Reflections on the Contagion of Domestic Gun Terrorism

The horror of mass murder through gun violence in our society confronts us time after time. Just last weekend on August 3^rd and 4^th, 31 people were killed in El Paso and Dayton; the country is struggling to deal with the emotions evoked by this domestic terrorism and as usual there is talk of some gun control, but it is unlikely that any substantial controls will materialize. Most of the time Americans remain numb amidst these horrors as a way of trying to keep their sanity, which feeds into the denial of the problem. But

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normal denial fails when the images of the shooting and dead are directly before them.

Mary Coleman, married to the psychohistorian Jay Gonen, has devoted her life primarily to treating others as a neurologist while protesting against war and all violence. While bedridden at age 90 she can no longer picket the White House for peace, but she can still work for it, which is why she wrote, “Why Do Children Have to Defend Themselves Against Being Shot at School?” Her focus is on why it is so often left to school children to try and defend themselves against school violence because this should be the job of mothers and fathers. I appreciated her passion and worked with her to make the article acceptable to our referees, even sending her paper out as a symposium piece and putting out a call for papers on the subject. Indeed, I also hired two young students at my college to send out the call for papers, but to little avail.

Given the amount of effort that went into attempting to get people to write a response to Mary’s symposium paper, the failure of anyone to write a commentary on it is quite frustrating. Fortunately, there are three papers and two poems on the subject. Psychiatrist Jamshid Marvasti and a colleague confront the impact of the trauma of school shootings on children, the attempt to scapegoat the mentally ill, and the failure of the political system to adequately control guns. A Colorado mother, Debra Anderson, writes of her anguish at the shooting in the school her sons attend. Professor Mark West of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, a subscriber to our journal, writes of keeping vigil in the face of recent gun violence during final examinations.

Our society is normally numb to this issue—for most it is just too painful to write about. In the face of the determined efforts by the gun lobby, modern Republican legislators, who know the majority of their constituents favor increased control over weapons of destruction, are afraid of being challenged by members of their own party (“primaried”), causing a probable electoral defeat. This has not always been the case. In 1993 America had at least passed the relatively weak Brady Bill in response to the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan and a ten-year ban on assault rifles, which expired in 2004. Recent U.S. inaction contrasts with the banning and buying back of semi-automatic and military grade weapons in New Zealand after a white supremacist killed 51 worshipers in two mosques on March 15^th. As Ken Fuchsman recently wrote me, an ideology of school shootings has developed in our Internet Age.

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In watching major news outlets and reading the major newspapers in the face of the El Paso and Dayton bloodbaths, it seems almost impossible that no action will be taken to meaningfully reduce the level of gun violence in our society. But at this point I am not optimistic about it because our society has been at this point after the Newtown bloodbath and much too often. In fact gun violence sells more guns, so today there are more guns than people in the United States—though they are certainly not evenly distributed throughout the country. In the face of shootings, people go and buy guns with the thought of protecting their loved ones and society. This is the opposite of the reality. The more guns, the more gun deaths. True, most of these will be from suicides, some will be from accidents, and a comparative few will be from a horrifying contagion of mass shootings in schools and wherever people gather. Walmart regrets 22 people being killed in their store in El Paso, but it is not at this point willing to give up selling guns; they will in fact sell a lot more. Legislators in “carry states” encourage gun ownership, talk of arming school employees, and look to ordinary citizens to stop shooters. People imagine that they or others will somehow become an action hero, shooting the attempted perpetrator of a mass killing. This has not been the case. This is fantasy rather than reality, and it is best left to action movies and comic strips.

My hope had been that Dr. Coleman’s symposium article would elicit a dozen or so commentaries on gun violence in schools and elsewhere, which was perhaps unrealistic. I’m also quite troubled that there is a scapegoating of those who are mentally ill as being the perpetrators of gun violence. The reality is that mentally ill people are not especially violent and are of the greatest danger to themselves. Today the threat typically comes from men who are feeling lost and identify with an ideology, such as a non-white/Latino invasion of the United States that President Trump focuses upon. White nationalists, not desperate Latino asylum and job seekers, are the ones we need to worry about most when it comes to gun violence.

We need more in-depth psychohistorical and psychopolitical insights on gun violence and other terrorism such as we have printed in the past in Clio’s Psyche, for example: David R. Beisel, “Columbine: The Search for Causes” (Vol. 6 no. 1, 1999, 14-16); Dan Dervin, “Questions About the Suburban Massacre in Littleton” (Vol. 6 no. 1, 1999, 16-18); Ken Fuchsman, “A Portrait of Newtown: Before, During, and After” (Vol. 20, no. 3, 2013, 275-

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280); and Paul Elovitz, “Reconsidering Freud’s Death Drive in Our Era of Suicide, and Suicidal Terrorism” (Vol. 23, no. 3, 2017, 230-237). Robert Jay Lifton, Jerry Piven, Charles Strozier, Jacques Szaluta, and Vamık Volkan are but a few of the many psychodynamic colleagues who have provided insights on the subject elsewhere and usually at greater length. Why not research the psychohistory of American gun violence and write on it for these pages?

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