The nation’s worst school massacre occurred in the spring of
1927, in the farm community of Bath, Michigan. Forty-five people,
mostly second grade students, were killed that day, and 58 were
injured. The perpetrator, Andrew P. Kehoe, 55, was a bankrupt
school board member and electrician angry about a property tax
levied to fund the school. One May morning, after about six months
of careful planning, he murdered his wife, burned down his farm,
and blew up the school, students and all.
What, if anything, has that tragedy to do with the latest school
massacre? On November 7, Pekka-Eric Auvinen, an 18-year-old Finn,
opened fire randomly at his high school, killing eight. Police and
the media immediately described Auvinen as a “bullied teenage
outcast” and an “alienated youth,” a “school gunman profile that
has become the norm since the 1999 Columbine massacre in
Colorado.”
Unfortunately the profile is wrong.
Few people who commit massacres are going to be elected prom
king or queen. If they are outcasts it is likely because they seem
abnormal, or in common parlance “creepy,” like the Virginia Tech
shooter Cho Seung-Hui who had severe mental problems and whose
creepy personality rightly disturbed his fellow students and
teachers.
But this is not always the case. As Slate reported, “[the Columbine shooters] were far more
accepted than many of their schoolmates. They hung out with a tight
circle of close friends and partied regularly on the weekend with a
wider crowd.”
Alienation and bullying, however, are only part of the
motivation given by the media and its experts. After the Finland
shooting the blame spread to Finland’s relatively lax gun laws and
the Internet. “A Finnish teenager’s shooting spree shows how the
Internet may be fueling violence among alienated youths,” reported USA Today.
But it turns out that these factors had little or nothing to do
with any of the most high-profile shootings.
An exhaustive report, released five years after the Columbine
shooting, concluded that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were bent on
outdoing their hero Timothy McVeigh. The fact that their mass
murder would happen at a school was irrelevant to them. They simply
chose the school as a convenient location where they could inflict
maximum casualties. At one time Harris planned to hijack a plane
and crash it into New York City. (Michael Moore failed to mention
that little detail in his Academy Award winning documentary
Bowling for Columbine.) When that became impossible
because of tightened security, they decided to blow up their
school, shoot down fleeing survivors, then detonate car bombs that
would kill survivors and rescue workers (just as Kehoe had done),
all of which they hoped would be broadcast on live TV. It was not
just fame they were after, said Supervisory Special Agent Dwayne
Fuselier, the FBI’s lead Columbine investigator and a clinical
psychologist:
They were gunning for devastating infamy on the
historical scale of an Attila the Hun. Their vision was to create a
nightmare so devastating and apocalyptic that the entire world
would shudder at their power.
Auvinen’s manifesto reads like the confused rant of a paranoid
schizophrenic, his views oscillating from extreme left to extreme
right with no stops in between. His targets, he wrote, would be
“students and faculty, society, humanity, [and the] human race.”
What is more he saw himself as a “political terrorist,” and wrote
“altough I choosed [sic] the school as target, my motives for the
attack are political and much much deeper and therefore I don’t
want this to be called only as ‘school shooting.’”
Auvinen’s rants are somewhat reminiscent of the loopy manifesto
left behind by the Virginia Tech shooter, who blamed deceitful
charlatans on campus, rich kids, materialism, and hedonism and
compared himself to Jesus Christ. Most experts agree he was copying
the Columbine killers, who likewise did not want to be seen as
“school shooters.”
Copycat murders are nothing new either. In the late 19th century
and early 20th centuries assassinations and anarchist bombings were
virtually monthly events, one provoking another. President
McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz, was copying — indeed obsessed
with Gaetano Bresci — the man who assassinated Italian King
Umberto I a year earlier, going so far as to copy Bresci’s type of
handgun.
The day after the Bath massacre, the New York Times’s
front page headline stated: “Maniac Blows Up School, Kills 42,
Mostly Children; Had Protested Taxes.” The next day the
Times’ headline was “Maniac-Dynamiter Had No Help.” The
lead paragraph of one story read: “Still stunned by the deed of the
madman Andrew Kehoe, who yesterday killed his wife and then blew up
the consolidated school here and his own automobile causing the
death of forty-three persons, including himself, this little
community today was groping its way through tears trying to meet
the awful consequences of the tragedy.”
Today the press would never consider calling Auvinen a maniac or
a madman. Instead we try to understand his motivations, and when we
do not like what we find, the rants about thinning the herd of
undesirables, we blame lax gun laws, video games, YouTube, even
other students who ostracized him, and we pretend there is
something about modern society responsible for these tragic events.
The truth is Auvinen was a maniac and a madman. We will all be
better off when we stop pretending that they do not exist.
