On February 5, the University of South Carolina went on lockdown following reports of an isolated shooting at the School of Public Health. Less than three hours after the first reports, and before school officials ID’d the victim or named a suspect, a writer for Fitsnews.com named Liz Gunn had already decided who the culprit was: today’s fragile college students.
Gunn wrote, “It’s not their fault that society decided that hurt feelings were a ‘no-no.’ It’s not their fault that they quit playing dodgeball in P.E. It’s not their fault that they got a trophy just for participating. So in essence, it really isn’t their fault when they get to college and feel the very first taste of rejection.
“People have spent the last 18 years coddling and protecting them from the harsh reality of life. And it is truly a disservice they have done,” she added. “This week’s shooting on the campus of the University of South Carolina is the second murder-suicide at the school this year. I hate to assume how things transpired, but typically, murder- suicide is the result of one party being rejected in some way and taking very drastic action.”
Ultimately, Gunn was wrong in her assumption. We now know that the shooter was the ex-wife of a USC professor and that after she killed him, she turned the gun on herself.
Although the Fitsnews column was ill-timed and ill-advised, Gunn’s “let’s blame society” position was an odd premise for a right-wing writer to take. After all, conservatives are rather ardent in their insistence that individuals, not society at large, are to be blamed for their various crimes. In the Republican worldview, it’s never the cycle of poverty or our failed war on drugs or our gun culture that perpetuates violence. Well, at least, that’s what they say when the criminals are African-American. Or poor. Or liberals. Or atheists.
Now, before the cries from the Right start piling up in the online comments for this piece accusing me of being a liberal hypocrite, let me also point out that this sort of nonsense is also present in the so-called reporting of outlets such as MSNBC — and it’s no less garbage there than anywhere else.
The horrible truth is simply this: humans have always had a propensity for violence. In fact, this sort of behavior has existed for so long that it is one of the first human behaviors to be mentioned in the Bible. In case you need reminding, the Old Testament begins with Creation, then the Garden, then the Fall, and then the world’s “first” homicide, the slaying of Abel by his brother Cain.
Now, if we view religion as a culture’s attempt to come to grips with the world around it, we have to take the following from the book of Genesis: that early Judaic culture wanted to explain how people wound up in the world (the fall from grace in the Garden, because surely God had a reason to put us here instead of somewhere “nice”) and why people acted violently towards others (Cain and Abel). And from there, our culture has a 6,000-year history of trying to explain something that is otherwise unexplainable, even though everyone from psychologists to neuroscientists and back to theologians have tried.
Sadly, the USC incident was not the only such tragedy to take center stage last month. Most recently, a man in Chapel Hill, N.C., shot and killed three of his neighbors. The victims were young Muslims. Shortly after the first reports had been delivered, commenters had already determined what motivated Craig Stephen Hicks to kill: he was a gun-toting Southern redneck with a grudge against Muslims. But like Gunn, these armchair detectives were wrong. According to Hicks’ Facebook posts he was a fairly liberal atheist who appeared to have a problem with all religions. Of course, the victims’ faith may have had nothing to do with the shooting. Perhaps Hicks was simply angry about a parking dispute with the victims. Or maybe he was just mentally ill. Or maybe, it was none of those reasons. Or maybe it was a little bit of each. Whatever the cause, each new guess as to Hicks’ motivation was discussed in an utterly pointless back-and-forth debate, both online and on TV.
In the end, the simplest explanations are sometimes the best. A certain percentage of people have always had the toxic mix of genetics, environmental upbringing, and cultural pressures that cause them to lash out violently and seemingly without cause. The fact that there are now seven billion of us on the planet, and several billion of us with nonstop access to 24-7 updates to every crime imaginable, leads us to believe that crime is getting worse and worse. This misconceived rise in violent crime also increases our need to rationalize it away by crafting a world in which only some other group of people commit the most horrendous acts imaginable. But the truth is, there is no “other” group who is solely responsible for these crimes. We’re all humans, and our history of violence is never-ending.
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