January 7, 2008 at 08:41:10

School, Mall and Workplace Shootings: Why So Many?

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By Russ Wellen (about the author) Page 1 of 3 page(s)

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For OpEdNews: Russ Wellen - Writer

Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion
by Mark Ames
Soft Skull Press, 2005
360 pages, $15.95

In April 2007, when a Virginia Tech student killed 32, it was one of the worst ever, to coin a phrase, "social shootings." Earlier, in February, five were killed in a Salt Lake mall and then, in December, nine in an Omaha mall.

Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion by Mark Ames was published by Soft Skull Press back in 2005. But the continued popularity of school, mall, and workplace shootings as a practical solution for troubled souls obligates us to revisit this essential work.

When social shootings first burst upon the scene, they seared the national psyche like a wildfire. Though since overshadowed by 9/11, Iraq, and Katrina, the regularity with which they flare up keeps them from slipping off our radar.

In 1986 postal employee Patrick Sherrill couldn't have imagined the trend he sparked when he opened fire on the Edmond, Oklahoma post office. "Going postal" soon spread to the workplace at large. Few are aware of the numbers, but from 1998 to 2003 there were 164 shootings resulting in 290 dead and 161 wounded. In 2003 alone, 45 workplace massacres left 69 dead and 46 wounded.

The frequency of school shootings is just as mind-numbing. For example, bet you didn't know that two weeks before Virginia Tech, two were killed at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Afterwards, while the bodies are autopsied, the culture audits itself. In the case of school shootings, perennial culprits like the broken family, gun availability, and bipolar disorder inevitably boil down to, "the parents," as in "I blame the..." or "Where are the..."

Never mind that, according to Ames, love for their parents is expressed in the suicide notes of Klebold and Harris (who the adolescent Internet has canonized as Saints Dylan and Eric of the Columbine order).

Ames is a founder and the editor of the eXile, a Russian alternative weekly for the English-speaking that's so wild and wooly it forces us to confront the painful truth that there may now be more freedom of the press in Russia than in the US.

Ames, pugnacious by nature (at least in his writing) is battle-tested by a decade in post-perestroika Moscow. He's thus equipped to handle the accusation for which a superficial reading of Going Postal leaves him wide open -- that he's justifying the killings.

"Rather than looking outside of the office world for an explanation," Ames writes of workplace shootings, "why not consider the changes within America's corporate culture itself?"

Because it results in the death of innocents, a massacre by a heretofore unknown entity obscures what causes it. Difficulty identifying exactly who was targeted masks the motive. But Ames chronicles case after case of a worker who's singled out for scut work and judged by separate standards. Wilting under the pressure, he invites further abuse, before ultimately erupting in a random shooting.

Except, Ames maintains, there's nothing random about it. Besides hunting down a hated supervisor or executive, the killer also mows down co-workers. Why? Because he seeks to destroy the company as an entity. This is the stuff of which uprisings are made.

In fact, Ames devotes part two of Going Postal to building the case that today's workplace shootings are akin to slave rebellions. At the time, outbreaks like Nat Turner's were viewed as inchoate and devoid of political context by a public blissfully unaware that the victims of slavery might have a problem with the institution.

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Russ Wellen is the nuclear deproliferation editor for OpEdNews. He's also on the staffs of Freezerbox and Scholars & Rogues.

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