But here's the strange thing (there are many horrifying things here, but this is the strange one): though we have so many to choose from, the standard by which all my freshmen continue to gauge mass-shootings remains Columbine.
Just to put that in perspective: my students were 2 when Columbine happened. 2. Literally still in diapers. They have no possible memories of the event. Yet when Umpqua happened two months ago, the first thing my students breathlessly asked was whether this was worse than Columbine. Not Sandy Hooks, not Virginia Tech, but Columbine.
It's an odd sort of time-warp; one would expect my generation to be the ones constantly referring back to Columbine, since it happened when we were in High School. Well do I remember the lock-down drills, the backpack searches, the bomb-squads, the expulsions of unpopular kids in trench-coats--right up until 9/11 happened and we all decided we had far worse things to worry about now. Shouldn't we be the ones constantly harping on Columbine, annoying these young teenagers who have far more recent rampages seared into their collective consciousness? Yet I think I would have forgotten about Columbine by now, if it hadn't been that my students keep bringing it up. What gives?
My best guess is the fact that Columbine remains the biggest High School shooting ever--and these kids just got out of High School. For the vast majority of them, shootings in malls, churches, military bases, hospitals, even other colleges, still feel too abstract and distant to fully process. But a High School--now that's something they know, something that has defined a solid fifth of their life. Classes, sports, extracurriculars--the super-majority of their waking hours revolved around High School. It's an intimate space, a Holy one, Great and Terrible--when a shooting happens there, they feel it in their bones, even if it happened 16 years ago.
But even deeper than that, these kids can still kind of understand a High School shooter. By contrast, some psychopath shooting up a theater, a Church, a mall, is just too opaque, too inscrutable to really resonate. But a High School shooter, well...none of them will admit it, but every teenager's thought of doing it, haven't they. Even the so-called "popular" kids have experience being bullied, while the most-bullied still have experience dealing it out, too. To be an American High Schooler is to be constantly caught between rage and guilt, between an intense desire to avenge yourself upon your tormentors and a deep fear that you deserve it if it happens to you. Everyone who survives adolescence merits a medal.
Most teenagers, in their deepest, darkest moments, have all fantasized about blowing up the school. But (as these things usually are), fantasies become horrifying in real life. What I suspect continues to trouble American High Schoolers about Columbine is the fact that those two teenagers actually carried out what the rest of them have secretly considered. The fact that the rest of them would never indulge in the awful fantasy is of no avail: they feel complicit, because they are able to imagine the unimaginable, to sympathize with the unsympathizable. Unlike other massacres, teenagers can actually understand the horror of Columbine, they are able to stare into the abyss and it stares right back--and that is what frightens them more than any other shooting you could name. Those other rampages don't belong to them; but Columbine still belongs to the teenagers.
And this all feels directly relevant to our most recent and endless bout of mass shootings: they are fantasies brought horribly to life, aren't they. Most of us manage the impulse towards total violence in more constructive manners, or at least try to--action movies, video games, sports, etc. The violence is carefully regulated, as in football, or it is somehow justified in a sort of ethically-definsible framework, as with action heroes. We create "good-guys with guns."
But the problem is that everyone thinks they're a good-guy with guns--yes, even the mad-men in Charleston, or Umpqua, or now San Bernadino. That they obviously weren't scarcely needs to be stated; that many really can wield firearms responsibly is likewise self-evident; rather, what makes these mass-shootings so horrifying is that they represent the awful fantasy brought to life, carried to its absolute extreme. For I dare speculate that people who purchase weapons typically don't just do so for self-defense or for sports-shooting--no, it's with the secret hope of wielding them in righteous fury.
But now some maniacs have actually done so. It is too horrible to contemplate, that we might have anything in common with these killers. So we must loudly disavow these shooters, declare we are nothing like them, blame their religion, their mental health, their troubled childhood, and R-rated movies and music and videogames and gun-laws and everything else except their very humanity which drove them to be so characteristically inhumane. We wish to keep them inscrutable, lest we recognize the same abyss within ourselves.
So hence we treat each new mass-shooting like it were some strange new thing, as though it had never happened before; perhaps that is why the horror never seems to go away, why we never get desensitized, each time it happens.
But the teenagers have been wiser; Columbine still scares them like nothing else from 1999 does anymore, precisely because they are keenly aware of the possibility for Columbine within themselves, and worse. But the rest of us adults still stubbornly, petulantly refuse to see the same within us, so we are continually blindsided by it, and that with every increasing velocity.
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