patrickmurfin

George Sodini, the crazed lone gunman du jour.

The Pennsylvania Gym Shooting—note how quickly these things acquire proper titles—is just another event in a familiar parade of American gore.   Another heavily armed loner/psycho lets loose with real fire power.  Result—tragedy, carnage, and a blip on a 24 hour cable news cycle.

That the event garnishes that much attention is because the victims were mostly (I haven’t seen the usual photo gallery of victim photos) middle class suburban white women.  Their killer was the lone white loon down the block.  Black kids sprayed with automatic weapons on the streets of Chicago with similar body counts hardly make it to the front page of the local papers, let along mention by well coifed national news readers.

This event will be somewhat marginalized because it is assumed to be, perhaps, an over aggressive case of domestic violence.  By some accounts an intended target, and perhaps one of the victims, was a former girl friend or a woman who had spurned shooter, George Sodini.  And domestic violence, however worthy of a passing tsk-tsk or a third-rate basic cable movie staring the second lead of a 1980’s sit-com, is far too routine to hold our interest—or our indignation—for long.

But what if we look at this another way.  What if this is the same kind of hate crime as say the Knoxville Church Shooting, the Abortion Doctor Murder, or the Holocaust Museum Shooting?  The gunman in this case shared a lonely and alienated life, a history of mental problems, a violent temper, unlimited access to weapons—and most importantly--a clearly defined “enemy”  to be destroyed.  In each case, and in others like them, the shooters left behind screeds, manifestos or statements elevating their actions in their own eyes to a noble, self-sacrificing blow for vengeance.

In Sodini’s case he left a web page, since taken down by the authorities, that clearly outlined his grievances, his targets, and even the place and method of attack.  Sodoni hated women—all women—for a life time of perceived slights and rejections.

What, pray tell, is the difference between misogyny, hatred for liberals, anti-Semitism, anti-abortion fanaticism, homophobia, racism, or any of the other group based hatreds and their attendant ideologies that motivate carnage in America?

Maybe Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Rielly, Ann Coulter, or Michael Savage have not been overtly winking and nodding at violence against women.  That might be too much even for them.  But all of them let slip the occasional disdain and contempt for uppity women.  And the general American culture from slasher films to rap music (not that these folks ever listen to that) to popular country music ballads (which they probably do) enshrines such violence, especially when “the bitches had it coming”  for alleged wrongs and slights.

So let’s acknowledge this for what it is: a hate crime.  And let us adjust our outrage accordingly.