The title, of course, comes with an inherent asterisk, as I’m sure the shooting has been superceded by another by now. But I speak of the shooting that happened at Greenwood Park Mall in Indiana Sunday evening, where four people, including the perpetrator, were shot and killed (along with two wounded). In this instance, the shooter died by gunshot himself, as a shopper in the mall was armed as well and used his gun to kill the shooter.
Even now, just writing that short paragraph, I had to fight the urge to use euphemisms to cover over the harshness of the flat reality. Two people used guns in the situation and several people died.
I wanted to highlight just a couple of things. First is the way the shooting was handled by at least one media outlet, WTHR. Man-on-the-street interviews are notoriously superficial, which often is counterbalanced by an authentic response by the person so interviewed. In this instance, though, I mean to showcase the uncanny nature of the responses, especially of the woman in the first few seconds of the segment.
The interviewer is off-camera. This is important, as it turns the segment into one where the audience is now voyeur, and the information the woman gives becomes almost gratuitous.
Interviewer: Did you hear shots fired?
Woman: A ton of shots fired. At least about twenty shots fired.
Interviewer: What did everybody do?
Woman [pointing away]: Run.
(The video won’t embed to play off-site, but you can view it at YouTube. The interview starts at 0:12.)
This is not to demean what the woman has gone through. This is meant to highlight the superficiality of the style of the segment and how that translates to the audience. This is about the power of media to shape perception.
With the peek inside the woman’s emotional reactions, the viewer is invited to surf that emotion, which is to say to experience it in a surface manner only; while at the same time the audience member is encouraged to imagine putting oneself in that woman’s shoes and to pretend to have been such a witness, experiencing these shallow emotional takes. This makes the experience surreal and plastic—uncanny. Much like plugging oneself into a video game. It’s a consumerization of the macabre.
The second thing I wanted to highlight was the manner in which the second person with a gun is being lionized. The police officers called the person a “hero”, and the description of the segment itself nominates the person as a “Good Samaritan”(!!). A Good Samaritan who kills someone else.
Officer: The real hero of the day is the citizen that was lawfully carrying a firearm in that food court and was able to stop the shooter almost as soon as he began.
I understand the urge to want to extend some sort of solace to that young man, a 22-year-old who almost certainly has never taken a human life before. What I would have liked to have seen, a response that may have reached more of the human side not only of that young man but of the viewer at home, would have been something more of the following:
As law enforcement officers, we know what it is, unfortunately, to take a life. Such a young man must be beside himself right now, coming out of that scene. It’s never a healthy feeling to kill another human being. We’d like to extend our support in any way possible to that man, including just sitting down and talking to him, so that he knows the community is behind him.
What I wish for is a pipe dream, of course, because not only would such speech pull back the curtain too much on the anguish certain LEOs must experience as a consequence of their duties, but also such talk would violate the code of machismo that is on full display here. The second person who used a gun to kill is being lauded here to relieve the anxieties of the community and to restore some sense of normalcy in that man’s life, but at what cost? Will he actually heal from his encounter?
Either he comes to terms with his actions, which snuffed a life; he represses it, where it could fester and torment him subconsciously; or he embraces his new status as an eradicator, which pathologizes him from this point on. We as a community offer him very few choices. Because what we offer him has to be filtered through this sieve of acceptable gender possibilities. Even though he just killed a person, we don’t publicly offer him grief or trauma counseling. That would go against our script.
I do want to extend my condolences to the community of Greenwood, Indiana. But also I want to extend them to all of us. This shooting will wrap with the next, and the next. We’re becoming desensitized with the rapidity of this catastrophic violence. And what is happening to us at home? We’re imbibing it like it’s just another blockbuster.
Voiceover: Breaking news. It has happened again. Another mass shooting. This time in Greenwood, at the Greenwood Park Mall. …
I’m currently studying fascism, in particular Nazism. One of the major cultural values of the Nazi system was that of death. We say that MAGA is a death cult, and this description should not be glossed over. What we’re seeing play out in almost weekly fashion is a ramping up of catastrophic yet expected death (which dovetails, as it happens, with the backdrop of constant and now chronic death from plague). We’re coming to anticipate more carnage, which does in its own way set us up as almost the next participants. Will we be the next ones in a shopping mall or grocery store that gets shot up? Will we be the next ones interviewed on the spot? Will we survive the death maze?
The people on the scene experience a living nightmare, a trauma that will play over and over in the mind; while the next would-be shooter gets excited, seeing a blueprint for his next steps.
The culture of death cultivated by such fascism, paradoxically and perversely, accentuates the sense of living in those who survive. It is a heightening of sensation, analogous to the cutting of the psychologically troubled person. The death is meant to awaken a sense of vivification.
This is where we are, folks. This is where we are.