The events last week at Fort Hood, Texas were truly tragic. The murder of those thirteen innocents can never be justified or, for that matter, even coherently explained and the murderer is a soulless, despicable madman.
But in the nonstop media coverage that's followed the Fort Hood tragedy, I can't help but wonder why this particular mass murder is more worthy of attention than the scores of others that occur with a numbing frequency. The dead at Fort Hood were no more innocent than Otis Beckford, killed the next day in Orlando or Teresa Marie Beiser, murdered in Portland this morning. Their murderers, Jason Rodríguez and Robert James Beiser, were no less mad, no less evil than Nidal Malik Hasan.
We're stuck on Fort Hood and Nidal Hasan though. I suppose it's because it happened on a military base and the killer was a Muslim soldier and that makes it unique. But there's sure nothing unique in America about crazed madmen walking into public locales and indiscriminately slaughtering as many as they're able.
Lee Siegel does an admirable job at an abbreviated accounting of recent mass murder sprees. Siegel counts sixty four murdered this year in thirteen separate events and concedes the list isn't complete. Mass murder sprees are occurring at a average rate of more than once a month and it's only a crazed Muslim soldier opening fire on a Texas Army base that warrants our attention and causes us to notice.
Nobody does a damn thing to try to stop it. Conservatives don’t want to make an issue of mass murder because then they would be confronted with the fact that nearly all of the massacres are committed by people using guns. Liberals don’t want to cry out about it because then they would have to address the fact that the violence of our entertainment—TV, movies, videogames, our proliferating apps—makes killing seem like just another strategy for coping with reality. If the utterly immoral legality of handguns and assault weapons puts killing within reach, then vicarious violence, sanctified by every corner of the entertainment culture, makes murder ethically and conceptually possible.
Maybe it's now a cultural fact of life. There's certainly nothing being done to address the monthly mass murder spree. And, perhaps, every once in a while some particularly twisted lunatic will devise a new killing scheme that will cause us to take notice, shake our heads at the horrible carnage, wait for the current president to eulogize the dead and make us all feel better, and then we'll go about our day.
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