I don't want to write about this. Except that I do

Judging from my social media feeds and what's on radio and television, a new national religious practice we have in the United States is interpreting the meaning of mass shootings. I would like to add in my thoughts: Don't. What annoys me the most about responses to mass shootings is when a liberation / control / justice movement (conservative or liberal) views the event and the suicide note as an excellent piece of supporting evidence for their movement. I believe this is a bad idea, and we need to resist it. Allow me to explain, and please forgive the odd transitions:

If you've ever been in a class where discussion of morals or ethics takes place, it's only a matter of time before someone makes a reference to Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union. It's the logical extreme to which all ideas go, especially when you're talking about the importance of obeying the law. In college, I found this tendency highly annoying, and if I ever teach a class such as this, I'm going to reward the students with chocolate if they can make it more than 30 minutes without a Hitler / Stalin example.

Why do we talk about Hitler and Stalin? I think it's because they're a concept of abstract evil that can never be negotiated with, will never develop further, but are very easy to oppose. They're universal straw men.

Now, back to the mass shootings, and the criminals who commit them. When a shooting like this happens and the killer writes a suicide note that mentions an issue that the rest of us care about, the note and the event become a similar element of abstract evil that does not change, that cannot be negotiated with. Lately, I've been hearing everyone go on about the Isla Vista killer, who wrote a really, really long suicide note mentioning, among other things, his frustration with women before killing six people, wounding several others and killing himself. And the Internet has exploded with heroes who oppose men who feel entitled to women's affection.

But, let's suppose he had been captured alive. What we would see is a young man showing up at court appearances in various states of demeanor. He might rage at the judge and shout things, he might hang his head and look afraid. His lawyer would probably try to keep him from saying anything related to the suicide note. His lawyer would probably try to keep his Internet activities from getting entered in to evidence, and would probably argue that he was mentally unstable. The young man would be put on suicide watch in the jail. He would continue to develop, or maybe deteriorate. His trial would go on for a while and then end. The flash of ideology and violence would be replaced with exhaustion, uncertainty, and a fade from significance, and the suicide note would not be the central element of what happened. An actual person through time would be what we saw. (Here in Seattle last week, we had a campus shooter who was captured. He appears to be far less interesting.)

The role that these suicide killers and their manifestos play in our lives is something of a satire of time itself. These abstract concepts of evil, this "ultimate gentleman" in California, the "outcast teenagers" at Columbine High School that we feel the need to do something about do not actually exist. They are feelings that fade. But, for those who want a useful straw man for their arguments, a dead straw man in these cases, they do exist, and they remain an abstract evil concept that never changes until enough years go by that a majority of young people don't remember them.

I have my own experience of having my life changed by a suicide killer with a note 13 years ago. He shot someone four times on a college campus before killing himself. I was 30 feet away and had been on the spot where the victim was shot about two minutes before it happened. I want to be careful not to go on too long about the details (and I could for pages) but here's the short version of the effects (at least on me): It changed my religion and I became an Orthodox Christian (still am), it gave me a mild case of post-traumatic stress disorder that gave me tremors in my right hand and kept from sleeping well for a year, and it drove me out of newspaper journalism, not because of any ethical problems with covering violence, but because I discovered that writing up gunfights gave me worse PTSD.

But none of this had that much to do with the actual person who committed the crime, or his reason for doing it. He was a stalker, and the behavior got started in Hawaii in 1968 and continued stalking until 2001 when he killed someone vaguely acquainted with the person of his obsession. I suppose a national movement for stalker control could have gotten started here. Or, I suppose we could have called it part of a national mental health crisis, although the man's suicide note said that he understood what he was doing was murder and that murder was wrong. I doubt he was a paragon of mental clarity that day, but I don't think he was crazy. He was a person who decided to commit a crime, and it's very important to remember that it was a crime, like other crimes -- not a moment when God breaks the rules on us.

I was, of course, angry about what had happened. But I never felt the need to oppose him, to prove him wrong, or anything else, mainly because he really was not around any more. I saw the red hole in the back of his head, I saw him carted in to an ambulance, and I learned that he died that night at a hospital. This man had all the personality of a tornado.

I suppose there's a few other things I ought to say before leaving the topic:

Mass shootings are not an actual trend. We just think they are. Every time I hear of a killing similar to the one that nearly missed me, I think, "Oh, no, it just keeps happening," but I have to remember how rare they are. There are 30,000 gun deaths in the United States every year. I think something like 300 people have been killed in mass shootings in the past 15 years. One thing I learned early on in my stats class is that you can use statistics to describe and predict things about large numbers of events (such as 30,000 of something) and you can even use such statistics to make goals for legislation, but the outliers aren't helpful. When we focus only on the scariest shootings, we're trying to turn a group of outliers as if they're the center of the curve. Every public place needs to have an "active shooter response" plan nowadays, but they're really, really rare.

 Places such as Detroit or Puerto Rico have murder rates of around 50 per 100,000, which are more than 10 times the national average, and put them on par with developing countries that have very weak governments, or are actually having a civil war. For whatever reason, we're willing to tolerate that. The somewhat common occurrence of drug dealers having gunfights in the "bad part of town" is something we hear about and forget about, but a rare motiveless random shooting with an ideological suicide note that happens in a public place where middle-class white people ought to feel safe, and the American dream just died, and we're living in the "post-Columbine America." It's true that one death is too many, and that grief does not know proportion, but if we're going to have a meaningful national response, we have to think differently. It's like we're trying to stop car accident deaths -- we also have about 30,000 of those each year -- by focusing just on Chevrolet Corvettes because they have a somewhat higher accident rate than other cars.

This isn't to say there's nothing we can do here. But let's step out of the all-or-nothing obsessive kind of thinking that we have -- it's like a national case of PTSD -- and look at the reality of the situation. If we'd like to focus on gun violence and the 30,000 people who die from it, there's all sorts of things we could do, from better law enforcement and courts work, to gun control and background checks, to better social structures that help communities prevent crime. There's both liberal and conservative versions of violence reduction, but we first have to step out of the horror movie our narrow vision has given us.