Something All Our Own

Trey Smith

We’ve had mass-killings before; and every now and then, you’ll read about a rampage killing in some other country. But only in America, and only since the mid-1980s, do American employees attack their own workplaces and offices, and middle-class students attack their own schools, with such consistency, year after year.

It was only after the crash in 2008 that some Americans began to accept the obvious: That the cruelty, predation and concentration of wealth and power introduced by the Reagan Revolution sparked a new type of murder that has more in common with insurgency violence or rebellious peasant violence than, say, the psychopathology of a serial murder.

Like so many school rampage killers, last Monday’s alleged murderer, One L. Goh, was reportedly bullied and mistreated at his nursing school program at the small Korean Christian nursing program he enrolled in. Bullying also was blamed for the high school rampage killing a few weeks ago in suburban Cleveland that left three students dead and five wounded.

The gruesome details about the way Goh is said to have lined up and executed his victims, the way he apparently singled out women, make hard not to caricature him as a monster, a demonic psychopath — and yet, without excusing Goh’s killings, one should try to make sense of what happened to him, the downward-trending bleakness, the slow water-torture of low-five-figure debts, the broken marriage, the $23,000 tax bill owed to the IRS.
~ from Behind Another Rampage Massacre by Mark Ames ~

Mass murder doesn't happen only in America. It's happened in Norway, England, Russia and a few other locales. Yet, as Ames aptly points out, it happens in the US routinely and frequently. In fact, it happens so often within our borders that, in many ways, news of this sort becomes blase.

I'm certainly not suggesting that crimes of this nature go unnoticed, but most cases no longer seem sensational anymore. We read or hear about them and may manage to eke out an "Oh, that's terrible" before going on with our day without skipping a beat.

This is one of the problems with being exposed to news of unthinkable violence on a frequent basis; it quickly loses its shock value. Not only are we not shocked, but, due to the frequency, we no longer do much societal soul searching. We no longer ask ourselves WHY this problem is so prevalent in our nation. We more or less take such acts as a given.

When such things are taken as a given, it guarantees that they will happen over and over again.