Sadly, The United States has reached the point where mass shootings have become a normalized, and reluctantly accepted part of its culture. Whether at a school or shopping center, innocent people being ripped to bits by heavy assault weapons fails to shock the conscience like it once did. Shootings occur, and the news enters the twenty four hour information cycle via cable television and social media. Americans pause to mourn the dead for a moment, lament their failed politics and politicians, and return to their daily lives. Every couple of months, the cycle repeats. Variations in the pattern include: the number of innocents killed, the ages of those killed, any racist motivations of the killer, and any attempt by the killer to livestream their rampage. Due to the normalization of mass shootings, these incident variations affect the emotional response of the American people more than the shooting itself.
The modern iteration of mass shootings in the United States could probably trace its roots back to the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado. At the time, the Columbine shooting was a momentous occurrence. The shocking violence sent the country into deep reflection and dismay. Americans wondered how it was possible that such terrible events could even happen. More importantly, they wondered about the motivations of the young men who carried out the massacre. How could they have been propelled to the depths of such nihilism? How could the culture of the country have led to such a nightmare?
This discourse of bewilderment would repeat itself in 2007 after the Virginia Tech massacre, in 2009 after a massacre on the Fort Hood military base in Texas, and in 2012 after the Aurora, Colorado movie theater massacre. Later on in 2012, the nation’s existential reflection would reach new depths with the massacre of twenty elementary aged school children in Newtown, Connecticut. This tragic event brought with it a sad irony as well. As more and more shootings occurred in the years following the Columbine massacre; many in my generation wondered what would need to happen in order to initiate some kind of meaningful change. We had a notion that when someone finally decided to shoot up an elementary school, it would somehow shock the nation into long awaited action. Yet after the Newtown massacre, it became apparent that the mass shooting phenomenon had become culturally embedded in American society. It had become an ugly feature of American culture; not a random or unexpected bug.
It was after the Newtown massacre that I decided to create the painting that would eventually be titled, ‘Shooter’. For me, the portrait of a young man caught in the fever dream of ‘nihilistic nirvana’ represented everything that was wrong with American culture. It represented the most extreme negative outcome of various American cultural trends. I didn’t see the issue surrounding mass shootings as simply having to do with guns. To be sure, a country that is awash in firearms is more likely to have those firearms used to kill human beings. But the unique American phenomenon of mass shootings seemed to be as much a product of metaphysical rot as it was a product of legal assault weapons. Like a zombie horror movie, it almost seemed like there was an unseen virus infecting young men and turning them into sociopathic killers. Except the virus wasn’t produced in a lab or brought to earth by an alien species. It was produced by American culture itself.
Whatever the virus was, I recognized a version of it infecting myself and others in generations that came of age in the 1990’s. This was the main reason I saw it as no coincidence that the Columbine killers and I were the same age. Coming into our late teens, much of our music was angry, aggressive, and violent; and so were we. We had the same notions of rebellion that most younger generations possessed. Yet for us, the rebellion seemed to be coated in a nihilistic veneer. The goal wasn’t to smash things in order to rebuild them in a better manner. It was to smash things for the sake and joy of smashing them. I’ve always felt that an easy way for people to understand this cultural shift from generations past was to contrast the Woodstock music festival from 1969, to the Woodstock music festival from 1999. One festival became known for peace, love, and social protest. While the other festival became known for chaos, anger, and destruction.
Many of the threads in American culture that lead to the hostile behavior of young men in the 1990’s also contributed to the invention of the modern American mass shooting rampage. Of course, the vast, vast majority of young men did not turn to mass violence despite how dark their mental outlook became. Yet from Columbine onward, a toxic brew of converging trends would lead a tiny minority of young men to commit horrible acts of nihilistic violence. After any given shooting, media personalities would single out one trend and seek to use it as the single cause for the shooter's actions. Yet as with most things, the cultural creation of a mass shooter can’t be reduced to ‘one thing’. The young man turned mass shooter is a complex creation of various cultural forces.
As I did a bit of research to prepare for the ‘Shooter’ painting, there was one cultural trend or force that seemed to become apparent. With at least one of the Columbine killers, and the Newtown killer, there was a kind of rejection of conformity under American professional culture or capitalism. This rejection of the ‘rat race’ can be seen as a luxury of upper middle class trappings. It can also be seen as a form of pathetic whining about growing up and taking responsibility for oneself. Either way, it doesn’t matter. Neither of these descriptions make the sentiment itself any less true, and that’s what matters most. I’ve written before about how capitalism replaced the old ‘realms of meaning’ towards the end of the 20th century; despite it being incapable of providing true meaning. The sentiments portrayed by the Columbine killers and the Newtown killer seem to relate to this. Remember this is not to justify their sentiments, it is simply to acknowledge their existence.
From what I can remember the Columbine killers expressed a kind of straightforward, anti-social rejection of upper class conformity in journals and conversations. Yet the Newtown killer seemed to have deeper thoughts about what it would take to fit into American society, and the effect it had on individuals. In 2011 the Newtown killer called into a University of Oregon radio show called ‘AnarchyRadio’. He was evidently a fan of the show as it dealt with mass violence and the effect technology was having on society. His call centered around the recounting of the story of ‘Travis the chimp’. Travis the chimp was a domesticated chimpanzee in Connecticut who ‘snapped’ on his owner’s friend in 2009. The owner’s friend was killed, and Travis was ultimately killed by responding police.
The Newtown killer basically compared the plight of Travis’s upbringing to that of human beings in American society. Speaking of Travis, he would say, ‘look what civilization did to him: it had the same exact effect on him as it has on humans. He was profoundly sick, in every sense of the term, and he had to resort to these surrogate activities like watching baseball, and looking at pictures on a computer screen, and taking Xanax. He was a complete mess.’ The Newtown killer portrayed Travis as a benign creature seeking a meaningful life amid a meaningless culture. He portrayed Travis as a victim of a sick society, rather than a perpetrator of violence. This kind of reasoning is probably how the Newtown killer would justify his heinous actions approximately a year after his call. It wasn’t his decision to gun down innocent children; he was forced into action by the society he was raised in.
The sentiments conveyed by the Columbine killers, the Newtown killer, and other mass shooters could be seen as variations of the ‘existential vacuum’. The concept of the existential vacuum owes its creation to Austrian psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl. It is a concept I’ve talked about much before, and basically means an individual who doesn’t see any true meaning or purpose to their life. There seems to be a broad psychological motivation among mass shooters that they are finding meaning and purpose with their actions. For the brief time that encompasses the beginning of their rampage to their death or capture; they achieve a self perceived God-like status. They fill the existential vacuum with the power of controlling life and death, realizing some twisted political or racial ideology, or the allure of being known worldwide.
It’s hard to argue that our modern times haven’t exacerbated the overall prevalence of the existential vacuum. The four main realms of meaning in human life (vocation, community, family, and religion) have become emptied and scrambled. It should be noted that this is not an argument for any particular quality of these realms, it is simply an acknowledgement that these are the places our human species finds true meaning and purpose. We’ve seen reactions to this absence of true meaning come in varying forms. Whether it’s hedonistic greed, addiction, or gravitation towards extreme political ideologies. Many people suffer under the modern American version of the existential vacuum. And every so often, a young man might seek to fill it by committing mass violence.
In addition to the existential vacuum, there are of course other factors in the casual matrix surrounding the creation of a mass shooter. Recent studies have shown no link between playing violent video games like Grand Theft Auto (GTA) and increased aggressive or violent behavior among young men. And it should be noted that I am probably one of the least receptive people on the planet towards any kind of government censorship or artistic regulation. Yet I have to admit that it seems reasonable to think about what effect a game like GTA could have on a young male mind predisposed to psychopathic behavior. In various versions of GTA, the player can carry out numerous acts of criminal behavior and violence.
As an example, a male player could drive around a city with various weapons and pick up a female prostitute. After receiving oral sex from the prostitute, the player could pay for her services, and have her exit the car. As the prostitute walks away, the male player could get out of the car, push her down, and stab her to death. Then maybe he could shoot her to make sure she is dead, take his money back for the sexual encounter, and set her body on fire. While enacting scenarios like this day after day might be proven to not create violent behavior, maybe it has an effect on minds predisposed to violence. One of the killers from the Columbine massacre seemed to be a ‘born psychopath’; determined by fate to live with mental instability. Both Columbine killers were obsessed (as were many young men around my age) with the 1990’s era first person, sci-fi shooter game, ‘Doom’. The nihilistic rage of the killers seemed to bleed into their enjoyment of the game. The text in my ‘Shooter’ painting, ‘ever kill a demon with a chainsaw?’ is taken from one of the Columbine killers referencing gameplay in ‘Doom’.
In recent times, the advent of social media and internet culture has added another ingredient to the toxic brew that warps the minds of mass shooters. From algorithms that steer human minds into anger and conflict, to dark digital echo chambers of conspiracy and paranoia; our digital reality is very good at facilitating the worst aspects of human nature. Throw on top of this widespread, instant access to massive amounts of digital pornography; and the pitfalls for a young man with mental instability become clear. It’s almost as if the modern digital age has provided multiple new avenues for an isolated mind to venture down a dark path. A lost mind now has a whole digital universe to indulge and explore in isolation. While in the past, before the internet age, the same mind might have been restrained, simply by lack of opportunity to indulge its worst impulses.
Whatever cultural, metaphysical, or digital causes one can think of in terms of the American mass shooting phenomenon, there seem to be two foundational causal axioms concerning the problem; with the first one being mental illness. Taking into account the issues discussed in this writing, and other American social and economic trends; I would make an uneducated guess that rates of mental illness have increased among young American men over the last twenty years. Regardless of any kind of increase, most young men turned mass killers have displayed signs or symptoms of mental disorder leading up to their violent actions. This is not to lay some kind of stigma on mental illness. Rather it is to acknowledge that a society that seems very good at stimulating mental disorder in the human mind does a rather shitty job of providing access to healthcare or proper treatment.
The second foundational causal axiom to the mass shooter phenomenon is of course, easy, widespread access to high powered firearms. The National Rifle Association Republican types like to say, ‘guns don’t kill people - people kill people’. This statement is true on its face, and I’ve spent the majority of this writing discussing non gun related reasons that spur young men to commit mass violence. Yet the simple fact remains, if there were no guns, there would be no mass shootings. Easy access to weapons like the AR-15 assault rifle is like the icing on top of a rotten cultural cake. Guns might not be the cause of mass shootings, but they are the primary facilitator. They are the last enabling piece in a complex casual puzzle. Ironically, the gun culture in the United States could be seen partly as a product of the existential vacuum that also helps fuel the mental instability of mass shooters. Regardless, it seems no mistake that a culture that continuously produces young men turned mass shooters, also maintains a grotesque excess of firearms. The products and trends of a culture in distress often combine to create a worse scenario than their individual parts. The phenomenon of the American mass shooter looks to be no different.