“It must be depressing to be American. You feel so helpless,” a British friend said when asked what he made of the atrocity in Las Vegas.
“Think how much more damage the guys who used a truck and knives near London Bridge last June could have done if they’d had automatic guns,” he reflected, highlighting the high profile of firearms in U.S. mass and organized attacks.
“I read it was the 338th mass killing in 275 days so far this year,” said a French friend cynically, adding that France mostly suffers mass attacks by radical Muslims but these killers are not homegrown, except for some who are French citizens.
Making comparisons between countries has its limits. But still, by considering a more distanced viewpoint, perhaps Americans can better discern the forest instead of the trees in the landscape of what some Europeans call “the big, bad United States,” with its racial history that puts it, in some minds, on par with South Africa.
In this forest of U.S. mass and organized killings, these are some of the trees: In 1966 a young white student with a brain tumor shoots from his university’s tower in Austin, Texas killing 15 fellow students. In 1995 two young, white men use explosives to kill 168 government workers in Oklahoma. In 1999, two young, white students shoot and kill 13 at Columbine High School. In 2001, Al-Qaeda hijackers using planes kill 2,997 in the World Trade Center. In 2007, a young, Asian-American shoots and kills 32 Virginia Tech students. In 2016, a young Afghan-American shoots and kills 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando. In 2017, a young, white man in Portland knifes two people to death during his attack on Muslim girls; a white supremacist using a truck kills a young woman in Charlottesville and the NAACP issues a travel advisory warning people of color against driving in Missouri (based on an estimated 210 to 250 black men killed in the nation by police in a recent year and the Missouri Attorney General saying African Americans in Missouri are 75 percent more likely to be stopped and searched than Caucasians).
Guns (and white perpetrators) may seem prominent in this list, but we still cannot explain why, with all the guns in the United States (the highest number per capita in the world, according to a researcher at the American Friends Service Committee), the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime ranks the nation in the mid-range in its intentional (one-on-one) homicide rate.
And especially when the 9/11 killers are included, other apparent patterns – religious, political, psychological, racial, choice of weapon – prove to have exceptions, seem less certain and often make us call the attacks “senseless.” The killers’ gripes trickle out of neat categories and Europeans are not the only ones pinpointing the emotion of the day. Helplessness is explicit in almost every account: “Neverending nightmare” reads a headline in one magazine; “More are on the way.”
There is a parallel for badly understood, destructive behaviors that surface inexorably and leave us feeling helpless: addictions.
And a dizzying array of them – alcohol, drugs, food, sex – are in the bailiwick of a daisy chain of addicts known as 12-step groups. Just as I puzzle over mass killings, I marvel at the inexorable rise of eating disorders. I suffered from one and it came upon me without knowledge that it was on its way to recognition as a behavior of overachieving girls who complete a successful weight-loss diet.
A decade on, I hooked up with Overeaters Anonymous, patterned after Alcoholics Anonymous, and tried to implement its 12 steps, the first of which is “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol.” Powerless, helpless.
The second step grates on the non-religious, among whose ranks I counted myself: We “came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” But I took a deep breath and held hands with strangers and said the Lord’s Prayer. I can’t attribute my immediate freedom from the Sturm und Drang of an eating disorder to anything but admitting my helplessness and looking toward this “Higher Power.”
I may be walking on thin ice by encouraging those of us appalled by mass and organized killings to take some of the 12 steps (and I do not believe they mean we wallow in inaction). But could our overwhelming sense of helplessness be nudging us down this road?