Humanizing Mass Killers to Vindicate Progressivism

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, March 29, 2023

 

The trauma of mass gun violence — at least in places where mass gun violence has not become a terrible feature of daily life — is compounded today by the perfunctory ritual through which the arbiters of American discourse drag the rest of the country.

 

There are the reflexive calls for stricter gun-control laws without any understanding of whether those proposals would have had any effect on the course of the events that inspired them (and sometimes in the face of evidence that they would have no effect). There’s the mockery of the religiously observant from great institutional heights. And there’s the effort to tether, however tenuously, the shooter to Republican rhetoric or a right-wing aesthetic.

 

At least, that’s the routine when the shooter fits a demographic profile with which we’ve become woefully familiar: white and male. But recent episodes of mass violence perpetrated by shooters who do not fit the part has compelled cultural observers and the press to innovate new ways of talking about mass violence. These new methods rob the victims of these attacks of their sacrifice and transfer their victimization onto their killers.

 

Commentary around Monday’s horrific mass shooting at a Christian elementary school in Nashville, Tenn., followed a familiar trajectory right until the perpetrator was revealed to be a biological woman who identified as a man. This priors-scrambling detail sent media outlets off on the frenzied pursuit of something that would justify the preconception that those who assume a trans identity are never victimizers, only victims.

 

First, there was the mad dash to indict Nashville police for failing to use the pronouns preferred by the person who shot and killed three teachers and three nine-year-old students. That was followed by an attempt from media outlets and politicians to allege — the lack of substantive evidence to back them up notwithstanding — that the shooter had been incited in some way by local legislation restricting “adult cabaret performances” in the presence of children and the provision of hormone-blocking therapies to minors. The application of a moment’s reasoning to the suggestion that any of this explains, much less justifies, the murder of children must have proven unsatisfying, because the press soon moved on to crafting a narrative of victimization for the deceased killer.

 

The humiliation and rejection that serve as the shooter’s supposed origin story stretch back into early childhood. “Twenty years later, after being rejected by her Christian family when she came out to them as gay,” the Daily Mail’s report on the shooter’s psychological trauma concluded, the shooter “had turned into a killer.” The tragedy of mass murder is, in fact, “not one tragedy but two,” according to a statement release by the Trans Resistance Network. The killer “felt he had no other effective way to be seen other than to lash out by taking the life of others.”

 

NBC News reporters Matt Lavietes and Jo Yurcaba alleged that the killer’s victims tangentially include Tennessee’s trans community, who could now expect to face increased discrimination. That extraordinary claim rests on the existence of a provocative hashtag on Twitter and the media outlets that accurately reported on the shooter’s identity and actions within the same sentence. “We were already fearing for our lives,” acting president of Tri-Cities Transgender, Aislinn Bailey, told NBC’s reporters. “Now, it’s even worse.” The actual victims of violence in this case were replaced by the hypothetical victims of conjectural violence — the less disorienting sort that fits within a familiar rubric.

 

The pattern we’ve been forced to witness this week has been in development for some time, because the perpetrators of mass violence increasingly fail to meet the expectations set for them in the mainstream press.

 

The Chinese citizen who shot and killed seven of his colleagues in Half Moon Bay, Calif., last year experienced “mounting frustrations with his job conditions and simmering tensions” at the farm where he worked, according to local media outlets. The “final straw” was thought to be an “insult” about his “diminutive” size. That trauma was reportedly exacerbated by the ghastly conditions endured by America’s agricultural workers.

 

“Viewed the crime scenes today in Half Moon Bay,” San Mateo County supervisor Ray Mueller reported. “Deplorable, heartbreaking living conditions. As I said on the campaign trail, we must raise the quality of life of farm workers, NOW.” California governor Gavin Newsom agreed. “California is investigating the farms involved in the Half Moon Bay shooting to ensure workers are treated fairly and with the compassion they deserve,” Newsom said. The killer’s victims were soon displaced by local farm workers and their activist allies, who demanded “better pay” and higher standards of living.

 

A similar pattern emerged when a 72-year-old Asian man shot and killed ten people at a dance studio in Monterey Park, Calif., earlier this year. “With the significant amount of anti-Asian hate, there’s been this feeling of a lack of safety and being under threat,” the founder of Stop AAPI Hate told The Guardian in the wake of the Monterey Park killer’s murder spree. “It really perpetuates this fear that they are not safe,” a local community organizer agreed, citing the rise of anti-Asian hate in America since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. “We need more acknowledgment on how important it is to address this lack of support for immigrant, refugee and monolingual populations, and we need more resources.”

 

Once again, the actual victims of violence were generalized, transformed into abstract avatars of the demographic to which they belong. The “jealousy” arising from a domestic dispute that served as the shooter’s motive, according to the dance studio’s owner, had become irrelevant. The “specter of anti-Asian hate” and the “tragic saga in Asian-American history” took center stage. After all, the AAPI-centric outlet The Yappie warned, just because “the gunman has been identified as an Asian person doesn’t exclude the possibility of hate, misogyny, or ethnic discrimination as a motive.”

 

Even the last time America had to witness a terrible act of mass violence in a school, the shooter’s identity confused observers to the point that they felt compelled to humanize him. “When I see photos of” the gunman who murdered 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, “I also see Latinos I know,” LA Times columnist Gustavo Arellano mourned. He agonized over the “merciless ridicule” the shooter “suffered,” seeing himself in the killer and his experience with the cultural milieu in which young “Latino males” incubate.

 

The Uvalde killer’s act “certainly feels like another kind of performance of young masculinity,” psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl told the Washington Post in an article that transformed the killer into a theoretical construct. In cases like his, “We are talking about boys who have been emasculated over a period of time,” criminal-justice professor Eric Madfis added. “They were bullied, or ignored, or didn’t have the dating life or popularity they wanted.”

 

In all the above cases, something approaching sympathy pervades the analysis of these heinous actions in the left-wing press. Mass shooters are motivated in part by the notoriety their predecessors attain through violence, which renders these contortions shockingly derelict. The impulse to reduce these disturbed individuals to categories and to force their actions to comport with a preferred ideological framework serves no purpose other than to preserve a fragile worldview. But it is not a harmless exercise.