Here and there – The United States of America
I had been living in the US for a little over a year when the news broke of a massacre. It was Friday 12 December 2012. The initial stories were unclear, just there had been a shooting incident in Newton, Connecticut. As more facts emerged that day, we learnt that a disturbed 20-year-old young man had shot and killed his mother, and had then gone on to Sandy Hook Elementary School, armed with a Bushmaster rifle and ten magazines, each containing 30 rounds. He had shot his way through a glass panel next to the locked front entrance doors of the school. Hearing gunfire the school’s principal and school psychologist left a meeting to find out what was happening. Both were killed. A teacher in the meeting heard one of them shout “Shooter! Stay put!” which alerted their colleagues to the danger. The police were called. A school janitor ran through hallways, asking teachers to lock themselves with their students in the classrooms. This did not prevent 18 children being killed at the school (two others died from their wounds in hospital), and 6 staff. The gunman committed suicide.
I think it is fair to say people across the country were stunned. Even in America, events on this scale involving young children were rare. Five years earlier there had been a massacre at Virginia Tech, when a 23-year-old student, armed with two pistols, had killed thirty-two students and faculty members, wounded another seventeen students and faculty before committing suicide. We were not to know that five years hence a 19-year-old former student would shoot students and staff members with a semi-automatic rifle at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. However, in the history of US gun violence Sandy Hook stands out because of the young age of the children – all but 4 were only six years old.
Sadly, stories about gun massacres keep happening. Australia had experienced a terrible massacre at Port Arthur, Tasmania, in 1996, when 35 people were killed and 23 injured. Most victims were adults, except for two young children in the toll. As I have commented elsewhere, the response to that event was a dramatic change. Under federal government co-ordination, all the country’s States and Territories moved to restrict the legal ownership and use of self-loading rifles, self-loading shotguns, and tightened controls on use by recreational shooters. The government also initiated a mandatory ‘buy-back’ scheme with the owners paid according to a table of valuations. Some 643,000 firearms were handed in at a cost of $350 million, funded by a temporary increase in the compulsory health insurance levy.
However, I want to concentrate on some of the events that followed Sandy Hook, events which offer worrying evidence that a huge social experiment, its origins back in the 18th Century, is coming to an end. I will return to that point later, but first, drawing on a recent article by Amanda Crawford in the Boston Globe, here is a selective summary on what happened after that dreadful day in Connecticut (‘The epic story of a Sandy Hook family fighting Alex Jones and the rise of conspiracy theories’, Boston Globe, August 17, 2022).
I suppose it was not surprising the first stories about what happened at Sandy Hook were confused and often incorrect. It does take time to sort out facts. In fact, after the shooting at the Elementary School, a great deal of what was reported early on was wrong. For hours, the shooter, was widely misidentified; his mother was incorrectly described; and we heard the shooter had been found dead with two handguns, while a rifle had been found in his car. The police tried to keep control of what was reported, but it was already too late to stop doubts. As Amanda Crawford explained: “Long before the shooter fired his first bullets, the seeds of conspiracy theories were lurking in the muck, sown by Second Amendment zealotry and nurtured by institutional distrust … Speculation about shadowy forces at work began immediately on a constellation of fringe Internet forums, message boards, and blogs — stoked by well-known conspiracy theorists. ‘If we start seeing telltale signs of it being staged, we’ll let you know,’ pledged Alex Jones”. His Infowars audience debated issues on his company’s online forums. Craziness on the margins was expected. What was horrifying was how perversely twisted it became. On the afternoon of the shooting, even as families waited at the firehouse and the dead still lay on the school floor, Newtown’s Police Chief started getting disturbing emails explaining the government was behind the shooting, and that the whole thing was being made up to take away Second Amendment rights.
Just one day after the shooting, Connecticut’s chief medical examiner, Dr. H. Wayne Carver II, released the names and ages of the victims. He confirmed how they were killed: each had been shot multiple times with a high-powered rifle. Even that report was to stoke rumours. When asked how the victims were identified, Carver explained they “did not bring the bodies and the families into contact,” but rather used photographs of victims’ facial features to identify them. “You control the situation, depending on your photographer,” he said, “and I have very good photographers.” Listening, some thought the families never got to say goodbye (they did, of course). Some thought Carver seemed bizarre, and a growing number of online sceptics didn’t see a man exhausted from examining dead children, and instead saw something sinister: “He is either under coercion or an imposter,” one commentator suggested.
The events in Newtown dominated the news. I remember watching well-wishers piling hundreds of teddy bears, other toys, gifts and flowers at roadside memorials, while thousands sent in cash donations. Within a couple of days, false information started appearing online. Imposters posing as victims’ families sought money. We saw President Obama arrive in Newtown. It was the fourth such visit he had made to a community ravaged by a mass shooting. We needed him to act, especially on assault weapons. The National Rifle Association had claimed Obama intended to destroy the Second Amendment (the so-called ‘right to bear arms’). In fact, he hadn’t pushed hard for any new firearm restrictions. In 2010, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence rated him an F[ail] on every issue it scored.
However, it was clear the mass murder of young children had affected Obama. In a brief television address to the nation that Friday, he wiped away tears. By the time he spoke at a vigil, he was angry and emotional in a way the public had rarely seen. “Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children, year after year after year, is somehow the price of our freedom?” He pledged to use “whatever power this office holds” to prevent future tragedies. Little did we realise how little power he had.
The following Monday one mother prepared for the first of the funeral services, for her son Noah. As Amanda Crawford wrote, “White balloons lined the street outside the funeral home. A sign in a tree read, ‘Our Hearts Are With You Noah.’ Police with bomb-sniffing dogs patrolled outside, worried about threats on social media … His mother spoke, “The sky is crying, and the flags are at half-mast,” she began. “It is a sad, sad day. But it is also your day, Noah, my little man.” National media outlets wrote about the decision to have an open casket, some calling it Newtown’s Emmett Till moment. People at the service said they were impressed by her poise: She didn’t break down until the very end.” But some read about events online, about the mother’s background, her eulogy, her decision to get a tattoo, or saw her wearing lipstick, and came to a much different conclusion: ‘Would a grieving mother really act like that?’ And so it was to continue.
Like many others, Amanda Crawford wonders if ‘truth’ mattered anymore. “Does the grief of so many mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, brothers, sisters, spouses, partners, loved ones, and friends of those lost in a bloody decade of mass shootings, from a theatre in Aurora to a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, from an elementary school in Newtown to one in Uvalde, Texas – and so many other horrors in between – matter?” In the immediate aftermath of Sandy Hook, many Americans organised and marched, found one another on social media, and formed new organizations that initiate a decade of activism trying to prevent gun violence. ‘If not now, when? If not this, what?’ They hoped to ensure effective debate on gun policy. They weren’t to know their battle was against denial, denying the massacres were related to gun access, even denial of the deaths and the grief.
In mid-January 2013, Vice President Joe Biden announced proposals including universal background checks for firearm purchases and a renewed ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Even as he did, “doubts about Sandy Hook became the test case that showed how a new generation of outlandish conspiracy theories, born and spread on social media, would poison political discourse, polarize Americans, and paralyse public policy.” Conspiracy advocates pointed to conflicting news reports and asked: ‘Wouldn’t frantic kids be a difficult target to hit?’ ‘Has the news convinced you there was only one shooter that morning?’ It scrutinized footage of victims’ families: ‘Is the behavior you’re witnessing right now, the facial expressions and body language, consistent with that of two parents who just lost their daughter?’ Two months after the shooting, Alex Jones said, ‘In the last month and a half, I have not come out and said this was clearly a staged event. Unfortunately, evidence is beginning to come out that points more and more in that direction.’
In April 2013, Governor Malloy signed a bill giving Connecticut some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, but at the same time the federal initiative was almost dead in the water. A bipartisan compromise limited the federal proposal to expanding requirements for background checks to firearm purchases at gun shows and online, measures most gun owners supported. It failed. A Fairleigh Dickinson University survey on gun control found that 1 in 4 Americans believed facts about Sandy Hook were being hidden from the public to advance a political agenda. Some observers dismissed the poll because they thought another finding was too unbelievable: nearly one-third of those surveyed, including almost half of the Republicans, said they believed ‘an armed insurrection may soon be necessary in the US’.
When the State Police revealed the shooter had fired 154 bullets in less than five minutes and the rampage was over in 11 minutes, the Sandy Hook ‘truthers’ demanded more proof. Millions of people were convinced they were being lied to – that their country was being stolen, that mass murders were being staged, that children were being kidnapped or raped or left to die. From Sandy Hook onwards, social media took over. Political leaders together with other Americans, including crime victims, first responders, restaurant workers, hospital staff, election officials, found themselves thrust into absurd plots and accused of terrible crimes, so awful that almost any action seemed justified. I was living in a splintering country, threatening democracy, each more outlandish idea supplanting the one before.
In 2017, a mass shooting at a concert in Las Vegas left 58 dead, setting off another round of fake news and conspiracy theories. More horrific events followed. On Valentine’s Day 2018, there was a school shooting in Parkland, Florida. 14 teenagers and three staff died. You would have thought this would give renewed pressure to bring in gun controls. The teenage survivors from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School were extraordinary. They demanded politicians stop offering condolences and instead act. They demanded stricter gun control measures and some of the student survivors organized Never Again MSD. Days after the massacre, dozens of Stoneman Douglas High School students went to the state Capitol only to see the Florida House of Representatives reject a bill that would have banned those guns characterised as assault weapons. As Wikipedia notes, they did pass a bill that day, to declare that pornography is a public health risk. However, in March 2018, the Florida Legislature passed the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act. It raised the minimum age for buying rifles to 21, established waiting periods and checks, and provided a program for the arming of some school employees. On the day it was signed into law, the NRA sued, challenging the ban on gun sales to people ages 18 to 21: the NRA’s suit wasn’t dismissed until June 2021. Rather than seeking reduced gun access, Trump endorsed arming schools: he called a ‘gun free’ school a ‘magnet’ for criminals, adding, “Highly trained, gun adept, teachers/coaches would solve the problem instantly, before police arrive”. Conspiracy theories and disinformation flourished. Students from the high school were criticised. In March 2019, Marjorie Taylor Greene, later to be elected a US Representative for Georgia, was filmed heckling and harassing a survivor walking toward the Capitol.
In May 2022, a gunman with an assault rifle murdered 21 people at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Another massacre drawing attention to US gun laws. A month later Congress passed a bill to extend background checks for young gun buyers but did nothing to address the availability of assault weapons or high-capacity magazines. Two days before President Biden signed the bill, the US Supreme Court struck down a century-old New York law that restricted concealed carry of firearms, casting gun restrictions across the country into doubt.
However, Alex Jones, under scrutiny for his role in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, was found liable by default in 2021 for defaming and inflicting emotional distress on the Sandy Hook families. In the first of three trials, two parents were awarded ~$50m in punitive damages. Ten years after the Sandy Hook massacre, you might be thinking at last, things are turning around. They aren’t. The gap between right and left, between facts and conspiracy theories, between faith in government and ‘go it aloners’ is growing. The US is ripping itself apart. The Supreme Court, once a bastion of legislative caution, is spearheading radical change. Abortion rights have gone; gun rights will stay. Decision making is being left to right-wing state officials to deny or overturn elections. Gay rights will be next to be demolished, then gender equality. Earlier I said it takes time to sort out facts, but today, we don’t want facts: we want to hear stories, and in a world of ‘free speech’ stories flourish, and any link back to reality is tenuous at best. The media offer a ‘take what you want’ party
Earlier, I claimed a 200-year experiment seems to be coming to an end. That experiment was democracy, the right for everyone to engage in the political process, to vote, and to seek a place in the legislature. Democracy has been on the ropes for a while. Most countries that do have elections run the process in such a way that rich men (sic) arrange things to ensure they are re-elected and do what is in their interests. Already a sham, we see free general elections increasingly falling out favour. There are exceptions. You might think Australia and New Zealand are bucking the trend but keep alert. Look at the way Finland, and then the rest of the world, attacked the young female Finnish Prime Minister for partying! Misogyny is on the rise everywhere, violent men continue to rule, and democracy is on the ropes. A recent New York Times opinion piece asked if we could come up with something better than democracy (12 September 2022). The conclusion was bleak, concluding “ Churchill said, ‘Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried.’ … He was right: better than all the others that have been tried, from time to time, and here we are, in one of those times again.” Yes, we are, and it doesn’t look good.
