Slayings Shed More Light on Darker Forces in Society

A church. A high school. A day-care center. A hospital. A stock brokerage office. If there is any thread linking the recent wave of mass shootings in America, it is that they have taken place in public spaces, areas long thought to be immune from the violence that typically erupts behind closed doors, or at least out of public view.

The most recent horror, this week’s shooting of seven people at a Baptist prayer service for teenagers in Fort Worth, illuminated once again the dark side of a culture that has spawned such violations of public space. Ideally, the common areas in which Americans come and go are the physical embodiment of an open society. But the sense of security that millions take for granted has been compromised by a wave of senseless shootings, one seemingly more horrific than the next.

“It’s become a hideous intrusion, gunman in the Fort Worth church shootingsa violation of the most fundamental guarantee we have in a democracy,” said Jean Bethke Elshtain, a professor of ethics at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School. “You think you’ve heard the worst possible story, and then another shooting happens. Finally, all you can do is shake your head and ask yourself: Why?”

The level of public violence seen today has been relatively rare in American history, according to historians. While there were bombings of black churches during the civil rights years, those attacks had a clearly defined political agenda, said Melissa Fay Greene, who wrote a book about the 1958 bombing of an Atlanta synagogue. “They weren’t prompted by the blind rage you see today, when you don’t know why people are crazy.”

Struggling to make sense of this phenomenon, historians, religious leaders and social scientists offer layers of explanation. Some talk of a generalized war between the forces of “community” and isolation, while others focus on a highly marginalized group of outcasts--many of them white American males--who are utterly estranged from mainstream society and loathe most symbols of modern-day authority.

Some observers suggest that the desecration of public spaces is a problem that goes beyond a lunatic fringe and highlights a declining sense of civility in the broadest sense of the word. It begins, they say, with routine, daily transgressions--like rudeness in a movie theater--and culminates at the highest levels of government, with presidential peccadilloes in the Oval Office a prime example.

Whatever the root cause, however, the bottom line is that no government on Earth can stop a random act of public violence if it’s carried out by an obsessed criminal, said Robert Castelli, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “Decent people are shocked by these attacks. But the best we can do is find the true reasons for them--and then try to protect our public spaces as best we can.”

It’s not the first time America has been shattered by such savagery. On the morning after the Fort Worth massacre, the University of Texas at Austin finally reopened the campus Tower, from which gunman Charles Whitman methodically killed 14 people in August 1966. Yet Whitman’s rampage was an isolated, freakish event at the time, and unlike from the numbingly familiar acts of rage that explode with disturbing regularity today.

For Richard Rodriguez, a San Francisco essayist, the defiling of common areas by a wave of gunmen reflects a clash between the forces of “community” and an alienated class of Americans who feel threatened by symbols of “belonging”--most powerfully represented by organized religion. This rage, he suggests, “is directed at institutions . . . it’s a hatred of people who gather under any kind of organizational umbrella. We have people who are very angry in their isolation and who strike back very publicly.”

Others see even darker forces at work, noting that a number of the recent killings were not simply the work of dysfunctional individuals but purposeful attacks against American society carried out by members of shadowy hate groups.

“There are quite a few people today, many of them white males, who are literally at war with this country,” said Richard Slotkin, author of “Gunfighter Nation,” a detailed examination of American violence. “For them, going into a public place with a gun is the ultimate symbol of defiance. And this, more than inner-city gang violence or anything else, has become the characteristic ‘Big Crime’ of the late 1990s.”

Unlike serial killers, who act in secrecy, or those who kill an employer or a spouse for revenge, the new wave of killers leave calling cards by going public, Slotkin added. Beyond the hunger for notoriety, he suggested, they often share a deep personal anger at being left behind by a prosperous society that is undergoing rapid transformation. Inevitably, some copycats are emboldened by the tremendous attention gained by mass killers.

As the violence in civic spaces continues, some leaders say it is a mistake to view the problem as one solely of psychopaths with semiautomatics.

“There’s been an alarming decline in courtesy, especially how we behave in public, and I tell my congregation the real test of moral character is not how they deal with their boss in the office but how they deal with a parking attendant,” said Rabbi David Volpe of Sinai Temple in West Los Angeles. “They laugh, but then they see that I’m serious. And while I realize this is a long way from going into a church and shooting people, our public spaces have become less sacred.”

Not surprisingly, there is sharp division on how to prevent or limit such violence, with some observers calling for stricter gun controls and greater attention to the desperate problems of the untreated mentally ill. Others say the decline of respect for public symbols of authority contributes to a reckless sense of “anything goes” in a violent society.

“I would never analogize the two situations, but just as we are horrified over the defilement of churches and schools by violence, we should be angered by authority figures who demean their offices and the public space they occupy,” said professor Elshtain. “When we fail to get indignant over these things, it begins to suggest that the boundary between good and bad behavior in public areas no longer really exists for us.”

Even worse, she and others said, is the probability that this kind of violence will cause Americans to become even more isolated than they are--refusing to get involved in any kind of civic life.

“What’s happening now creates the kind of fear and horror that terrorism creates,” said Columbia University historian Alan Brinkley. “It happens in places where anyone can imagine themselves being, and even though there’s less violence today than there was five years ago, it’s hard to imagine a more outrageous and shocking violation of space than shooting young people in a church.”

Even now, government social scientists are trying to get a handle on the scourge of shootings. While homicides are declining, America has concurrently experienced a rise in the number of multiple shootings in which the victims are mainly young people, according to Dr. Rodney Hammond, a psychologist who directs the Division of Violence Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The CDC will soon publish a report documenting the problem, he added, but it’s evident that the traditional approaches to controlling crime--such as tougher laws or adding more police protection--may no longer be sufficient. “It’s a very disturbing trend because we don’t really know why this has been happening or what we can do to stop it in the future.”

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LEGACY OF RAGE

More information is now known about the gunman in the Fort Worth church slayings. A13