Summary: The news of the horrific mass shooting yesterday in San Bernardino causes one to fall back on invoking the deity, on offering anodyne “thoughts and prayers,” and also to begin pointing fingers, assigning blame, and jockeying for political advantage. Yet perhaps now should be a time for principled and considerate silence, as we take some time to ask ourselves what do we think, what do we know, and what can we prove.
When the news hit of yesterday’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, just up the road from here, which left fourteen dead, and 17 injured, my first reaction was the almost invariable one of invoking the Deity.
Oh my God.
My second reaction, equally ineluctable, was to ask who has done this and why.
The immediate temptation under such circumstances is twofold. The first response, while somewhat laudable, is nonetheless largely meaningless. From all quarters, and particularly from the overcrowded field of Republican presidential candidates for 2016, there have come anodyne statements that “prayers and thoughts go out to” families, first responders, and just about everyone else involved.
The second response is equally ineluctable: to begin pointing fingers and assigning blame. Certainly, the last 23 hours have seen a veritable feeding frenzy, as commentators, pundits, trolls, and others on both sides of the political divide lob verbal broadsides at one another.
At some point, however, we must allow ourselves to be moved, if not by the better angels of our nature, at least by a sense of personal and professional responsibility to step back, putting our emotions aside and seeking truth from facts.
In short, we need to ask some basic questions: what do we think? what do we know? What can we prove?
At the moment, what we know is that 14 are dead and 17 have been wounded. We know that two suspected shooters, Syed Rizwan Farook, 28 and significant other Tashfeen Malik, 27, perished in a shootout with police. We also know that the President of the United States (and presumably many of the law enforcement community) has not definitively ruled out the possibility that terrorism may have been involved. Certainly, the fact that the suspected shooters appear to have had Islamic names accounts for the president's reluctance to allow terrorism as a factor.
What we think is a more problematic issue. From yesterday’s events, activists, commentators, pundits, and plain old trolls and bomb throwers have drawn whatever conclusions suit their own agenda and confirmation bias. About the only conclusion that seems to enjoy broad support across both sides of the aisle is that perhaps we need as a country to take a timeout, to think long and hard about the extent to which the tone of our political dialogue has served to enable extremists who prefer bullets to ballots, if it turns out that the shooters were motivated by some type of extremism.
Winston Churchill once famously defined a fanatic as someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. By Winston’s definition, there may be a disturbingly large number of fanatics abroad in the land. Fanaticism is in many ways an infantile disorder; many of us have passed through phases in life in which we have been tempted to treat every difference of opinion as irreconcilable, and every issue as a matter of unalterable principle, but for most of us, the operative word is “phase.”
What separates the fanatic from the well-adjusted person is that the fanatic remains stuck in that infantile phase. The fanatic cannot, or will not, acknowledge the possibility that reasonable minds may differ, even on contentious issues. Moreover, the fanatic, by forever misapplying first principles to trifles, will inevitably convince himself (and most of the great fanatics of history have been men) that not only does he possess truth with a capital T, but that those who disagree with him are in error to such an extent that they cannot be suffered to live.
Fanaticism of that kind, with its stark rejection of any view not absolutely accordant with its own, and with its sense of exclusive custodianship of the Truth (with that capital T), and its concomitant insistence that those with other views are not merely to be silenced, but eliminated, invariably arises in contexts in which disputes and controversies tend to become inflamed.
No one would argue that the sluggish tempo of the recovery in our American economy —a recovery where the vast majority of the tangible gains have gone to the One Percent, largely leaving the middle class behind— has left many Americans of all political stripes fearful, fretful, and frustrated. Difficult times have a way of fraying the fabric of civility which is -- or ought to be -- one of the critical components of a successfully functioning democracy. When people are angry and afraid, extremism becomes not merely easy, but tempting.
Add to that the deliberately demonizing and eliminationist rhetoric coming from the so-called pro-life movement, which appears to have been responsible for the Planned Parenthood clinic shootings in Colorado Springs last week, and it’s easy to understand why America manifests an almost suicidal willingness to appeal to violence to address our fears and insecurities.
Nevertheless, when shocking events occur, such as those which transpired in Tucson yesterday, the first and greatest challenge is to take a metaphorical deep breath, to wait before rushing in with theories, allegations, or accusations. As Donald Rumsfeld might have put it, we have very few known knowns at this point. There are far more known unknowns, such as the true motivations of the shooters, or whether they had assistance, or whether there were in fact others involved.
In the days to come, the situation will develop further; more information will presumably become available about the shooters, their motives, whether there are additional accomplices, and whether yesterday’s events were an isolated occurrence or part of something larger and more ominous. At the moment, however, none of these facts have been developed; the evidence is too thin to justify drawing any significant conclusions, as much as we may be tempted to do so.
In short,, we think --perhaps-- too much, we know very little and at the moment we don’t know what, if anything, we can prove.
Nonetheless, whether yesterday’s shooting was a political act, or merely the random crime of unbalanced individuals, to the extent it may have arisen from the embittered tone of our political dialogue, it should still be a warning to us that when we lose the ability to disagree agreeably, we put our democracy at risk.
So today, let our thoughts and prayers, no matter how anodyne, be with the 17 people who were injured for their recovery, as well for the repose of the souls of the 17 victims whose lives were so tragically cut short. Tomorrow, and on the days that follow, it will be time again to ask what do we know? What do we think? What can we prove?
For now, however, we should observe a principled and considerate time of silence, leaving off with partisan rhetoric and poisoned comments. A decent respect for the dead and the injured should demand no less of us.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City, California, where he practices law, where he served two terms on the Cathedral City city Council. The views expressed herein are exclusively his own. This post is a revised, extended, and adapted version of one he wrote in 2011, when Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was injured in a mass shooting in Tucson that claimed the lives of U.S. Chief District Judge John McCarthy Roll and five others, and injured the Congresswoman and 13 others.
NOTE: comments on this post will be much more strictly moderated than might otherwise be the case. Comments containing any personal attack will not be published, nor will comments that, in the view of the author, are intended to shed more heat than light.
