Mass Shooters Don't Arrive from Mars

My first pastorate was in Philadelphia.  From time to time people shot one another in that city, thus the unkind insult “Kiladelphia.”  Most of these shootings were not mysteries; we knew why they happened.  The victim had something the shooter wanted.  The shooter was afraid they were going to lose something they wished to retain.  The shooter knew and was angry at the victim.  The shooter felt the victim to be in some sense a threat.  These were tragic deaths, but there was little mystery to most of them.We realized this violence was part of a larger cultural system.  This did not excuse the violence, but we knew that conditions in the lives of both shooter and victim played a role.  We knew that if we worked on reducing poverty, improving education, and increasing economic opportunities we could mitigate some of the violence.

We also knew that Philadelphia was part of a larger regional cultural system.  We knew that the drug trade in the city was driven in a significant way by young men driving in from wealthier suburbs in their mothers’ Buicks, buying their drugs, and getting back on the Schuylkill expressway to return to their neighborhoods.  The violence did not arise unrelated to this broader context. 

Systems theory teaches us that we all play a role in shaping one another’s behavior.  This does not exonerate people; it simply suggests to us that to some degree we co-create one another.  To address the violence in the city, we needed to look at the whole system.  We had to look at the city itself and the role people living in the suburbs played in shaping life in the city.

Mass shootings, unlike urban shootings, are usually inexplicable.  Why would someone shoot strangers with no apparent benefit to themselves for doing so?  We are quick to talk of mental illness as a way, perhaps, to minimize the discomfort this puzzle breeds.

Mass shootings do have something in common with urban violence.  Mass shootings occur in a cultural system, and the shooters are a product of that system.  This does not excuse them; but if we want to reduce the prevalence of these tragedies, we would do well to look at the culture in which they are spawned. 

In the 8th chapter of John's Gospel, local leaders bring to Jesus a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery.  Jesus responds:  “If anyone of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.”  The woman is guilty; Jesus is not condoning her choice.  Yet he sees that she, although guilty, is part of a larger community that has shaped her.  Perhaps if the community had lived out their common life together in a different way, the woman would have been less prone to sin.  This does not exonerate her; it does suggest that you cannot extract her from the sinful cultural system in which she lived.  She was part of a larger drama. We are constantly co-creating one another.

This might be a good thing to keep in mind as we sort out what we can do in our communities and our nation to reduce the prevalence of mass shootings, or violence in general for that matter.  None of this excuses mass murder, but it does remind us that these murderers do not arrive at the scene of the crime from Mars, untouched by the broader culture in which they were nurtured.

Jim Kelsey—Executive Minister of the American Baptist Churches of New York State