After Uvalde

The one and only time I was in Uvalde, more than 20 years ago, was to stop at a roadside barbeque joint on my way from San Antonio to the border. The place could hardly have served up more tropes of what I had imagined rural West Texas to be: good ol’ boys in ball caps tucking into their ribs and potato salad, rusted pick-ups in the parking lot, shitkicker music on the jukebox, and a picture of a handgun on the wall with the slogan: “We do not call 911.”

The gun-fetish humor felt jarring even then, because the story I’d come to cover was about white ranchers along the Rio Grande shooting Mexicans as they crossed into the United States – “the broken promised land” as Ry Cooder sings in “Across the Borderline.” Uvalde is 80 percent Hispanic, but the barbeque joint’s owner and his clientele, I noticed, were white. The wall signs had an unmistakable them-versus-us quality (another, riddled with fake bullet holes, said “Due to price increase on ammo, do not expect a warning shot”), and only certain people could afford to take them as a joke.

Over in the next county, in a speck of a town called Brackettville, the authorities seemed relatively untroubled by the gun-toting locals at the border taking the law into their own hands. The ranchers were protecting themselves from thieves and bandits, I kept hearing. These were invaders, wetbacks, aliens. Maybe killing them was going too far, but it was also the West Texas way of dealing with a problem nobody else was stepping up to address. 

“We have enough guns out here to start a war if we want,” the county sheriff said, a grin plastered over his unshaven face as he leaned back in his chair and propped his snakeskin boots on his desk. He compared the Mexicans crossing the river to mesquite brush, something “that was there” and needed to be cleared from time to time. Three or four deputies, standing behind him, started to chortle. “Hell,” the sheriff went on, laughing along with them, “if we wanted to, we could kill ‘em all!” 

I offer this not to suggest that there is a straight line to be drawn between the gun culture and tawdry politics of West Texas in the early 2000s and the shocking, senseless slaughter of 19 elementary school children and two of their teachers in Uvalde on May 24. If anything, I’m suggesting the opposite. The shooting of unarmed Mexican immigrants on the border, however appalling, however unjustified, however alien to the sensibilities of liberal Americans or most of the rest of the world, could at least be explained as a toxic brew of old frontier myths, racial politics, fear of the immigrant other, and the centrality of guns in a certain definition of American identity and self-worth. 

While all these issues are still alive in Uvalde and the surrounding counties – more alive, maybe, in this age of Trump and resurgent white nationalism – they don’t begin to account for the fact that a troubled 18-year-old bought himself weapons of war at the first opportunity and unleashed one of his AR-15s on a bunch of third- and fourth-graders. 

***

At the outset of America’s epidemic of school shootings, in the 1990s, we were still very much in the business of asking why. These early episodes generally involved suburban high-schoolers taking out their depression and alienation and rage on their peers. Maybe they’d been bullied. Maybe they had trouble fitting in. After Columbine, in April 1999, the cable news stations spent much of the first week asking whether Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were members of a group of campus outcasts called the Trench Coat Mafia, whether they were getting back at the jocks who had supposedly tormented them, whether they’d been unduly influenced by video games, or goth subculture, or the music of Marilyn Manson. Since the attack took place on Hitler’s birthday, April 20, they were briefly tagged as neo-Nazis, too. 

Much of this speculation turned out to be flat wrong. But a big part of why it was wrong was that we, as a country, were still wide-eyed enough to believe that there must be coherent reasons behind the madness. More than two decades later, we’re not asking any more, because nothing, it seems, can adequately explain what two adjoining classrooms filled with nine-, ten-, and eleven-year-olds have to do with anything, much less why anyone would turn them, without warning, into sites of unspeakable horror. “He had his reasons,” the Uvalde shooter’s mother told a Spanish-language affiliate of CNN three days after the attack, but even she could not articulate what those reasons were. 

Mass shootings have become a source of financial and political gain for parts of our governing system, a death spiral we seem wholly incapable of breaking.

And so the conversation has moved on to other things: how shockingly easy it is for mass killers to access their deadly weaponry, usually through legal channels; how we feel about the Second Amendment, for or against; the failure of the Uvalde School District police to follow its own training and confront the gunman as quickly as possible; and, yes, the line – whether straight or crooked, visible or imagined – between Texas gun culture, the state’s Republican establishment and the extraordinary proliferation of mass shootings in the Lone Star state.

I’m not sure that we can understand or successfully address any of these vital issues without attempting to make sense of the senseless and understand what motivates the killers in the first place. It turns out that we know a lot more about that than our politicians and the news media like to let on. 

Eric Harris offered some significant clues in the journal he left behind after Columbine. “I fucking hate the world,” he began. This wasn’t about getting even with a particular group of kids on campus. It was an expression of pure nihilism, a way to tear down as much as possible and relish in the act of doing so. It was about performance and empowerment, about having the world at your mercy for one brief instant instead of being at the mercy of the world. “I want to tear a throat out with my own teeth like a pop can,” Harris wrote. “I want to grab some weak little freshman and just tear team apart like a fucking wolf. Strangle them, squish their head, rip off their jaw, break their arms in half, show them who is God.”

In other words, senselessness and cruelty are the point.

Behavioral psychologists and criminal profilers have identified a number of traits common to mass-casualty shooters – loneliness, antisocial behavior, dysfunctional family backgrounds, feelings of failure and resentment, all of them exacerbated and amplified by exposure to social media platforms on the internet – and have been clamoring for years for government and community resources to identify individuals who fit the profile and develop systems to intervene before they have a chance to obtain weapons and act on their deadly fantasies.

Instead of coming together as a country to tackle this issue, though, we have allowed it to divide us further. Worse, mass shootings have become a source of financial and political gain for parts of our governing system, a death spiral we seem wholly incapable of breaking. The experience of every other country on earth shows that restricting access to weapons is the surest way to prevent mass shootings. 

But here, gun sales reliably go up after every incident, which enriches the gun industry, which strengthens the National Rifle Association, which increases the power of the NRA’s campaign contributions and further emboldens the politicians the NRA supports – mostly but not exclusively Republicans — to tout their gun-loving bona fides and resist even the most basic regulatory measures that the public overwhelmingly supports, such as universal background checks and higher minimum-age requirements.

Both political parties, it must be said, are guilty of pandering to their bases and failing to craft realistic, consensus-building policy proposals to address gun violence. But it is also important to say there is something uniquely dangerous about the modern Republican Party – not only because of its refusal to offer more than perfunctory thoughts and prayers in the wake of repeated mass slaughter, but also because of its exploitation of the politics of resentment to attain and hold on to power.

The GOP’s political messaging is that we are all on our own, and if we don’t take care of our own problems nobody else is going to take care of them for us. To an unstable mind, fed and watered by the sewers of the internet and emboldened by the notion that American manhood is defined by the power of the gun, that can all too easily act as a call to arms.

For years now – starting before Trump and going into overdrive after – the GOP and the right-wing media have taken a sledgehammer to government institutions and to the very idea of institutional integrity as a guarantor of our democratic freedoms. Over and over we have been told that government power is suspect, that public agencies are politicized and corrupt, that seemingly good-faith attempts to solve public policy questions are almost always a cover for partisan dishonesty, that elections are rigged, that even our courts cannot be counted on to weigh evidence dispassionately and abide by the plain meaning of the statute book.

All of it instills helplessness, fear and isolation – the very traits that mass shooters exhibit time and again. The mindset the GOP’s political messaging encourages is that we are all on our own, and if we don’t take care of our own problems then nobody else is going to take care of them for us. To an unstable mind, fed and watered by the sewers of the internet and emboldened by the notion that American manhood is defined by the power of the gun, that can all too easily act as a trigger, a call to arms. Why not storm into the office that fired you, or confront the doctor who failed to cure your back pain, or face down whatever minority group you’ve been conditioned to hate, and show them once and for all who is boss? Why, if you are feeling nihilistic and suicidal, go out with a whimper when you can go out with a definitive, attention-grabbing bang?

Years ago, the forensic psychiatrist and criminal profiler Park Dietz talked to me about the power of suggestibility to spur would-be mass killers to action. At the time, his concern was with saturation media coverage – his research showed that once one mass shooting hit the TV news, another invariably followed within a couple of weeks. “You’ve got to imagine this small number of people sitting at home, with guns on their lap and a hit list in mind,” Dietz said. “It only takes one or two of them to say, ‘That guy is just like me, that’s the solution to my problem, that’s what I’ll do tomorrow.’”

Now, the suggestibility has spread far beyond the news media to the very bones of our governing system. Republican politicians routinely solicit votes by wielding an AR-15, the military-grade weapon used not only in Uvalde, but also in Buffalo, Las Vegas, Parkland, Sandy Hook and many other places we have come to associate with unfathomable grief. Some get their kids to pose with assault rifles for the family Christmas card, or joke about giving both barrels to their daughter’s boyfriend if he steps out of line.

It’s true, we’re well past the point of warning shots. Our political leaders are quite literally shoving guns in our faces and telling us this is what freedom means. Never mind that we are now seeing more than ten mass shooting incidents a week, or that murders, suicides and accidental deaths involving firearms have also hit record highs. We keep amassing more guns, buying into the story that this is somehow what the Founding Fathers intended. What we’re really buying, though, is a one-way ticket to hell.

For more on Uvalde and its aftermath, see Jeffrey Anderson’s AR-15s Are US.