What is the Difference Between You and the Shooter?

Can we understand people who do things like this

Yet another another mass-shooting, this time at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. Ten bodies laid out dead in aisles, three more bleeding and barely clutching to life. The shooter, an 18-year old who bought the gun the Friday before, wrote a 180-page manifesto that auto-published to 4chan just before he opened fire on Saturday. He live-streamed the shooting on Twitch. At the very end of his killing spree, before being swarmed by police, he dropped to his knees and held a gun to his head. He was not able to pull the trigger, perhaps suddenly feeling afraid to give himself the same sentence he passed onto ten strangers. He was arrested and plead not guilty in court later that day.

The questions around these mass-shootings remain the same as they have since Columbine. Some of the questions have answers, and some do not. It is hard for most people to enter into a mindset of someone who intentionally plans and executes such extreme violence. Most people could barely even imagine getting into a physical fight, much less choosing to take a life. Perhaps those most honest with themselves could even intellectually construct a hypothetical set of circumstances so rare and extreme that would provoke them toward a blind rage and fatal violence. Even if we concede this animalistic potential within us, a situation that would force us to follow that instinct seems so unlikely that it is better thought of as an act of God than a choice you have control of. Even if those perfectly-wrong circumstances were to arise, we still rely on the boundaries of civilization, the care and restraint of our families and neighbors, and the lack of access to lethal means to be the safeguards against bringing that situation to a fatal conclusion.

The Nightmare 1781 by JOHANN HENRY FUSELI

If we walk further still, out toward the edges of our imagination, even the most daring and introspective among us begin to find ourselves in a strange and unfamiliar territory. It’s hard to imagine taking a life just for personal gain or avoidance of consequence. It’s hard to imagine any sum of money or power that would cause one to extinguish another. Human beings are vessels of possibility, they live on interconnected webs of human relationships. To make one body go cold is to create a shockwave of pain that persists for entire lives or even generations. No one person has the right to turn off life for another.

And then there is what happened in Buffalo. Beyond the very edge of that limb of imagination, a limb now so thin and precarious that we can barely stand, you lift your gaze and behold hovering before you a fog. A dark gray roiling mass of menacing fog so dense we cannot at all see what is held inside. We are not even sure we would understand what we were seeing if we were able to peer within. Concealed inside is the thing children feel under their beds just before they sleep. It is the feeling you get when alone in your house and a footstep creaks in your attic. It is the nausea in your stomach when you look over the balcony railing and for a split second imagine you might suddenly jump. It is the fear behind all fears. It is evil so ancient, vast, and horrifying that to look upon it is to lose a piece of your mind you can never get back.

To do what this murderer did in Buffalo required that he drink of the fog. It required a rejection of the tree roots of humanity so profound and hateful that he was willing to jump directly into the heart of the fog and be consumed alive. Almost all but a few of us cannot imagine such spiritual perversion and horror. We cannot imagine giving ourselves to powers so heinous and corrupt, kneeling before altars of blood and asking these ancient gods to “do with me what you will.” This is what we call abomination.

Those of crooked heart are an abomination to the LORD, but those of blameless ways are his delight.

Proverbs 11:20

Since the very beginning of all mankind, we have tried every which way to stop this evil from taking root in a heart. We have called it abomination. We have called it madness, sickness, derangement, and psychopathy. It takes many names, always shifting in form to hide its nature. We have tried to root it out, stuck our instruments through flesh and mind and soul in order to pull it from the person. In all of this time, we have never found the answer. No matter what we do, there are always a few lurking among us who find pleasure in carnage, who delight in the cleaving of souls from bodies.

We still do not know why. The fog is too dense, we could not look inside if we wanted to. So we stand at the edge and we guess. We guess the reasons that hate takes hold of a heart, how someone could start life as a cute little baby and end it by ripping ten innocent people from this plane of existence. We so desperately want to know why. We believe that knowing will shield us from their violence. We believe knowing will help us to notice it sooner, to sit them down and alter their path. We want to know so that we can prepare, so that we can be ready when that thing that we normally think of as happening to “other people” suddenly happens to us.

We want to know because maybe we weren’t so truthful earlier when we were talking about the fog…

Maybe the story you tell yourself is the one I told you; that you’ve merely stood at a distance and watched the ominous curling tendrils of the fog unfurling before you. But is there a part of that story you’ve conveniently left out? Surely we can summon the courage if we think back together. Think back to the time you walked out on the branch in the cover of night, and checked over your shoulder to see if anyone was around. You felt afraid but part of you also felt called. A little wisp of the fog outstretched a tiny finger of vapor toward you, it bid you forward and invited you in.

Hypnotized by the immensity and power of this decadent evil, you slipped just the tips of your finger inside. You parted the tiniest slice of the noxious gas, leaned yourself over and peered inside. What you saw was more terrifying than you thought it could possibly be. To look more than a second would certainly have driven you beyond the brink of what the sane mind allows. But you did not see the tentacles and claws of an Eldritch god. You did not behold any monstrous form at all. You looked inside and saw a reflection of yourself.

You ran back up the branch and back into your bed and pulled the covers up over your nose. You screamed into your brain until your thoughts were all white noise and static. You could not make it through another day if you should ever think about what you saw. You had no other choice than to lock it away. You put it in a chest and wrapped it in heavy chains and unbreakable locks. You sunk it to the bottom of the ocean of your subconscious mind.

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Perhaps this is why we are so eager to know. We must understand where this evil comes from! We must make sure that nobody thinks it could come from me. “The killer in me is NOT the killer in you.” We must prove that it comes from somewhere else: mental illness, bigotry, terrorism, too many guns, not enough guns, video games, 4chan, the political ideology that is opposite of mine.

Now I’ve got it. Now I’m safe. The hate of this world has nothing to do with me. It has nothing to do with people like me. I am not responsible for hate like that. I am one of the good ones.

We have many names for people like the murderer in Buffalo. But most often we have just one. He is evil. He has evil in him. It did not come from me, or you, or anyone else. For no reason at all, it just decided to take root in him. He was called to the fog. He gave into his evil. What else could we have done?

For how many more years will we indulge this self-deceptive dishonest charade. How much longer will we ignore the way that casting blame on people who remind us of monsters because of how they look simply does not work. It makes the problem worse. How much longer will we pretend evil is everywhere around us except inside? It is up to you to decide what matters to you more: the safety of your self-concept or the safety of a supermarket on a Saturday morning of no note.

Don’t feel rushed, you have time. These things only happen to other people. Not you. Not me. Someone else.