Opinion: How many more?

A lot of people are asking themselves and the society in which we live this question hours after a fatal mass killing at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon.

I’m a native Oregonian, born and raised just an hour or two north of Roseburg. My parents called this mill city, situated between the North and South branches of the Umpqua River, home for a few years a decade back. I know the area fairly well. One of my favorite places to visit was Wildlife Safari just a few miles down the road in Winston.

Like so many other people, whose local communities become the latest casualties of mass killings, I was naturally taken off guard. It was hard to believe that such a tragedy could occur in little, old Roseburg, Oregon.
I’m sure the folks in Newtown, Connecticut, said the same thing. So did the folks in Aurora and Littleton, Colorado, Marysville, Washington, Charleston, South Carolina, and Blacksburg, Virginia, to name just a few.
But happen they did.

The question on all of our minds is why? We ask ourselves and each other this question every time there is a mass killing incident.

For some reason, though, we aren’t comfortable with the answers, so we settle for asking and answering a more obvious question: How did this happen?

That’s a much easier one to field. The “how” is the manner in which something is done.
We know how the killings were done, how they were carried out.
Guns.

That may be sufficient for someone like the President of the United States and other politicians who are looking to make a brief sound bite or two on their elected stage. But it isn’t sufficient for me or most other people who want to know why. The only “how” we are interested in is how to stop these killings.
For that, we must summon the courage to look deeper than the surface. We must not be content with scratching the surface and saying that’s enough digging; I’m fine with blaming these incidents on guns.

President Obama, on the other hand, wasted little time pointing his finger at the inanimate object, the tool of destruction, used to carry out the crime. I find it hard to believe that a man with a Harvard education is willing to stop there, and not consider the deeper problems that exist.
To conclude that guns are the problem, and more control or regulation over them is necessary, is to ignore our nation’s more pervasive cultural problems.

I doubt Tim McVeigh and his co-conspirators would agree that guns are the problem. They didn’t fire a single shot in carrying out the mass deaths in Oklahoma City two decades ago. All they did was load a few trucks with fertilizer, mix them with common chemicals, and boom.

I don’t think Dylan Quick would agree that guns are the problem, either. If you recall, he’s the perpetrator who in 2013 stabbed and seriously wounded 14 people at a community college near Houston, Texas.
Certainly the two brothers who carried out the massacre at the 2013 Boston Marathon would have disputed that guns are the problem. In that case, the means were backpacks stuffed with pressure cookers which were loaded with explosive material. Several people were killed and dozens more maimed and severely wounded by the destruction.

Even James Holmes, the shooter convicted in the 2012 massacre at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theatre may not agree. Investigations revealed he had a much greater repertoire of weapons than just guns. He rigged his apartment with explosives. So, what if Holmes had decided to plant a bomb or two at the theatre instead? The result would be gruesomely similar: A lot of dead people. And we wouldn’t have raised the old specter of debate about guns, either.

Guns have been used in the vast majority of massacres in the United States. That much is true. But they are not the only common denominator in these attacks.

There is something eerily similar about so many of the perpetrators of public massacres. They have very nearly all been young males teen-aged to thirtysomething. Most, though not all, have been Caucasian. Near as I can tell, virtually all of them have been the loner types, either preferring isolation by their own choices, or else bullied into it by others. And, they all have appeared to have some rather deep, pervasive internal problems.
Let’s see what we know so far about the Roseburg shooter. Chris Harper-Mercer was a young, white, twentysomething male. He was single, though he was looking on dating sites. In all likelihood he was a loner who felt alone.

In his own blog, Harper-Mercer lamented Vester Flanagan, the shooter who recently killed a television journalist and new photographer in Virginia by writing this:

“People like him (Flanagan) have nothing left to live for, and the only thing left to do is lash out at a society that has abandoned them. On an interesting note, I have noted that so many people like him are all alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are. A man who was known by no one is now known by everyone. His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day. Seems the more people you kill, the more you’re in the limelight.”
To me, this is a very chilling statement filled with more truth than even I would care to admit has come from the mind of who is now an infamous killer.

Mercer-Harper seemed to acutely and intimately identify with the perpetrators of public massacres. He appeared very aware of the “why” question that we all want answers to. And, even in the face of his own warped conclusions on how to deal with feeling lost and alone, he managed to express the ugly truth that has been a bane of America society for decades now.

“For so long we have been taught that what’s important in life is to buy this and have that,” Mercer-Harper wrote in one of his first blogs. “To always have the latest fashion, biggest tv, fanciest car, nicest house, and blah, blah, blah. Well, the truth is we’ve become so attached to these things, our spiritual development has been halted. … This attachment produces so much of the stress and worrying in the world today.”
I really cannot argue with that.
This leads me to the “why” question as I have been pondering it for years now.
Modern society has fostered a culture of hopelessness. Perhaps not on purpose, but in consequence to other messages we have been sending new generations of people, of citizens.
Mercer-Harper spoke of a loss of spiritualism, which is ironic considering that he allegedly targeted Christians in his rampage. But he was right.

America was once heavily spiritual. But in the last century or so, American culture has gradually become increasingly secular and agnostic. Our society has gone to great lengths to not kick God out of school, but to silence Him in public. We have chosen to ignore Him, turn our backs on Him, and declare that He doesn’t exist. With that, we’ve also tossed out the hope that He brings multitudes of otherwise lost souls.
Spirituality, whether Christian or Hindu, Islamic or Buddhist, takes care of what is inside of us. While food and material provide for our physical human needs, spirituality nurtures the “being” in all of us. When we take that away, we remove the hope that our “beings” also require.

Without hope, one becomes hopeless. When one is hopeless, he or she is at high risk of feeling desperate. Desperation leads to irrational thought and action.

Just look at what our culture has promoted in place of hope: Moral relativism, a chance existence, no boundaries, material importance, and male insignificance.
All that matters is what we can see, hear, touch, taste and smell; those things that appeal to our five senses. That’s all that exists anyway, so it is all that is of any significance or importance.
Right and wrong are relative. If it feels good, do it. Gray is the new black-and-white.
Self-control is just another word for social inhibition.

Our existence is by accident, a big bang that happened to lead to the universe and the Earth as we know it today. There is no design to the physical world around us. It’s just matter, that’s all.

Men are losing their places in the family, in the home, and even in their communities. Generations of little boys have been raised by mothers only, and they have learned through observation that they don’t have an important place in the family or in the home. They have been taught in their communities that male leadership is really chauvinism, so there isn’t any place of significance for them in their neighborhoods or cities.
There has even been a trend of single women choosing to become pregnant and raise children without a father, further cheapening and devaluing what it means to be a man in our culture.
Anymore, men have become pixelated on a screen, shooting enemies in a video game, blowing things up in a movie, or fulfilling carnal needs.

Imagine the conclusions that scores of young males are reaching when they observe all of this.
I once worked at a behavioral treatment home for adolescent boys. I remember seeing the boys play video games in their free time, blankly staring at the screen while turning pixelated humans into bloody messes.
Has the value of human life really been summed up in this manner? Has our culture become so desensitized through entertainment media, and digital fantasy, that killing just means earning points in a game?
I am, frankly, chilled to think that I may yet have an understanding of what Harper-Mercer was venting about in his blogs.
His rant about materialism is spot-on, too.

Consider how insane the lines are at Apple stores every time a new iPhone is released. Or the mania, the frenzy of store doors opening on Black Friday. Or, awaiting the release of a long-anticipated movie. I can only imagine that lines for the new “Star Wars” trilogy are probably already forming. Scores of people will camp out for days, even weeks, just to be among the first to get the latest and greatest, the best deal, or see the movie first.
Is our appetite for materialism really that bad?
Are we actually placing all of our hopes and dreams into a little electronic device that will crack and break if you drop it?

What happens when our material hopes do break? Is our hope shattered with them?
I could go on and on here, and fill literally pages of my thoughts on the matter of public massacres, what they mean, and why they happen.
But the bottom line is that our culture has decayed.

Young, impressionable men are feeling devalued, worthless, hopeless and alone. There is nothing to look forward to but the next iPhone, the next great deal, or the newest “Star Wars” movie.
I submit that human beings were meant to be deeper than this. There is supposed to be more to our substance than the messages conveyed by popular culture.

I personally don’t believe we exist by chance, but by design, and with a purpose. I don’t believe men have no place of significance in the home or in the community at large. I don’t believe in moral relativism. Black and white do have their places alongside gray. Feeling good doesn’t always make what we are doing right. Self-control is the key to individual liberty, not a method of inhibition.

And materialism has no soul, no intrinsic value. It may satisfy the “human” part of us for a time, but it will never serve our “being.”
Finally, I believe there is hope, because I believe in someone and something much greater than myself. I am not the end all be all of my own existence. I am part of a greater plan.

My desire is that more people will come to realize this truth, and learn to feel this way, instead of feeling hopeless, helpless, unimportant, and insignificant.
The most dangerous weapon possessed by mankind isn’t the gun. It isn’t the bomb, the airplane or the automobile, either. It is something we could never create if we tried, but we all have it.
The human mind. More destruction results from this weapon than any other conceived or contrived by mankind. The mind is what makes destruction possible, after all. The tools of the trade don’t matter. What matters are the choices we make to use them, the will we possess to manifest the hateful thoughts that are conjured up in our heads.

So, go ahead and heavily regulate firearms. Heck, ban them outright. And what will still remain is the human mind and its unthinkable, unimaginable capability to destroy.
Ban guns, and there will be an increase in knifings, like what happened in Texas a couple of years ago. Ban blades, and there will be an increase in bombings like the Boston Marathon or Oklahoma City.

How difficult do you think it would have been for James Holmes to plan a backpack with an explosive up against the theater and set it off amidst the long lines of people waiting to see the latest “Batman” movie?
How about Harper-Mercer? If he had set his backpack under his seat in class, went up to go use the restroom, and then detonate the explosive, how much destruction would we be talking about then?
There’s an old saying: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

As long as human beings possess the will for destruction, regardless of motive, there will always be a way for them to carry it out.
Maybe President Obama is content to scratch the surface of a deeper, more pervasive cancer by trying to remove the tumor he sees on the skin. But I am not. Unlike him, I’m not a lame duck left to make lame-duck comments that really don’t do his level of education justice.

I see a much deeper problem that has only continued to fester, infect and grow. We’ve done nothing to try and halt the spread of this cancer. We’ve only sought to pluck off the tumors as they surface.
But remove guns from the equation, and the cancer still exists, still grows, festers and infects. The body will die in spite of our efforts to treat only the symptoms.

It takes courage to make an incision and open up the body for a closer look at what is really happening to bring these tumors to the surface.
If these massacres are going to be stopped, then we must muster the courage to go much deeper than we’ve been content doing.

It’s uncomfortable, painful, and embarrassing to find out what really lies beneath; but it is necessary to ward off further destruction.

If we choose not to, yet again, then I foresee incidents like Umpqua Community College happening elsewhere. Same result. Same reaction to it. Same cyclical pattern.
When will we finally get tired of it? When will enough be enough?
For me, the time was yesterday. For the rest of us, the time must be now.

— Brett Fisher is a writer and cartoonist residing in Carson City. He and his wife, Lisa, have lived in the state capital for over seven years.