The Mass Shootings Chart

The first time on January 9, 2011, next on December 15, 2012, I posted a chart of mass shootings on LaMarotte by decades beginning in the 1910s—thus a century of shootings in the United States. The first time I had to expend a lot of effort to build the series from multiple news sources—trying always to including only those that more than one source had actually mentioned. I labeled it a “rough count” for a reason. I’ve only included counts of shootings that involve more than four dead (except as explained below). Many recent lists include smaller numbers and therefore blur the line between “modern style” mass shootings and family killings (where, for instance, three people related people are murdered).

Herewith I show a version of that chart updated to include the San Bernardino shootings of this month. My source for the update is here. Today, halfway through the 2010s decade, we are showing 27 such shootings (versus 15 in the whole 2000s decade).  Since last publishing this chart, when the 2010s total stood at 16 events, 13 more mass shootings have been added.

A note concerning the chart. In preparing it, I had found virtually no press accounts for the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s but discovered the work of the Minnesota criminologist Grant Duwe and a chart, produced by Duwe, from which I took data for those “empty” decades; those decades are shaded in a different color. Duwe’s numbers show a higher incidence of mass killings than the press accounts, no doubt because Duwe counted all killings of more than four people, whatever the context, whereas the news accounts concentrate on public events that go beyond family (or crime-family) killings.

Ours are interesting times. During a visit to a near-by Meijers Grocery store—a big chain around here—I saw a sheriff’s sedan parked by one of the entrances and wondered if a) it was the first arrival at a first-ever grocery-chain shooting; b) it had been dispatched to guard the place; or c) it was just a sheriff’s deputy picking up a half-gallon of milk on his way home. Later, having picked up my Evening Primrose Oil, I saw the deputy at one end of the store assuring a woman. She seemed in some state of agitation. Was I just imagining her inner condition? Or had she seen something suspicious….

Mass Killings in 2015

The Germanwings Flight 9525 crash in France begins to appear more and more like a mass killing by a deranged co-pilot. To get some perspective on the sudden deaths of yet another 150 innocents by violent means, I looked for and found Wikipedia’s site titled “Mass Murder in 2015” (link). Some 28 cases are listed there, not including the Germanwings crash. Total deaths reported thus far in 2015 have been 944. The largest number is associated with Boko Haram taking place in Nigeria or in neighboring regions of Niger and Cameroon (370 or 39%); Yemen comes next (180, 19%); and Pakistan is third (104, 11%). If we count the Germanwings case, France would displace Pakistan—or Germany would if we assign the deaths to origin of the perpetrator.

Nine hundred and forty-four—and today 1,094 innocents killed. May they all rest in peace….

S.O.S.

Just last Sunday a picture in the New York Times caught my eye. It showed a group of middle-aged folk standing out of doors. In the forefront was a large placard saying GUNS SAVE LIVES. What struck me was the piety of the people, their hands over the hearts. No doubt they were listening to the National Anthem—and the fact that they looked very much like the American citizenry might, on average. The picture is accessible here.

The picture came back powerfully when the Washington Navy Yard shooting spree began to dominate the news yesterday morning. It reminded me to what an extent the concept of an informed citizenry is something of a chimera. Information is simply not enough. The receiving mind must transform it into rational thought, comprehensive understanding.

We’re sure, eventually, to hear the argument that the dead in Washington could have been saved if only an alert civil servant working there had been carrying a gun and, observing the maddened killer, would have dispatched him before he had managed to get off his first shot. What erodes democracy, ultimately, is that public opinion—rather than responsible thought—influences people. They have a menu of opinion served up by the media. They can choose their flavor without thought based merely on feelings.

Emergence of a New Plea

One might think of it as the NRA Insanity Plea. Almost out of the box, someone suggested that the teachers in that unfortunate Newtown elementary “have blood on their hands.” They didn’t have a gun handy to defeat the attacker—blasting him to kingdom come from behind the desk where the apple sits. Okay. That was just a reflex. But as the second, third day dragged on, the new plea began emerging—with a weak and a strong thrust. The weak thrust is that we must now ban assault weapons—as if a person with a loaded six-shooter couldn’t, with some care, kill five people before terminating himself with prejudice. The strong thrust is that, looking for culprits, we must immediately point fingers at the Mental Health Community for its failure to identify the nuts among us.

Brutal Corrective

An alternative title might be Cosmic Corrective—but that might be misunderstood as an Act of God, our most exalted and injurious conceptualization for the random. I’ve dealt with mass killings before both here and on LaMarotte, on LaMarotte again this morning (link), showing counts over the span of a century; they paint a trend.

For a student of the life of cultures and the death of civilizations, events like the Newtown, Connecticut massacre have the character of markers. I’ve written extensively here about collectives; culture is their youth and adulthood, civilization their aging and decline. I noted with interest that media coverage of the event was immediate and extensive—and that the presence of international media was prominent enough to be remarked upon and reported. The problem is now global.

The brutally corrective character of such events is that they remind us of something we’ve come to neglect: our impotence and helplessness—especially over against the collective, in the face of actions that arise from the fracturing of culture. Media coverage today and for quite a long time to come—until it fades only to erupt again when the next mayhem strikes—will be about why and how it could have happened, also, marginally, about “what to do.” Many things immediately come to mind, of course. Will laws be enacted? The safe bet is, No. But the sheer and increasingly densifying recurrence of such events will act as a corrective for many, many people—and as these numbers rise, the culture, sure enough will undergo a change. When chaos spreads and strikes the individual out of the blue like a random lightning bolt, we lose faith in our collective perfection and begin to look for a new orientation—in the vertical direction. Will mass killings eventually diminish? The cultural time-scale is very long—but yes; killings of this kind probably will as a new culture takes hold of us. In the best of cultural times, however, mass killing are still present and still practiced—but only at the most refractory and stupid level of humanity, by the tips of our collectives, by our kings and by our states.  

Concerning that Act of God, above, it is, unfortunately of very long standing. There is that phrase by the German poet Friedrich von Logau (1640):

Gottes Mühlen mahlen langsam, mahlen aber trefflich klein.

Ob aus Langmut Er sich säumet, bringt mit Schärf’ Er alles ein.

Longfellow translated von Logau’s Sinngedichte in part. His rendition:

Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small;

Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds He all.

Longfellow lived in the nineteenth century. And folk sayings echo this. How many thought, in Newtown and elsewhere yesterday: “There but for the grace of God…” But our brutal corrective suggests that we best leave God out of it. His grace was as much there for those killed, and their relatives, as for those who escaped physical termination—which, ultimately, awaits us all.

Slow-Mo Fracture

Based on copies sold, the sixteen novels that comprise the Left Behind cycle, written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, represent something of a literary phenomenon at the kick-off of the twenty-first century. The series is based on interpretations of prophetic books of the Bible under which, in End Times, the faithful will undergo rapture and be instantaneously taken up to heaven. The unbelieving are…left behind. The books appeared in the period 1995-2007; seven became best sellers; total copies sold have topped 65 million. Three movies were made from this series as well, also popular. But this series, while remarked upon by the mainstream, which cannot help but admire a commercial tour de force, has been ignored because it belongs to an alien culture, so to speak.

Two recent mass killings (at a movie house showing a Batman film, at a Sikh Temple) taking place within 19 days of one another made me think that these are symptoms of cultural break-up—and curiously brought to mind the “left behind”—those individuals and groups who feel left behind in some sense of that word. Massive, rapid change always produces such individuals and groups; the KKK represented one kind of reaction to the outcome of the Civil War. And that war, in the fullness of time, also produced the last major social movement where unity, thus integration, was at the center of the great effort: the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn’t very long after its successful implementation that  we suddenly developed a fascination with rapidly-branching ethnicity. Soon after came multiculturalism on the left and fundamentalist activism in politics on the right. The Michigan Militia formed in 1994—and will here be a stand-in for other similar groups that have sprouted since.

LaHaye and Jenkins brilliantly turned a perception, deeply felt by many traditionalistic, religious people on its head. They were not the left behind. That label belongs to the major culture as the kingdom comes. From  my perspective all this signals the slow-motion fracture of Western Civilization. Parts of it are breaking off. Cracks appear in the denuded landscape deprived of water and burned by the merciless rays of commercialism. The mass killings are, as it were, the visible sparks that fly as this breakup is taking place.