IS IT REALLY A SHOCK WHEN A MAN GRABS A GUN? Blatchford,
“No one ever became famous by beating his wife to death in an alley,” wrote Elliott Leyton, the Memorial University anthropologist whose book, Hunting Humans: The Rise of the Modern Multiple Murderer, was first published more than three decades ago. It was updated in 2005.
Leyton’s point — and it’s complicated and thus not easily done justice — is that the mass killer is granted both a degree of celebrity denied the common man and a degree of affirmation, if not support, from the culture.
He wasn’t saying that the violence so prevalent in our world (in mass media, on TV, online, wherever you look) makes such killers.
But, as he wrote, “If we insist upon the right to understand the dark forces that propel a person into launching a war upon the innocent, we must also assume the responsibility of recognizing the unholiness of his acts and the tragedies that he perpetrates.
“A cultural system that does otherwise, as does our own, is guilty of much more than misplaced tenderness: It must be charged with encouraging the repetition of such acts.”
Is there a better description than unholiness for what an unidentified gunman did to a group of people Sunday night on the Danforth in Toronto?
As he walked along the popular and busy street filled with cafés and restaurants, a 29-year-old man sprayed bullets, killing two people and wounding 13 others before he “exchanged” fire with Toronto Police, fled, and was found dead, either by police bullet or his own hand, about 100 metres away.
One of the dead was a young woman of 18, barely starting her life, and recently graduated from high school. The other was a 10-year-old girl.
If, as Leyton wrote, “The fundamental act of humanity is to refuse to kill,” surely the fundamental act of inhumanity is to kill a child. “Our murderers have consciously rejected that humanity,” he said, and “for their betrayal of humanity, they deserve no better than to be permanently excised from the social order.
“Their only value is as objects of study.”
While multiple murder is as old as the hills (it has “been with us for centuries,” Leyton wrote), in the late 20th century the crime began to attract sensational attention far beyond its modest but consistent rise.
Portrayals of serial killers such as the Nightstalker, Boston Strangler, and Canada’s Paul Bernardo invariably painted them as either brighter than normal or more abused (picked upon, bullied, etc.) than usual.
For instance, of James Oliver Huberty, who shot up a McDonald’s in California in 1984 and killed 21 people before he was killed, Leyton said, “It is true that he had come from a ‘broken home’ and that his only friend during his lonely childhood had been his dog, but such minor anguish has been the lot of millions.”
Yet, the reaction of the state after the McDonald’s massacre “was almost as tragic and misguided as the event itself.
“If television coverage can be taken as meaningful (and it is surely the prime cultural disseminator in modern America), the state and its agencies intervened only to express bewilderment regarding the killer’s motive and to offer the services of therapists who would help victims (present and future) to ‘adjust’ to the shock of such tragedies.”
Leyton was so far ahead of his time.
The prime cultural disseminator now may be social media, but the state always reacts the same way.
The blood on the sidewalks of the Danforth was barely dry Monday before the authorities were publishing the numbers for the traumatized to call, with leaders offering the “thoughts and prayers” trope.
Of course, it is more complicated here; it always is, in Canada.
Because the shooter may have died in a confrontation with police, the province’s oversight agency, the Special Investigations Unit, invoked its mandate. It is now “investigating” whether the police were justified in firing their weapons: Duh. If he died by a police bullet, it was after he’d already mowed down a total of 15 people. Apparently, it takes six SIU investigators and three forensic specialists more than five minutes to figure this out.
The SIU was, its spokesperson Monica Hudon told National Post Monday, discussing whether, once the shooter was formally identified, the unit would release his name publicly. The SIU has a policy of doing so only with the consent of a deceased’s (in this case, the shooter’s) family.
But late Monday, the SIU identified the shooter as Faisal Hussain of Toronto.
Ours is such a violence-drenched world.
The night of the Danforth shooting, as it’s already being called, Bravo debuted the much-praised series, Killing Eve. It’s the story of a beautiful hired female assassin (Jodie Comer) being chased by a tough and sexy female security agent, played by Ottawa’s Emmynominated Sandra Oh.
The gorgeous assassin kills people, sometimes with a hat pin and always with relish, in a variety of glamorous world cities. She seems excited by her kills, yet is engagingly flip and funny with her handler.
It came with none of the trauma-ahead warnings that accompanied some actual newscasts Monday.
As Jeff McGuire, the former head of the Toronto homicide squad once famously snapped, this when he was being badgered with questions about the city purportedly falling apart in the wake of a daylight shooting, “One idiot with a gun does not speak to the state of affairs of Toronto.”