Once again, we are in that place of shocking introspection, another- yet another- school shooting. I find that I grind my teeth often, literally every instant that the media speculates to the “why”. “What is the motive? How could someone do this?” It starts the public mudslinging on simple one aspect solutions that do not involve anything but simple political denigration.
I know the why. The why is that it is an act of terrorism. Nothing more, or less.
Terrorism as a term has been co-opted by the political forces that wish to apply it to super charge a function of a crime- adding the term gives it more gravity. In taking ownership of the word, there are pitfalls, mostly that in its evolved definition there is a loss of clarity that would pave a way to a solution of the active shooter social epidemic.
Terrorism defined is an act of violence where the immediate victims are selected and murdered/injured is a vehicle of communication to spread fear, (terror) in order to produce intimidation or another second or third order effect. As such, the immediate victims are not the targets of the attack, rather the audience. The shooter in Nashville did not shoot the children and elderly victims because she had anything against them- the shooter in Nashville shot those victims so that we would read her manifesto. Never before has the motive been clearer.
To our discredit, we will read the manifesto, do so with vigor- and if it did not come at the cost of blood we would not have- in fact we could have cared less. Lifted on the updraft of the media- both formal and social media platforms- the ability of this act to generate this sensational outreach is the real strategic issue of the day.
The Nashville shooter was subordinate to a doctrine, which not all happen to be. Insubordinate actors conduct this because they are not content to be what they view as socially invisible. The difference is that an insubordinate shooter wishes to terrorize a broad audience, while one that is subordinate to another activism wish to terrorize both a broad audience and inform a narrower, specific audience. This concept has direct impact in targeting, which certainly was the case in Nashville.
So, we are the broad audience. How have we suffered? We have changed. We have opinions. We profess those opinions at the volume. We suck up the manifestos to power our own agendas. We are the reason that this form of terrorism works, and it sure does.
The second order effect of an active shooter is that those politically minded take swipes at one another, and we become more divided, if that is possible. “It is the guns, take them!” against, “It is the guns, arm them!” The second order effect is one that we will not live down anytime soon, as we are as divided in this country as we have ever been.
I was reminded a day ago that people have changed, in the form of a harkening back to the good days, which is the third order effect. I remember those days, as well- I remember a high school kid with a new Browning shotgun in the gun rack of his truck and showing this gun with pride to students and a few faculty, in the parking lot of our High School. Gone. We don’t live there anymore. We can’t live there anymore.
I remember cleaning my fingernails with the pocketknife in class, after a frog dissection, and the biology teacher joking about it. I remember being an enthusiast of the written word when I was school, was turned towards descriptions in creative writing class that were some military, mostly dark, and some violent. I think we know that I did turn out, both in writing and in the military- but I believe if I was a student now, and had tried such a thing in these days, I would have likely been referred to a mental health professional or medicated. Rightly so, likely- as we do not live there anymore.
In those good days, we did not have an appetite for such scandal, and that is the real change from the good days to the bad ones. We can’t wait to read that manifesto. In the shooter’s mind, she had to die to get the right messaging, and she sure got it. In her mind, she is not a criminal, but a martyr, for the cause of her specific audience. The sad thing about this, is that every one of these attacks is the same. Martyrs for cause, even if that cause is their own frustration at being invisible.
This, gentle readers, is terrorism.