The
hunt for the political ideology driving each
murder that makes the news obscures some key
points.
One
is that the shooter is almost always a man,
even though women are equally capable of
shooting, meaning that the ideology is one of
masculinism.
Another
is that the shooter, more often than not,
shoots himself (and it may not make the news,
but most often a shooter shoots only himself),
which blows a rather large hole in the idea
that he is working to advance some subgroup of
people or some desired better world.
Another
is that, to the extent that coherent thoughts
are involved, every shooter shares the
masculinist ideology that holds that anything
good can come of shooting people — an ideology
also shared with many non-shooters (including
angry, violent individuals in places not
saturated with guns and gun training and war
veterans) and with many indirect shooters
(including those ordering, funding,
authorizing, and profiting from shooting or
bombing Palestinian children or Venezuelan
boaters,
etc., and to at least a great degree those who
create films glorifying shooting people and
make speeches thanking each other and saying
“peace”).
Gathering
additional information about the thinking (or
the training or conditioning or arming) of
murderers is all to the good. Perhaps
assassins of important people are very
different from your typical suicide or
murderer. But the ideology hunt is always
fundamentally accomplished from the start. The
shooter has, at the very least, the shooter
ideology. It is an ideology as opposed
to basic historical facts as
climate denialism or trusting political
candidates. It comes in many flavors. A
shooter may believe that certain scapegoated
types of people are a threat to his type of
people. Or he may imagine that shooting
hateful bigoted people is a brilliant way to
bring us all together. He may suppose that
obliterating neighborhoods in Gaza is
“defensive,” or that it rids the world of
lesser beings. He may fantasize that a
wider war
on Israel is the
path to
peace and harmony. He may claim to be teaching
someone a lesson, or to be undoing a corrupt
election. He may tell you he’s eliminating
Hitler, or clearing the way for Hitler’s
return. The important thing to become aware of
is that, in any case, he is nuts.
The
shooter is nuts. The shooter is Pharaoh,
emperor of denial. Shooting a kind, loving
soul harms any cause it seeks to advance.
Shooting a hateful bigot or a healthcare CEO
generates sympathy, real and feigned, for
hateful bigots and healthcare CEOs. Attacking
the “National Guard” occupiers of your city
gives them an excuse to occupy your city.
Sending armed troops into a city generates
resentment toward those troops. Abusing
Palestinians in a violent apartheid state
fuels resistance. Launching rockets into
Israel provides an excuse for accelerated
genocide. Shooting people doesn’t actually
help your ideological goals, no matter what
your ideology may be. So, you may have an
ideology, and it may be very clear and
coherent and dear to you, but as long as you
are shooting people, what matters is that you
have a shooter ideology that overrides the
rest of what you care about.
This
analysis it not missing from the news because
of its simplicity. The news loves nothing if
not simplicity. It is missing from the news
because the people telling you the news are
required to themselves have a shooter
ideology, to believe that weapons help
Ukraine, to be conditioned to shout “but
Hamas!” or “but Maduro!” on command.
About a
third of U.S. mass shooters must
be praised for having trained to shoot well,
must be thanked for the service of having shot
at certain people, and then must be condemned
for having shot at the wrong people — these
are U.S. military veterans. That constraint
makes it difficult to see the problem as
belief in the positive effects of shooting
people.
But
that is the problem. The key
ideological
divide is between those who
believe
that nonviolent actions can
accomplish
all things better than
violence,
and those who believe that
shooting
people can be justified.
Unfortunately,
many of the loudest
pundits
on both sides of what they
suppose
to be the key ideological divides
stand
together on the wrong side of this
one.
