Los Angeles SWAT team members approach the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills, Calif., on Aug. 10, 1999.FREDERICK BROWN/AFP/Getty Images
In the wake of the killing of at least four people at a Tulsa, Oklahoma, medical campus on Wednesday, once again parents are trying to explain the inexplicable to their children, political leaders seem helpless to respond to a crisis that requires resolve but is immune to congressional resolutions and social commentators are asking whether media coverage of violent outbursts fosters public understanding or fosters copycat crime.
The world seems more forbidding, more frightening, than ever.
The result is a return to the sort of soul-searching that the country undertook in 1968, when two infamous assassinations and urban upheaval provoked worried Americans to question the country’s culture and its strain of violence. But the country has changed significantly since that last bout of introspection.
That time, the violence seemed part of a great social upheaval, and the memorable episodes – the sight of Martin Luther King Jr. dying on the Memphis balcony, the glimpse of Robert F. Kennedy lying in a pool of his own blood in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen – seemed to be markers in history. This time the violence seems even more random, even more senseless.
That time, the violence seemed to put the country’s stability at risk. This time, the violence seems to put our sense of personal safety at risk.
The catastrophic has become commonplace.
If all that seems familiar, it is. I wrote those exact words 23 years ago, in a front-page news analysis in The Boston Globe after a shooting at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles, in which five were wounded in a spray of bullets from an automatic weapon. The shooter, who said the attack was “a wake-up call to America to kill Jews,” later killed a postal worker.
The headline on Aug. 12, 1999, was: As sense of fear surges, nation again looks inward.
Knowing that another mass shooting in the United States was inevitable – there were 43 in May before a gunman opened fire in a Grade 4 classroom in Texas – I prepared much of this column in advance. The Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one in which a minimum of four victims are either injured or killed (not including the person with the gun), is clotted with accounts of mass shootings. Its website displays statistics in a layout that brings to mind baseball statistics, only the home runs are the sprints survivors make from a crime scene to their neighbourhoods. The indefensible has become inevitable.
The beat goes on, because mass shootings now have almost become a news beat in itself.
In The Globe and Mail alone, I have written commentaries after the killing of 11 people at prayer at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, a mere three blocks from my home; after another synagogue shooting outside Los Angeles; after two mass shootings (El Paso, Tex. and Dayton, Ohio) in one weekend; after another mass killing in Georgia; after the supermarket shooting in Buffalo; and after the school shooting in Uvalde, Tex. Plus the hostage situation at Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Tex. Those Texas incidents were 129 days and 582 kilometres apart.
The first few times I wrote these pieces, I called Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, who was in the Tree of Life when shooting broke out. He always provided a poignant remark, something along the lines of contrasting “never again” (a phrase that gained prominence in regard to the Holocaust) with “yet again” (which is how we both reacted to each successive tragedy). I ran into him at a restaurant a few kilometres from his synagogue a while ago and he said he had grown weary of providing quotes for me following tragedies – not that his ardour for opposing needless violence had flagged, just that the repetition of these episodes had left him, well, speechless.
Speechlessness does not make for an arresting newspaper quote. It does, however, speak eloquently.
Presidents, too, have spoken eloquently and, in President Joe Biden’s case, often – three times in the past fortnight. Thursday evening he called for, among other measures, a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and a strengthening of background checks before weapons are purchased.
“For God’s sake how much more carnage are we willing to take?” he asked in a televised White House address. “How many American lives must be taken before we say: Enough?”
Listen also to the sad musings of the philosopher and social critic Bertrand Russell, who in a March 21, 1903, letter to his friend Gilbert Murray, the fabled University of Glasgow classical scholar and translator, shared wretched words that might explain what is happening in our time, and how we react to it:
“I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worthwhile would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These times have to be lived through: there is nothing to be done with them.”
The tragedy of this week is that I was moved to quote myself, and to quote Bertrand Russell. These times have to be lived through. Apparently in the United States, where divisions grow and the political parties bicker, there is nothing to be done.
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