As the world reels from the shock of 50 persons from the LGBT community in Florida being slaughtered like shooting fish in a barrel, we have to examine the systemic factors at work in the US and apply them in our small country to ensure such an event never occurs here again. And while it may surprise some to see the word “again” used, that simply means we have forgotten, or refuse to confront, the madness of Lusignan, Bartica and Lindo Creek. On a per capita basis, they outweigh the Florida horror.
The question on everyone’s lips is “Why?” In these matters, we have to distinguish between “proximate and ultimate causes”. With the shooter in Florida, we can cite, as his ex-wife did, his mental instability and the men kissing each other that triggered his evidently deep hatred for homosexuals. But even if we look at the two presidential terms of Obama, we can examine 16 mass killings that might offer us a clue of the ultimate causes.
March 2009, Geneva County Massacre, Alabama, 10 dead; April 2009, Binghamton shootings, New York, 13 dead; November 2009, Fort Hood, Texas, 13 dead, 42 wounded; February 2010, University of Alabama in Huntsville, 3 dead, 3 wounded; August 2010, Manchester, Connecticut, 8 dead; January 2011, Tucson, Arizona, 6 dead, 11 wounded; October 2011, Seal Beach, California, 8 dead, 1 wounded; April 2012, Oikos University, California, 7 dead, 3 wounded; July 2012, Aurora, Colorado, 12 dead, 58 wounded; December 2012, Sandy Hook Massacre, Connecticut, 27 dead, 1 wounded; June 2013, Santa Monica College, California, 5 dead; September 2013, Washington Navy Yard, 13 dead, 3 injured; May 2014, University of California, Santa Barbara, 7 dead, 7 wounded; June 2015, Charleston, South Carolina, 9 dead; August 2015, Roanoke, Virginia, 3 dead, 1 wounded; October 2015, Umpqua Community College, Oregon, 10 dead, at least 7 wounded; December 2015, San Bernadino, California, 14 dead; March 2016, Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, 6 dead, 5 injured; June 2016, Orlando, Florida, 49 dead, 53 injured.
We have given this exhaustive list over the last seven years, to show that the mass shootings in the US are as representative as you can get geographically. They are not, however, representative by gender when it comes to the killers: these are overwhelmingly male. Each of the mass killers used guns to exterminate their victims. But these are the “external” variables: what about their frame of mind that goes to deeper causes? In each incident, while the killers were facilitated by the easy accessibility of guns in the US, more pertinently, they were motivated by hate.
Hate is a very strong emotion and in the end, it occurs when we separate the objects of our hatred from our common humanity in a special instance of a process called “othering”. As humans, we have inbuilt physiological mechanisms that make us differentiate ourselves from “others”. Unless we are taught to respect differences in our early socialisation process, only to the extent we see commonalities we consider important beneath the difference, we might tolerate the other.
But if one is taught to see specific differences as “evil” or “beyond the pale”, then the other is “dehumanised” in a hate-cathected continuum that in the end justifies using violence to exterminate them. And this is the process we find in common in most of the mass killings in the US. Whether it was a case of slaughtering college students, African-Americans, or gay Americans, the individuals wanted to make a “point” about their hatred.
But hatred spreads easier in a climate of dehumanisation that is spread by leaders about others. During different periods of history this was taken to its limits when whole groups were exterminated – from the Jews of Germany to the Tutsis of Rwanda. In America today, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has been dehumanising Muslims and immigrants, much as some Guyanese were dehumanised with devastating consequences between 2002 and 2008. We must eradicate guns and hate.
