Binghamton

There's a book by Mark Ames called GOING POSTAL, which is really a history of workplace-related shootings. Ames is a terrific writer and researcher, but he's also an amoral extremist (he's currently urging Americans to rise up and murder bankers and corporate executives). As you'd expect, his political take is lunacy: Ames holds that mass shootings were caused by Reaganomics chopping away at the social safety net, though he doesn't try to explain the relative rarity of such incidents during, say, the Great Depression, where there were worse conditions for workers and next to no safety net). But the history is very interesting, and Ames recounts some incidents I'd never heard of.

I'm wary and curious both hearing that.

As you'd expect, his political take is lunacy: Ames holds that mass shootings were caused by Reaganomics chopping away at the social safety net, though he doesn't try to explain the relative rarity of such incidents during, say, the Great Depression, where there were worse conditions for workers and next to no safety net).

Point. Though now I'm thinking of the French Revolution in terms of suddenly the underclass losing its shit dramatically and for keeps. I always had a faint thought, as in, randomly and out of my sheer lack of knowledge, it's just a lot easier now if your goal in life is a blaze of mass murdering glory, but not so much that if you were just that determined, you couldn't find a way to do it.

And this is soon after the anniversary of that big British mass murder of all those kids as well--there was a thing about that, since the survivors were all protected by their age until their eighteenth birthdays this year. Not connecting them, but it's bringing to mind suddenly that I wonder how much of a curve we're on with mass shootings. I hate to say there's a rise in them, because I'm not sure there's an overall rise that's not copycat linked (last year someone did an overview on work and school shootings, very bare bone, but interesting), but hmm.

And randomly, around here--somewhere in Texas recently--some woman went on a rampage with a bow and arrow. Or tried--two coworkers were licensed to carry and one shot her, if I remember correctly, but unfortunately, the radio discussion got sidetracked onto gun laws and I forgot to follow that up. I have to admit, after watching professionals at an archery range when I guy I knew took me there once to learn, I'd find someone with experience holding a long bow with a frantic gleam in their eye almost as intimidating as a .22.

Personally, I've been leaning toward the idea that Gavin de Becker puts forward: that these guys are looking to get a lot of attention and to re-make their personal images by having the media-- particularly television-- crown them as evil bad-asses. Which, by and large, they do, by focusing on their guns, their planning, their wake of destruction, et al. According to his theory, the more television coverage-- and there's no denying it's gone up dramatically over the years-- the more the next guy in line is impressed and thinks yeah, I want to be that guy, which is why we usually see these things in clusters as a bunch of guys on the edge of going postal take that as confirmation that this is the impression they want to leave on the world. De Becker suggests that we could cut way down on these sorts of things by universally using TV coverage to focus on how much these guys are/were losers-- referring to them by the dumbest nickname they ever had, showing them being guarded by a single bored-looking female cop, showing interviews with people who air all their embarrassing dirty laundry, and so forth.

Granted, the media would never go for it, because they get ratings spikes every time we get an assassination or mass murder, so they milk it for all they can. So I guess there's no way to test the theory, but damn I'd love to see it in action.

I recall a WaPo column by Stephen Hunter, the film critic and novelist, in the wake of the VT shooting suggesting that that killer - I refuse to use his name; why should he be remembered instead of his victims? - was also heavily influenced by the films of John Woo, particularly in his use of "two-gun" shooting.

It's too bad that the Binghamton killer didn't put at least as much effort in improving his English skills as he did in researching mass murder. And selected, as his victims, fellow immigrants who actually had their priorities straight.

--Wes S.