Summary: another mass shooting has called forth almost predictable responses within American society. Republicans and Democrats will each have their own partisan take; the NRA, shameless and corrupt as ever, will be fundraising off the tragedy, while the Kremlin will be deploying its troll army to use this latest outrage to spread dissension and division within American society. Altogether absent will be the comforting words Barack Obama knew how to offer. Instead, we should we were with the usual hackneyed political clichés of “thoughts and prayers.” How long will it be before an outraged public finally calls bullshit on the shootings, on the thoughts, and on the prayers? What, then, is to be done?
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Columbine.
Virginia Tech.
Tucson.
Sandy Hook.
Mother Emmanuel.
Pulse.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas.
Santa Fe, Texas.
Every time another mass shooting happens in this country, we have an almost standard involuntary reaction. We hear the news and we invoke the deity.
“Oh, my God....”
Some of us may be moved to utter prayers and to make the Sign of the Cross. Politicians among us will offer the anodyne cliché that their “thoughts and prayers” are with the killed and injured, (though with the events at Orlando’s Pulse Nightclub, the “thoughts and prayers” from Republican politicians were notably thin on the ground, inasmuch as so many of the dead were queerfolk.)
This shooting, like so many others, seems to fit into a fairly standard pattern: a young man with uncompensated issues and insecurities goes into a public or semipublic venue, armed to the teeth, and opens fire. Aside from offering their anodyne thoughts and prayers, politicians will do little, especially knowing that the National Rifle Association will be ineluctably fundraising off this tragedy even as these words are written.
We also know, after the Ash Wednesday shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that the Kremlin’s troll army will be swarming social media networks with a view to using this latest incident to stir up dissension and division within American society.
After the shooting in Tucson, in which Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot and wounded, I asked in this blog “what do we think, what do we know, what can we prove?” At the time, I suggested that before drawing any conclusions we should allow the dust to settle, allow a reasonable time for mourning, allow ourselves some space for careful, rational thinking, and that we should perhaps forbear from drawing immediate conclusions.
The same counsels apply today. It is still far too early to have a clear picture of what was going on in the mind of the shooter, who is at least in custody and can be interrogated. It would be reckless to try to draw conclusions when the facts are still not completely clear to us and we see as through a glass, darkly.
Nevertheless, there are some not unknown knowns, pace Donald Rumsfeld, which have manifested themselves to us since the events at Marjory Stoneman Douglas in February.
First, we know that the Russian troll army has already been deployed. After the Ash Wednesday shootings at MSD, Russian trolls swarmed American social media networks within half an hour to forty-five minutes of the incident, disseminating all manner of divisive disinformation. It was a textbook example of Russian active measures intended to drive wedges into American society.
Second, the NRA, as always, hopelessly corrupt, began aggressively fundraising within a couple of hours of the incident at MSD. NRA Executive Vice President Wayne La Pierre, with his unerring lack of tact, took to the microphones and to the “interwebs” with his by now standard trope of self victimization to besiege the faithful to help fill the NRA’s coffers for the inevitable “battle to save the Second Amendment” that, to the NRA’s way of thinking, has been just around the corner since the assassination of President Kennedy.
Third, the conspiracists at Breitbart, at Infowars, and at other conspiracists outlets, have already begun circulating ridiculous claims and notions that this latest incident was just another “false flag” attack, that the dead — and survivors — are nothing but paid “crisis actors,” presumably acting at the behest of some sort of quasi-mythical Deep State out to destroy the Trump administration.
We also see that the response to mass shooting incidents inevitably breaks down along partisan lines. Republicans tend to respond to such fusillades by taking absolutist Second Amendment positions in which they frequently delude themselves of such nonsensical notions as “a bad guy with the gun will be stopped by a good guy with the gun,” and “let’s arm all the school teachers.”
Democrats, by contrast, tend talismanically to invoke the notion that an assault weapons ban and universal background checks are a panacea for the problem. Democrats, who also control the legislatures in large population blue states such as New York and California often tend to respond to mass shooting incidents with their own fusillades of predictable legislation by anecdote.
For example, after Sandy Hook, the New York legislature rushed onto the statute books reactive legislation essentially doing away with most of the evidentiary privileges that had shielded doctor-patient communications. In California, 3000 miles away from the side of the incident, Democratic lawmakers in Sacramento rushed a whole package of legislation into law designed to enhance California’s reputation for having the nation’s toughest gun control laws.
Indeed, gun control continues to be a political football in California. Gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom has aggressively campaigned on an activist gun-control platform, and today’s events will no doubt form the subject matter for yet another Gavin Newsom campaign commercial or mailer.
Yet, stuck between Republicans, with their Second Amendment absolutist positions, and Democrats who think the moment is opportune to push for a totally gun free society, the millions of Americans who inhabit the political middle find themselves in a difficult place. It’s hard in America in 2018 to be a gun owner between the two camps. If you are not a Second Amendment absolutist, the Republicans will anathematize you as a “squish;” while for their part, the “repeal the Second Amendment” militant tendency among Democrats will condemn you as an illiberal, anti-communitarian DINO, to be read out of the Democratic Party with bell, book, and candle.
The absolutist positions of absolutists and doctrinaires within both parties leave conservatives who favor reasonable gun safety legislation and armed liberals in a conundrum. I, myself, fall into the latter category. As an armed liberal, as a person of the political left who was taught by his grandfather at the age of seven and eight how to shoot in the arid country of West Texas, I know the destructive potential of even a low caliber weapon. I know that you can kill as easily and as efficiently with a .22 round as you can with a .44 Magnum. I know that depending upon the production run, a Colt .45 caliber model 1911 semiautomatic tends to throw high and to the right, as does a 9mm Makarov semiautomatic.
That I know some of the behaviors of these two semiautomatic handguns does not make me a monster, a gun nut, or a ravening conservative. I do, however, treat each such weapon — on the rare occasions when I come into contact with one — with the care it deserves. That may be one reason why I don’t keep semiautomatic handguns in my home, in my car, or in my business. I keep the one handgun I do possess, a .44 caliber revolver, locked away in a gun safe to which no other human being on the planet has the combination.
In short, I treat guns with the care and respect my West Texas grandfather inculcated into me those long years ago when we were plinking bottles out near the New Mexico line. For when the hammer falls, and you hear the explosion that sends that bullet on its way to destroy a bottle on a fence post or a watermelon propped up on the ground, there is that ephemeral moment, that (pace, Betty Friedan) quintessentially male moment when you see the bullet destroying the bottle or blast in the watermelon, and a little frisson of satisfaction lights up the lizard part of the brain.
But we’re not lizards. Neither are we those other closest living relatives of dinosaurs, birds. And because we are neither birds nor lizards, it is incumbent upon us to interact with the weapons we create and use in the context of a larger moral compass.
It would be a mistake, with investigations still pending, to try to guess the nature and parameters of the moral compass within which Dimitrios Pagourtzis, 17, the alleged shooter, was acting. Nonetheless, at some point, we must try to suss out the moral geography in which the shooter was operating. The shooter himself may tell us, and it will be incumbent upon Facebook to cooperate fully with investigators, and the shooter’s social media profile for clues.
If, as Pat Conroy once wrote in his novel Lords of Discipline, “our Europes were different; our Americas were different,” so are our Texases. The Texas of my heritage is the West Texas of the sere, stripped-of-nonessentials, Trappist desert. It is the Texas of El Paso, of Democratic Congressman and Senate hopeful Beto O’Rourke. The shooter’s Texas, by contrast, was the humid, hurricane Harvey harried, conservative East Texas of the Gulf Coast, the Texas of Tom DeLay and Blake Farenthold, the Texas of so many Republican politicians whom the late Molly Ivins took such joy in skewering.
As investigators, journalists, and inky wretches like me seek to get our arms around what made the shooter go and do what he did, we will be tempted, after the fashion of Joan Didion and the other dissectors of the California psyche, to try to draw conclusions about the shooter from the environment in which he was raised and from which, presumably, he took his inspiration.
Yet still, as we try to ascertain the whys and wherefores of this latest incident, we should still let ourselves be guided by the better angels of our nature, allowing the survivors to recover, to grieve, to mourn and bury their dead, and to regain the composure so unceremoniously stripped from them today. Donald Trump notwithstanding, no good can come of off-the-cuff, inconsiderate, predawn tweets from the residence of the White House.
What do we think? What do we know? What can we prove?
The next few days will be a time for considerate contemplation of this incident, not for partisan bickering, Trumpian tweeting, conspiracy theorizing, or Russian active measures.
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Paul S. Marchand has been an attorney for the last 29 years. He lives in Cathedral City, California, where he served two terms on the city Council. He currently practices in Rancho Mirage. The views contained herein are his own.
