Blacksburg: from one massacre to another

There were two articles that caught my eye today in the Guardian about the Blacksburg massacre, one by Simon Jenkins and the other, in the G2 supplement, by Lionel Shriver, the author of a novel about a school shooting. Jenkins's article discussed the various people who gloat when such things happen in the USA and who point to it as the sign of a sick society, rather than simply "the manifestation of a distorted soul unable to live at peace with the world". Interestingly, he claims that people with family connections with the USA are the first to defend it as a beacon of freedom; this is not the case with me, or others in my family, which has American connections.

Shriver asks the question of why such events keep happening, and offers three possible explanations. One is, simply, guns: the fact that Virginia has among the most lax gun laws in the USA, allowing the purchase of "only" one handgun per month, and does not require criminal record checks when buying weapons at gun shows. Another article attached to this gives a few reasons why Americans cherish their rights to keep and bear arms: they don't trust the government to keep them safe, a sentiment with which I sympathise enormously, as I've written on the past when we are threatened with the extension of our country's callous and idiotic anti-weapon laws. The second is that these attacks are copycat crimes, with the reporting of each one increasing the potential for another; each one seems to have a new twist, as with the attack on the Amish school last year.

The third, most interestingly, is this:

I do not believe that the choice of schools or colleges for the pursuit of grievance or, often, for the staging of what I call "extroverted suicide", is arbitrary. For most of us, school and university are the seats of profound and formative emotional experiences, and the psychological power of these locales does not necessarily abate with age. Only last month I had reason to walk down the hallway of an elementary school in the US, and the lockers, lino and acrid chalk-dust smell sent my head spinning with memories, not all of which were pleasant. I felt claustrophobic, smothered, actively grateful to be spared the tyrannies of Mrs Townsend's home room, and relieved to get out. In fact, I couldn't believe I was allowed out of the door without a pass.
For a lucky few, school and college are where we first distinguish ourselves. But for the majority, they are the site of first humiliation, subjugation and injury. They are almost always our first introduction to brutal social hierarchies, as they may also sponsor our first romantic devastation. What better stage on which to act out primitive retribution?

I don't entirely agree with this. What she says about schools, particularly at secondary level (11 to 16, in the case of the UK), is absolutely true, but this massacre took place at a university, and the culprit was a final-year student. Universities are often the first place people experience freedom from the strictures and pressures of school, not a continuation of them. We now know that he had a history of mental illness and that he was known to local law enforcement for sending annoying messages to female students. While the culture of US high schools came in for much scrutiny after Columbine, the same does not seem to be happening in the case of university culture now (although it's early days). School shootings are distressingly frequent in the USA, with university shootings much less so: according to the Guardian, the most serious one before this was in 1966, in Texas.

Massacres are often motivated by grudges against one group of people or another: Palestinians (Hebron), women (Montreal) and even children (Dunblane). Over the last couple of days, since I've posted a link to Abdul-Hakim Murad's article on Bosnia and the attitude of the churches to the massacres that went on there, I've had a few comments referring to the grievances the Serbs supposedly had against the Bosnian Muslim population, with the devshirme (the Ottoman boy-tribute which was abolished in the 17th century) figuring heavily as always. The fact that nothing of which they refer happened in anything close to living memory precludes any of the grievances being genuine when clung to by the generation which carried out the atrocities in Bosnia. The grievances the Hutus had against the Tutsis in Rwanda related to their respective status under colonial rule, in which the Tutsis were cultivated as a ruling class, but I can't remember hearing it suggested that this justified the genocide; however much the West indulges Israel, it would not countenance an Israeli nuclear attack on Germany to avenge those murdered in the Holocaust. And of course, when anyone mentions the grievances which lead to the terrorist acts some Muslims carry out, they are accused of justifying the acts of terrorism. All these things took place within living memory, not at least 125 years ago, the time which elapsed between the explusion of the Ottomans from Serbia and 1992, the year the war in Bosnia started. That anyone would think this justifies, or even mitigates, the genocidal acts such as Srebrenica, or the mass gang rape which took place elsewhere in Bosnia, is pretty sickening.