What Really Scares Me About Evil, Deranged Lunatics

In the last 36 hours or so, Americans have been collectively weighing the shooting of 71 people in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. There are already volumes of commentary on the pertinent issues, a healthy dose of which I’ve wallowed in since I saw the first headline yesterday morning. Although there are many troubling aspects of this event, I’ve been struck by the insistence of most people to brand the shooter “evil” (Mitt Romney and Barack Obama), “deranged” (Anderson Cooper), and “a lunatic” (EJ Dionne). One thing people across political, religious, and news network lines agree on is that the man was crazy. I understand, and even agree, that these characterizations of the shooter may be true, but I’m troubled by what they seem to me to imply about where responsibility lies.

Certainly, the lion’s share of responsibility must be laid at the shooter’s door—hell, he shot 71 unsuspecting people. It’s both inconceivable and horrific, and there’s no excusing his actions.

What concerns me, however, is that the characterizations of the shooter as evil, crazy, deranged, disturbed, unbalanced, etc. leave ALL responsibility on his doorstep. He was solely, individually, and unstoppably responsible for his actions. You can’t stop evil, after all, you simply must resist it where possible and heal when evil manifests. I heard one commentator, David Brooks, make this point on the radio yesterday—he essentially said, you’ll never be able to prevent a psycho from wounding innocent people if they’re determined to do so. He implied, "So why even try?" The commonplace acceptance of the shooter’s “insanity” reflects our real understanding of what makes a person randomly open fire on a crowd of strangers, but it also indicates that we believe his craziness made us helpless to stop him. We have no responsibility because you can't prevent evil, so why even try?

 If we’re talking about stopping him once he made the decision to arm himself and rampage, I suppose I agree. But to a significant degree, I think that dismissing this shooter (and all the others, at least since Charles Whitman shot up UT Austin in 1966) as “crazy” is a cop out that allows the rest of us—the "normal" people—to excuse ourselves from thinking or worrying about our own involvement in this kind of violence. Calling the shooter "crazy" and "evil" excuses his actions by pretending they couldn’t have been prevented with better mental health care in America, stronger gun control laws, less general romance attached to violence, more social support for students, and on and on. If the perpetrator was "evil," we don't have to bother talking about these things—not really, not for any longer than it takes for the news cycle to pick up something else worth repeating over and over again. Because again, there's nothing we can do.

I’m not, necessarily, advocating better mental health care, gun control, etc., though it shouldn’t be hard to see where I stand on these issues. What I am advocating is a realization that Americans' naïve idealization of individualism, personal responsibility, and social insularity are intimately involved in this shooter’s actions. We are, at least partly, responsible for his actions because we are, at least partly, responsible for the conditions that allowed him to act. The political, religious, and cultural decisions we make collectively create the conditions for these kinds of horrific mass shootings. This should be clear in the shooter's actions—he didn't set out to hurt an individual; he set out to hurt society, presumably because he felt that society hurt him. There's no other reason to attack a theater full of strangers.

While a good deal of time is being and will be spent on determining who's to "blame" for the shooting in Colorado, I submit that we all are in some way because of decisions we make collectively. When we vote to defund mental health institutions in order to save ourselves the tax burden, as was done in California in the 1980s and in several places since, we collectively accept the responsibility for turning people with mental health challenges out of hospitals and into the streets, prisons, and our neighborhoods. When we devise and accept movie ratings that punish moviemakers with strict ratings for sexual content but don’t punish moviemakers with equally strict ratings for violent content, we accept that we will be continually exposed to depictions of graphic violence, as will our children. When we advocate education systems that equate “rigor” to over-working and under-supporting students—where students earn their stripes by surviving the gauntlet—we accept that students' mental and physical health will be tested, and sometimes broken, in the service of “weeding out the weak.” (Incidentally, this happens at every level of the education system, not just at the highest levels of graduate education.) When we claim, as Texas Representative Louis Gohmert and others have, that mass shootings are some sort of divine retribution, we reaffirm the attitude that only "good" people who think like us and believe what we believe deserve our support and care. We also reaffirm the romanticized American attitude that tells people they’re on their own because no one cares about anyone else unless they’re legally or economically obligated to be.

Defining the "evil" people in the world lets us imagine they're not us, and we therefore have no responsibility to them or for them. When we spend our time defining who the good people are, who the bad people are, and who the people are that just aren’t worth our time and money, we accept that some people will be left to struggle and suffer on their own. We accept that some of them will be estranged, and we ultimately accept that some of them will become violent against "us" because we've cast them aside. Perhaps that’s inevitable in a world shared by 7 billion people, but it’s something I think we should do better to try to prevent because it ultimately ends up hurting us all.

To reiterate, the political, religious, and cultural choices that we make collectively create the conditions for the evil, deranged, lunatic actions of people like the shooter in Colorado. If we genuinely want to stop them, we need to collectively decide that “every man for himself” is not the best way to live together. But such decisions take serious dialogue, and they take the realization that “evil” isn’t something that exists beyond the responsibility of “normal people.” Maybe if we’d collectively take more responsibility, instead of writing these kinds of horrific acts off as “crazy,” we’d be better able to have conversations that reach beyond what's good for everybody individually. We'd be able to talk about what we can and should do for ourselves as a collective—a group of people who live together and need to be responsible to and for everyone else, not just the people who agree with us. Or to put it another way, instead of waiting for an evil, deranged lunatic to shoot up a movie theater, college campus, or summer camp to bring us all closer together, maybe we try and get our collective goals together before tragedy happens. Maybe, if we take a little more responsibility for one another, we even end up preventing it.