 |
| Brenda Ann Spencer. "I don't like Mondays." |
Usually, the first question we ask on
hearing about a murder is, why? What was the motive? An answer to this doesn’t
bring the dead back, but it can help a community understand and achieve some
level of closure on an otherwise meaningless act of violence. The recent media
and government attention on ‘one-punch’ kills in Sydney implies that
intoxication is the cause or enabler of latent violent instincts among a small
minority of men wandering between bars. But is it the only reason? As
professional boxer Danny Green noted when launching his
new ad aimed at knocking out ‘coward punches’, plenty of guys built like
Thor get drunk and don’t feel the need to harm others.
January 29 marks 35 years since America’s
first horrific experience of a mass school shooting. The perpetrator was
16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer, who lived across from the Grover Cleveland
Elementary School and opened fire one morning in 1979, killing two adults and
injuring eight children and one police officer. Spencer, who remains in prison
after being refused parole several times, showed no remorse.
Her explanation for her actions was, "I
don't like Mondays. This livens up the day." The sheer senselessness of
what happened and Spencer’s apparent ambivalence towards it defied belief and inspired
Bob Geldof to pen the Boomtown
Rats’ hit, I don’t like Mondays. My Grade 6 teacher introduced our class the song, which had been
released a few years earlier. It wasn’t a song that your average 10-year-old
would find appealing musically back then, but it did receive a huge amount of
airplay on the stations our parents listened to, and he explained the story
that had inspired the lyrics. It was as startling to me then as the current
spate of (mainly US) inexplicable outbursts of wanton violence.
Tell
me why
I
don’t like Mondays
Tell
me why
I
don’t like Mondays
I
wanna shoot the whole day down
And
daddy doesn’t understand it
He
always said she was good as gold
And
he can see no reasons
'Cos
there are no reasons
What
reason do you need to be shown?
These days, the authorities might linger
longer on questions such as why the hell “daddy” bought her the gun and 50
rounds of ammunition in the first place (Spencer had stated it was because she
thought he wanted her to kill herself).
Or why he’d refused her access to mental health treatment when it was
strongly recommended based on her behavior prior to the killings.
America is now so accustomed to outbursts of
boredom or rage or whatever it is that drives someone to kill children that
there’s a whole market opening up in bulletproof bookcases and other
furniture innovations that can be used as barricades. But violence is also erupting
elsewhere, and although guns are predominantly the weapon of choice, they’re
not the only one.
The last month is littered with examples.
Last week, in an affluent part of Illinois, a 14 year-old girl stabbed her 11-year-old sister 40 times, because she didn’t feel the young sibling was showing enough
appreciation for what she was doing to keep the house running. Kathleen Heide, a criminology professor from the
University of South Florida, tried to help a nation fathom what would prompt
such an act. “Multiple stab wounds can indicate rage as well as dissociation,”
she said. Buried within the story was a line that authorities are investigating
the girls’ single mother for neglect of her children.
A couple of weeks ago in Florida, a
71-year-old retired police captain fatally shot a theatre-goer who irritated
him by sending text messages on his phone during the previews, and ignored his
escalating requests to desist. What provoked him is clear. Less so, how it is
that an apparently civilized, intelligent man formerly responsible for
upholding law and order as a cop was unable to control and appropriately
channel his anger.
In Australia, most of us are dumbfounded
that President Obama’s attempts at very liberal gun control measures repeatedly
fail in the wake of such incidents. John Howard’s decisive action following the
Port Arthur massacre and the statistics since prove a direct relationship between
the accessibility of firearms and acts of violence. In an absurdly funny
segment, The Daily Show’s
John Oliver investigated this in the context of why the US wouldn’t follow
an example of country that took action on gun control and reaped the benefits.
But even if America ever manages to overcome
the widespread fears of tyranny and police states and sentiments like the NRA’s
“The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun”, understanding
and tackling the deep-seated issues that provoke people to be violent is a problem
shared by all countries, including Australia, where fists and knives are equally
lethal.
Last weekend, a gunman shot dead two people before turning
the gun on himself in a busy shopping mall in Maryland in the United States. At
this stage, his motive – the key question everybody needs an answer to –
remains unknown.
A mall employee, present during the
shootings spoke a candid, horrifying truth. "This country needs a lot of
help,” she told reporters tearily. “When somebody is that angry to go to a mall
on a Saturday morning and shoot people, we're in a lot of trouble. To push
people to those limits where things like that happen makes no sense."
Controlling weapons is a good start to
reducing deaths. But as a society, we also need to examine– beyond blaming alcohol
and drugs and accessibly to weapons – what is driving people to hurt others in
such senseless acts of violence.
