Ben Agger and Timothy W. Luke
Last Thursday, February 14th, 2008, Steven
Kazmierczak reportedly shot and killed five students, and then turned a weapon
on himself at Northern Illinois University. At least sixteen students were wounded in the
rapid-fire shootings in this large NIU lecture hall during class. We have few certain details about the shooter, except that he used four
weapons, two of which were purchased legally within the past week—a shotgun and
a 9mm Glock semi-automatic handgun. Ironically, he purchased two magazines and a holster for the Glock from
the same online vendor which sold Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, one of his guns
through a dealer transfer last spring.
Apparently, he was a good student (a former sociology major
at NIU) who had no police record. He was
pursuing graduate studies in social work at the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois. It was also rumored that he recently had
ceased taking mood-modifying medication and had broken up with a live-in girl
friend. He was 27 when he died in the
large NIU lecture hall. Yet, there was
another side to him. He enlisted in the
U.S. Army in September 2001, but soon was “administratively discharged” within
six months. More recently, he took a job
as an officer at the Rockville Correctional Facility in Indiana in September 2007, but he failed to
complete his preliminary training after only two weeks, and then never returned
to work.
The shooting in DeKalb, Illinois occurred almost exactly
ten months after the shootings at Virginia Tech last April, when 33 died,
including students in classrooms, some of their professors, and the gunman
himself. On November 7, 2007 Pekka Eric
Auvinen walked into his high school in Tuusula, Finland, and
shot eight people, killing five, and then also turned the gun on himself. There are parallels between these three
bloody events: The shooters were young
males; they used deadly semi-automatic weapons; they burst into school
classrooms to do their damage; they took their own lives. There were apparent differences, too,
although as yet we know next to nothing about the ‘real’ Steve
Kazmierczak. Cho had already been
identified in the Virginia mental health system as a troubled individual, and a potentially dangerous one
at that. And Auvinen and Cho left video
and written manifestos. In his
testimony, Cho acknowledged the inspiration of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris,
who killed twelve of their high-school classmates and a teacher at Columbine in Colorado on
April 20, 1999.
How are we to understand the sequencing and connections
among Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tuusula, and now Northern
Illinois? It is
unimaginable that the Valentine Day’s Massacre in DeKalb would have occurred in
the way that it did without Virginia Tech having occurred, as the December
shootings in Finland also demonstrated. Tech is imbedded in
DeKalb as its prototype and possibility. Kazmierczak might have found other ways to kill and to die without the
example of Tech (and Columbine or Tuusula before it), but he surely framed his
actions last Thursday within the scenario of last April in Blacksburg, Virginia.
This is not to suggest that DeKalb is simply a copy-cat
killing. What did Klebold, Harris, Cho,
Auvinen, and Kazmierczak have in common that led them to enact these epic
killings and suicides, on school grounds? It seems they were alone in a crowd; they were alienated, lacking social
ties. Whether they were mentally ill or not is somewhat beside the point. They might have been stopped, helped,
redirected—yes, even medicated. We are
intensely interested in the experience of being alone in a crowd, in Cho’s case
as an Asian-American outsider on a big-time college/fraternity campus, which
considers itself ‘Hokie Nation,’ —the illusion of tight community achieved
through the gridiron Gemeinschaft of the Virginia Tech campus. And in the hours after the NIU attack, the
response in DeKalb, Illinois and around the nation was to appeal
to the school’s athletic mascot, the Husky, and tout “Huskie Spirit.” Perhaps
we know only this: people more on the
inside do not tend to commit mass murder and then take their own lives.
It cannot escape notice that the killers at Columbine, Blacksburg, Tuusula and
DeKalb were men. Women usually do not
embark on shooting/suicide escapades, even though not even a week before on
February 8, 2008 at Louisiana Technical College a female student shot two classmates and then herself in a classroom. Four of the five killed at DeKalb were women
students, and many of those killed in Tuusula and Blacksburg also were female. This is a potent admixture: social isolation, male gun culture, fantasies
of revenge.
Were the killers evil madmen predestined to wreck
havoc? Were they beyond social influence
and redirection? They committed mad
acts, to be sure. But there is a thin
boundary between those who keep their demons within, and at bay, and those who
erupt. The answer to these acts of
deliberate madness lies not in armoring our campuses but in acknowledging people’s
interior turmoil and trying to help, where possible. This is difficult amid a sea of faces in
large college lecture halls. But can we
afford to reduce such acts merely to irreversible psychopathology? Columbine and Virginia Tech have now become a
set piece—a media spectacle--with a certain inexorable momentum.
Ben Agger is professor of sociology and humanities at University of Texas, Arlington. Timothy W. Luke is professor of political science at Virginia Tech. They co-authored a book There is a Gunman on Campus: Tragedy and Terror at Virginia Tech forthcoming in April 2008.
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