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Another rampage desecrates our common humanity
Sunday, April 30, 2000
For the second time in two months, Pittsburgh -- and we use the term in the broadest and most appropriate sense -- has learned how deadly one individual with a gun can be. On Friday afternoon, a man -- identified by police as a lawyer from Mt. Lebanon -- killed five people, all of them members of ethnic or religious minorities, seriously wounded a sixth person and desecrated two synagogues. Hate crimes by any definition, these outrages came almost two months to the day after a killing spree in Wilkinsburg motivated, law enforcement officials say, by the suspect's hatred of white people.
It is tempting after such a numbing tragedy to trot out pat explanations. In the Wilkinsburg killings, some suggested that the acts of violence were just the extreme manifestation of black rage inspired by police brutality against African Americans. Because the victims of Friday's carnage were members of minority groups often targeted by white bigots, there was immediate speculation that the killer was carrying too-common prejudices to murderous extremes. (Today's Post-Gazette reports that police have linked the suspect with a Web site denouncing third-world immigrants and "advocating the rights of European Americans.")
Finally and separately, these horrible events will be cited -- fairly, we think -- by advocates of more stringent gun controls.
Yet however valid these and other explanations may seem, they cannot fully make sense of Friday's slaughter, or of the shootings in Wilkinsburg that left three people dead. In both cases, it is unclear where malice ended and madness began. Whether one considers them deranged or diabolical, mass murderers seem to be a permanent, if rare, phenomenon in human society. We should be wary of glib prescriptions for how to put an end to such awful aberrations.
That doesn't mean that it is futile to reflect on what attitudes or experiences might lead disturbed people to lurch over the line into violence. (This newspaper, we hope, will be a forum for such reflections.) It certainly also does not mean that parents, religious institutions and community groups shouldn't preach passionately against the prejudices that provide a convenient template for anti-social behavior.
But along with the horror all of us in Pittsburgh feel at Friday's killings and other outrages, we should cultivate some humility about the possibility of dissecting or eliminating such acts.
There is nothing complicated, however, about the grief and shock Pittsburghers feel over the deaths of Nicki Gordon, Thao Pham, Ji-ye Sun, Garry Lee and Anil Thakur, and the wounding of Sandip Patel. The mourners' bench, to quote the novelist Peter DeVries, is a long one that crosses municipal, racial and religious boundary lines. Friday's shootings were an assault not only on the individual victims but also on our common humanity.