“THE WORLD SAYS: “YOU HAVE NEEDS – SATISFY THEM. YOU HAVE AS MUCH RIGHT AS THE RICH AND THE MIGHTY. DON’T HESITATE TO SATISFY YOUR NEEDS AND DEMAND MORE.” THIS IS THE WORLDLY DOCTRINE OF TODAY. AND THEY BELIEVE THAT THIS IS FREEDOM. THE RESULT FOR THE RICH IS ISOLATION AND SUICIDE, FOR THE POOR ENVY AND MURDER.” - FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY, THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
(1a) The Mental Health Reason
All too often shootings are disregarded as simply the more dire side effect of mental illness and derangement, although this method of deduction often removes all further reasoning and senses of nuance from this profoundly undefinable equation (literally, there is currently no clearly defined profile for a mass shooter, and there never will be). It is the easy answer to one of the most infinitely complex and painful issues that has divided the world to date. Mental health is certainly an important factor as to what leads to said violence, but it is absolutely not the only factor that contributes. And even if it were, environmental factors and realities of life are often the leading contributors to the mental health crisis itself.
I know what you’re about to say. “Guns bad! / Don’t give guns to the mentally unfit! / Ban automatic guns!”, and yes, the leniency of gun distribution among the populace (especially in the USA) can lead someone to easier means of committing mass violence. Then again, as has been said time and time again, just simply owning a gun does not mean you will automatically feel inclined to use it to commit unwarranted violence on others. There is obviously an extra step to be considered before this conclusion. Although guns are often the weapon of choice, guns themselves do not cause violence just as video games also do not. Automatic weapons aren’t the only guns that are used in mass shooting events, so banning them would only change the type of gun used in future events. In other countries where guns are illegal, mass violence is still possible through the use of knives or physical assault, although there is a much lower fatality count, there is still death and suffering for all involved. This again, leads back to the issue of mental health. What criteria would be appropriate to implement in order to lessen gun violence? Most shooters indeed do have some form of mental health issue, but majority are undiagnosed at the time of the violence. Just like many suicide victims, who are undiagnosed at the time of their death, commit suicide to the shock of their friends and family. Mental health is an extremely sensitive and nuanced issue that is very personal to each individual. Someone with depression may have suicidal or homicidal tendencies, but either side of this spectrum is able to be hidden deep beneath the surface. I would be bold enough to say that a good amount of people with mental health issues only want to punish and hurt themselves, but it can easily be concealed and lied about, meaning that evading being disqualified from buying a gun would also, be very easy. Don't you think this energy should be going toward improving mental health institutions as a whole, instead of trying to restrict the rights of mentally unwell people in a certain country? The less mentally ill people, the less violence.. right?
Mental health issues are not only something you can be born predisposed to, but just like anything else, it is something that environmental factors can have a profound impact upon. The phrase “born evil” is one I utterly despise. There is no one on this earth born evil, nor are there any that are born good. Each being has a certain balance of expression, sometimes that balance can be tipped off and attain a degree of re-balance, it is perfectly natural to lean in either direction and it is not simply dumbed-down to ‘good and evil’. I would say it is better defined as a ‘positive and negative’ response, and neither are better than the other. But when the balance has been tipped to such a dramatic degree, it is more than likely due to life factors and the external environment in which that being resides, not some mysterious inherent evil waiting to be awakened. External factors and circumstances have a much higher degree of influence than given credit for in these events, and often when instances of mass violence appear in the public eye, there has been a history of common understanding among similarly affected groups when that underlying context is applied and revealed. Even relatives of victims of a mass shooting event often express sympathy and understanding toward the suspect when there is context. This reflects in the exact same way as in suicides, a person who has been tipped to the furthest degree and sees no other way out, no other form of redemption for their injustice and hatred for the way they have been treated, attracting the same frequency of profound sympathy once their lifelong suffering has been revealed after death. It’s only when the victim has taken others with him, our sympathy seems to become socially unacceptable, even if the people that caused the victims suffering are the targets. If you’re gonna suffer, suffer on your own!
This degree of sympathy among the populace implies that there is more beyond the surface, there is a greater reason for why these tragedies take place, even recognized by those most directly affected. There still isn’t a clearly defined and reliable profile that fits every unique proponent of a mass shooting, because the truth is, anyone who is pushed far enough beyond their limits, who sorrowfully realizes the terrible life circumstances of themselves and others, who gets to a point of total desolation and dejection, has a prime opportunity to become one, and/or commit suicide. And the victims of this wrath suffer and die for it, but the blood is not only on the perpetrator’s hands, it is on the system as a whole. The shooters themselves cannot be profiled, but the workplaces, schools and societal structures at large very well can be.
(1b) The Copycat Reason
Another reason which shooting events are brushed under the rug of is the Copycat. This line of reasoning implies a certain debilitating amnesia that should require a diagnosis. To simply brush off such an outburst of rage and destruction as just another of it’s kind, just part of an unimportant trend for the sake of attention is ignorance of the highest caliber. It at least requires a total denial of the inner nature present in all beings including yourself, and the fact that each of us have our own individual lives that greatly influence our decision making and outcomes. There are so many intricate little details that surround and exceed our entire life, the human soul picks up on everything it is submerged in. To narrow another person down to just being a ‘copycat’ with the goal of attention for the sake of attention (postmortem, shooters usually commit suicide), with no further context does not help anyone. You choose to ignore suffering and be blind to a pattern that will outline a greater context and highlight a major problem.
You would have to be blind to your own past suffering, or to have never suffered at all, to think of a event like this in this way. You would have to be dreadfully apathetic not only to the perpetrator but the victims of the event as well. You take away everything that the event stands for and represents. You reduce lives to nothing and take nothing away from it. It is anti-intellectual and severely misguided. When mass shooting events happen and pick up on similar methods and sentiments of a previous one, does that not indicate a bigger problem than someone copying just to copy? Does that not mean that maybe, just maybe, there is a ‘hidden’ (or ignored) demographic just outside of your perception in which there are others who feel the same way as the previous did? That at any moment anyone, even someone you know, could also become a victim, or even a perpetrator? There is a lot more than meets the eye that just the surface level of a shooting, and taking on the sentiments of a previous shooting does not rid it of it’s meaning or significance. It just further proves that people have been unfairly treated and greatly upset about the same problems for decades upon decades. And excuses like these only further the divide and worsen cultural pain.
(2) The System Bruised but Forever Unbroken
Violence and destruction is not saved for soldiers of war. Every major system the world is under loves violence, destruction and fear, as long as it’s for its own profit, never it’s destruction. Though (if you don’t count war I guess) not as plainly as through the scope of a gun, but through the exploitation and apathy toward the less fortunate among it’s cracked, neglected drainage system. The system’s fuel runs on the fear and insecurities of billions, and the fuel these systems produce and consume is of such large proportions that the victims (whether they realize they are victims or not), though way bigger than the system itself in totality and the very reason for why it continues to stand, feel they cannot stand up to it nor fight back. And for very good reasons, as discussed ahead.
Each of us start our training to fit in with society in classrooms, learning things we often never retain or use in adult life, and despite that, are ruthlessly hounded to learn for the sake of the school’s public reputation. The schools not only want to have test-smart students, but they also want to have smart-looking students. So they strip each and every one of them of their individuality, confining them to uniforms and if not, impose strict rules on what they can and cannot wear or say. Schools front as the gateway into ‘the real world/adulthood,’ but the ultimate goal is to domesticate the human mind. If the goal was to prepare children for adulthood, they would teach things that actually pertain to adulthood and becoming a functioning human being beyond the workplace, instead of tearing their humanity from them.
The willful ignorance of school administrators leaves students to fight alone as victims of varying degrees of bullying and degradation at the hands of other students. There have been countless cases of children as young as 11 years old committing suicide due to the neglectful non-action of the adults who are meant to be guardians and protectors, purely because they don’t want to deal with it, or don’t take the situation seriously, even covering it up after the fact. This is especially true with Columbine.
Adult projections of life being simpler as a teenager shows an exceptional amount of cognitive dissonance and ignorance. School takes a massive toll upon students each day that they attend, just as badly as having a career and a family does in adult life. They cannot legally leave until a certain age, they are subjugated to a strict schedule offering no alternatives to those who cannot cope with it, the workload worsens each year until you graduate, the mounting pressure to have your future planned out as soon as possible before you even peak the horizon of graduation, having to balance social life, work experience and school work piled to the roof all while battling the horrific environment that comes along with being in the same proximity as more than a few hundred other teenagers every single day. With increasing rates of depression and anxiety among the younger demographics, it’s no wonder when this is reality from their point of view.
After the hellscape of the schoolyard has either been graduated from (or dropped out of), the next step expected in life is finding a job or investing time into a career. If you think this next stage is any different from highschool, you’re wrong. The same pattern repeats, just more standards are applied. The average worker is subjugated to the most overbearing and time consuming (yet worthless) work, an unbearable amount of stress with little to no time off (and if you do take time off, you’re made to feel guilty or that your reasoning might not be good enough) and little to no time outside of the workplace to live a fulfilling life if you’re working full-time (the choice of to be able to survive over being able to be a fully fleshed out human). The social aspect is a continuation of high school in itself, in the sense of the constant competitiveness, snitching/throwing others under the bus to earn higher status and being treated as a sub-human serf by the manager/perimeter overlord with little to no compassion applied. At least in most high schools there is some kind of certified counselor or psychologist to help students that are struggling to some degree, in the workplace there is no such thing. Depending on the severity of the stress and the treatment of workers, mental health can easily traverse a steep decline into an abyss unable to be retrieved from. The longer age goes up and mental health issues are left unaddressed, one is less likely to come out about their struggles and be able to receive help in order to cope. On top of all of this, the average worker is barely paid enough to survive in accordance with the growing price of bills/rent/groceries, no matter how hard they work or how many jobs they have.
These patterns of social behaviour and standards do not strictly remain inside the cage-like confines of a workplace or school, they have long been a gasleak into our everyday lives, poisoning the very air we breathe outside of their walls. Productivity guilt is a dreaded feeling that we all have fallen victim to, whenever you’ve felt you’ve been relaxing a minute too long or taken a momentary break, a wretched voice from inside your very being whispers in your ear; “Shouldn’t you be doing something productive?” Even if you’re called out sick, the guilt lingers, the anxious thoughts simmer in the back of your skull. It is no longer considered productive to do things ‘just for fun.’ They need to serve some greater purpose toward the ever-receding future that we are constantly told to be in service to, despite it never being in existence yet until it is, and then there’s more future to prepare for. The cycle never ends.
Personal lives, hobbies and social lives lay underdeveloped under the crushing weight of stress due to whatever of the millions of obligations you have to fulfill each day. There’s not enough time nor concentration in a day to be put toward the self, only the expectations and demands of others in order to be able to survive. We find our identity in our job, rather than ourselves. This often also results in over consumption to make up for the lack of identity and life developed or fostered. We try to find identity in items and trends while we are unable to actually know our identity due to the time-consuming machine and over-working for the appeasement of, and in turn the little payment from, other people higher up on the ladder than us.
The demand for everything to be convenient or fast leaves everyone with the intense desire to do everything as quick as possible, and becoming frustrated with each other when everything isn’t as fast as we’d like it to be. The desire for everything to be immediate and delivered in a timely manner causes us to forever be unable to live fully in each moment, sleepwalking while conscious, and unable to fully develop a sense of patience or compassion for others. Speeding past when we think someone is driving too slow, becoming frustrated with the delivery driver when the food took too long, shoving past people on the sidewalk, foot tapping, walking briskly everywhere we go, looking for new distractions when one distraction ends. Impatience shows up everywhere in society when you know what to look for.
The needless projection of personal standards (often stemming from societal influences), causes us to be forever at war with one another and constantly unsure of our own abilities. If you’re not contributing to society in a meaningful way according to someone elses standards for how to contribute in a meaningful way, you’re a loser. You’re wasting your life away. You don’t deserve help if you need it, because you should just be doing it. Whatever ‘it’ is. You’re just not doing good enough in life. If the work you manage to do isn’t good enough, you should just give up and do something else that would contribute more. These comments may even come from someone who isn’t even following their own advice.
Every man for himself is a phase or sentiment I see far too commonly. There is this falsified need for us all to separate ourselves from one another like we live our entire lives in cubes, like we shouldn’t engage in communal efforts and help one another, because nobody trusts anyone else. This thought process has horrifically damaged the social fabric and forced us to fend for ourselves like helpless animals, like we’re not the largest population currently dominating the planet. This lack of trust between us causes us to avoid each other on the streets, to grasp our belongings close when someone walks past, to engage in paranoid activity in public, suspicious of anybody who looks like they could do something sinister, if they wanted to. This same sentiment is in turn also applied to people we know. Asking for help financially is often looked down upon by others, to be vulnerable is to ‘trauma dump’. Community is superseded by the preservation of the individual, leaving everyone to lock themselves inside their own personal cage within the wider cage of an ego-centric society. We force ourselves to believe we’re alone out of fear.
A lack of empathy develops from this, especially when it comes to victims of such tragedies as shootings, suicides, or another other form of destruction that pains the masses. The sympathy comes but then it stops, and you need to get over it. The need for everything to be Fast disallows for workers and students alike to take time for themselves and heal from their emotional or physical wounds or illnesses. Productivity is the only thing that matters, but how does one expect to get the maximal amount of productivity from a population that is over-stressed, over-worked, perceive each other as wholly separate beings unable to be trusted, lack patience from themselves and for others, judge and hurt and tease others and are judged and hurt and teased themselves, unable to find confidence in knowing themselves or their environment to any deep degree, and working forever while strung out on the eternally unfulfilled promise of a pipedream, ‘the future’?
(3) The People Enslaved but Selflessly Willful
The obvious reason for why these massacres feel so far removed from the instincts of many is because they don’t think violence is the answer to resolve these obvious problems within society. Most reasonable people would rather take what they can get and try to live their lives as peacefully as possible, the path most traveled. Yet the path of revenge and suicide still appeals to some, and it is not beaten or overgrown. In fact, more seem to be walking it each day. And despite the ‘peaceful’ lives of the many, their worlds are still rife with misery under the power they feel they have no choice but to bow to. It is still that of an intense degree of suffering, also at risk of ending in suicide, and they have no idea how they could ever have the power to make change. Yet each are still fighting the others in their own particular ways.
DO NOT BE FOOLED: the peaceful can still have an inherent violence within them. They push and shove each other to climb the never-ending corporate and social ladder toward infinite debt and inevitable loneliness, toward a future in a world where no one is ever truly satisfied or fulfilled. They will manipulate, lie, steal, insult, belittle, purposefully misunderstand, will do anything to get above the rest. The everlasting battle is simultaneously selfless in the eyes of who ever is higher up, and selfish from the eyes within and below. None are immune to the urge to fight, ripping apart others lives and feeding at their flesh. A gun or explosive is only more direct and less socially acceptable. It is not abnormal for people to side with the powerful over the victim in order to get on the higher ups good side, whether to get a promotion, look ‘cooler’ among their peers, gain more power above the others within their environment or to simply save their own ass. And these perceptibly more ‘moral’ and ‘right’ actions ultimately lead to dire consequences for the less fortunate within that environment. Students and workers are pitted against each other constantly, desperately fighting for the next rung up on the hierarchy so they don’t become the next victim at the bottom of the food chain. The peaceful side has arguably been violent for a lot longer than the other side has been attempting to make a violent statement against said violence. Without the peaceful side’s inherent violence, there would be no need for the opposites sides violent resistance and rebellion. Yet, most choose to remain oblivious to this very obvious fact.
Seeing as most people don’t react by grabbing their duffle bag, sawed-off shotgun and a folder stuffed with a hate-infused manifesto (instead preferring to use a more social kind of shotgun), there must be a reason for this general preference and apathetic distancing from the people within their own class. Thus, I come to the pillars of consciousness. One of the only reasons the system has legs to stand on is the total fear and insecurities of the people underneath it, which in turn fosters the hellish environment. This fear and insecurity is perfectly reasonable and explainable. These fears are life-threatening, and these fears are social-risking. The two pillars on which our human consciousness stands and thrives, social life and existence itself. These fears hold power and labor to those who know how to exploit it, and usually the people get the bare minimum out of it, whether it is realized or not. People will willfully put themselves in often dangerous, soul-sucking and humiliating situations to keep their head above the water, to have a place to sleep at night and food to eat each day. To survive socially and have friends to confide in. Without both of these two things, a human understandably has very little chance of surviving or living a wholesome life in this cold, unrelenting world. When either of these things cease to become available, that person can very easily slip underneath the foot of greater society and their situation can become a detriment to their downfall. Not only this, but when a person’s emotional and social needs are left unmet for too long their ability to reason can become greatly fractured, leading to typically unsavory choices becoming the only foreseeable options from their point of view. A major problem which perpetuates victimization is that the victim is often blamed for their own circumstances without any further context, and the cycle continues. Many more victims fall due to loneliness or starvation, of soul or of body. It is purely designed, whether it means to or not, so only the elite and the most willing-to-be-exploited people (and sometimes not even them) can survive. The ones who are forced into the bottom section of society and drown is a much bigger portion than society seems to acknowledge, it’s just ‘a part of life’ to most. The reason why this demographic often remains silent is because their lives end in suicide, still one of the most controversial topics yet to be unbiasedly discussed. Only more pain and more death lie in our path if we continue to stay apathetic, ignorant, selfish and willful to a system that will inevitably destroy our natural world and take our inherently loving human spirit down with it.
(4) The Ones Who Stood Before; The Problem of Misrepresentation
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(5) Disarm with a Smile
How can we move beyond this violence that is all too often portrayed to be senseless?
More effort should collectively be put toward understanding the complex social and societal impacts regarding the realities of each perpetrator and their environment, it is irresponsible to label these situations with one solitary word or reason. It just doesn’t make sense in the context of how complex human beings and their environments are and how faithfully they work together to produce the outcome of their fates. There needs to be compassion in all situations. This doesn’t imply condoning, ignoring real pain or making excuses. It is looking at the event rationally from the point of view of all perspectives, in absence of judgment. It is detaching yourself and your values/morals from the event, and trying to pull the puzzle apart in regards to each perspective and the totality of the environment it transpired in. People will lie, manipulate, steal, become violent and kill, all for their own reasons in attempting to survive, and these reasons are conceivable if we put ourselves in the right perspective to view their reasoning. In doing this, the societal structures and standards that foster these outbursts can be identified and we can begin working to adjust these aspects, without going back to the same tired excuses.
We like to separate the victim and the perpetrator, ‘good’ or ‘bad’, based on reasonable judgment. The effort to distinguish ourselves or someone else as better or worse is a futile effort. It does nothing for resolving societal issues, bringing people back from the dead, or un-bombing a building. Labels do nothing but draw lines in the sand, instead of arrows toward a better future. All are subjugated, the murderer is just as much human in DNA as the saint, no matter what either of their actions imply. Both have something to say, both participate in the lives of those they effect for good or for worse. In ignoring or scorning the ‘bad’ and embracing the ‘good’, the world leans into a desperate state of imbalance and we subsequently lose touch with reality. When we lose touch with reality, we lose touch with everything. In acknowledging that these events happen and have been happening for a while now, we acknowledge the reality that death and bad things that happen aren’t necessarily senseless, instead, that they have very real sense and information embedded within them that highlight the problems waiting ever-so patiently to be resolved.
Infighting rather than fighting the oppressor keeps us distracted and keeps us docile to the almighty force that claims to help us but instead wants us to fight with each other forever. Then, our attention never lies on them. Learning to understand one another from each perspective with patience and becoming open to compassion in this respect sets a new paradigm for change. Without doing these things, we are dooming ourselves to suffer in our personal lives, bitter and angry, and more and more people will die needlessly.
Inaction is still a form of action. This is better known as the bystander effect. “The bystander effect, or bystander apathy, is a social psychological theory that states that individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim in presence of other people.”
We need to start caring for each other more deeply than superficial platitudes of ‘everything happens for a reason’, ‘don’t worry about it’, ‘just ignore it’. It cannot be ignored any longer that it already has been, for if we don’t start helping each other in more meaningful ways beyond our own self-preservation methods, then the suffering will soon become much more unbearable than it is currently. Supersede the bystander effect, stand up for your fellow man, reach out for him even in your weakest moments, work together and the load is shared, in turn, the load is lighter.
There is such limited time for healing in every situation due to productivity paranoia, and the rush to move on to the next event leaves us with no lessons learned, and a gaping hole in the trust within each other and our environments. Open up to the possibility that there is more beneath than what meets the eye, approach with patience, and in discovering and fully realizing the extent and severity of these hidden wounds that fester and bruise each generation, we may realize the higher path.
(A) LOVE AND SUPPORT YOUR FELLOW MAN, YOU ARE IN THE SAME POSITION AS HE IS.
(B) DON’T PUT UP WITH MISTREATMENT, OF YOURSELF OR ANYONE ELSE.
(C) UNDERSTAND, NO MATTER HOW HARD IT IS OR HOW FAR IT GOES AGAINST YOUR OWN JUDGMENT.
(D) DEFEND THE HUMAN SPIRIT. DON’T LET THEM TAKE IT AWAY FROM YOU.
