Every time there’s violence that makes the news, there’s an unseemly rush to shoehorn the event into a preexisting narrative of why evil people do evil things.
Every time there’s frightening violence that makes national news, there is this unseemly rush to shoehorn the event into a preexisting narrative of why evil people do evil things. And it usually doesn’t take long for the national discussion to get dragged into whether the motive was X or the motive was Y, when the motive is relatively unimportant. If you set off a bomb or go on a shooting rampage, the victims are equally dead, hurt or traumatized, no matter what the perpetrator’s motive was, and the act is equally illegal and immoral, no matter the motive.
As Rich observes on the home page today, there’s no evidence that the Atlanta shooter shot up those massage parlors and killed innocent people because of anti-Asian hatred or the pandemic or Trump’s use of the term “China virus.” (That said, we shouldn’t dismiss the notion that the shooter’s attitudes about sex were wrapped up in how he perceived Asian women, and vice versa.)
A guy shooting and killing innocent people because he thinks they’re nefariously making him want to have sex with them may not be driven by racial hatred, but it’s still a really big problem. It’s not a big problem in the sense that it is common; it’s a big problem in the sense that even just one man coming to the conclusion that mass murder is the appropriate response to persistent uncomfortable sexual desire can hurt a lot of people.
Similarly, it is good that the guy who blew up a chunk of downtown Nashville, Tenn., on Christmas Day was not driven to do so by terrorism. The FBI determined his “detonation of the improvised explosive device was an intentional act in an effort to end his own life, driven in part by a totality of life stressors — including paranoia, long-held individualized beliefs adopted from several eccentric conspiracy theories, and the loss of stabilizing anchors and deteriorating interpersonal relationships.” Apparently, he believed in “lizard people.”
A guy setting off a sizeable bomb because he thinks menacing lizard people are out there may not be terrorism, but it is still a really big problem.
There is a real appetite among the usual suspects to declare that events like these illustrate our “gun problem” or our “racism problem” or our “right-wing extremism problem.” These are often the same people who insist that the paranoid schizophrenic who perpetrated the Tucson, Ariz., shooting was driven by a Facebook post from Sarah Palin. Quite a few voices on the left insisted that the Pulse nightclub shooting represented right-wing hatred of gays, when the shooter told police he was a member of ISIS.
But our problem — at least in these particular cases — is not easily tied to politicians we don’t like.
What is our problem? Our problem is that the United States has a number of deeply troubled and often mentally disturbed individuals who conclude that the way to solve their problems is through a terrible act of violence. Sometimes they’re crazy. Sometimes they’re just angry at the world. Sometimes they’re upset about work or an issue in a relationship, or they’ve dealt with bullies. Their problems look pretty mundane and common to the rest of us. But they conclude, in their own warped little worldviews, that what they experienced is so terrible and unjust that they’re entitled to kill complete strangers to balance the cosmic scales.
We can have the familiar arguments about “red flag laws.” But we’ve seen sane people purchase a gun and then later develop mental and emotional problems, and sometimes those who are barred from purchasing weapons just steal or take them from other sources. And this isn’t even mentioning all the times we’ve heard about “red flags” being ignored by law enforcement.
The law is not a particularly effective tool against people believing crazy things, and we can foresee the potential civil-rights problems of law enforcement preemptively detaining people or restricting their rights based upon what they might do, not what they have done.
And while we don’t want government in the business of trying to regulate crazy ideas . . . that doesn’t mean that crazy conspiracy theories are all inherently harmless. Recent years have demonstrated to us that no matter how nutty you think an idea or claim is, somebody out there not only believes it, but also that person is probably willing to do something terrible and violent over it. The man who killed worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh believed that Jews and George Soros were helping migrant caravans in Mexico. The gun-toting delusional guy who barged into Comet Ping Pong pizza was a Pizzagate believer. This predates the Trump era; in 2016, the FBI arrested and indicted a Milwaukee man who was planning a mass shooting at a Masonic Temple, believing that the Freemasons “are playing with the world like a game.” People believing crazy things and being willing to act on them violently is a serious, complicated, and consequential problem, one that deserves a better answer than, “It’s the fault of my political opponents.”