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What sends a man on a shooting spree? Madness, yes. But look at the ample sources of hatred in this country
Wednesday, May 03, 2000
By Nicholas Lane
How could this possibly happen in Pittsburgh?
This isn't somewhere in Colorado, where everyone was from somewhere else and nobody knew their neighbors. This is Pittsburgh. Someplace special. We are family. This sort of thing doesn't happen here.
But it did. Our immunity was an illusion. Driven by whatever demons buzzed in his head, Richard Baumhammers, according to police, went out on Friday afternoon, killed five people, seriously injured another and fired shots into two synagogues. One of the people killed was his neighbor, a woman who had known Baumhammers since he was 4 years old.
The city is in anguish. The search is on for somebody, something to blame. It's as though the body of the gunman isn't big enough to hold all our anger and grief. We need something more worthy to blame, and we find it in ourselves.
Some measure of this, we feel, is our fault. We failed the people who were killed. We don't recognize the warning signs of violent behavior. We must shoulder some of the responsibility. We need to seek some kind of forgiveness . . .
But this is nonsense. Forgiveness for what? The people of Pittsburgh are not responsible for the actions of a mentally unstable man. It's much too early to jump to conclusions about Richard Baumhammers' precise state of mind, let alone to know whether there were warning signs to which anyone could have responded.
We need not ask forgiveness for letting this happen; we didn't let it happen. Nor should we rush to forgive the killer, a practice that would seem bizarre to the families of his non-Christian victims.
The Jewish view (and heaven knows we've had enough opportunity to work it out) is that there can be no forgiveness for a killer, because the only people with the right to forgive are the victims. How God deals with killers is unknowable. Jews have no concept of hellfire.
But we do, of course, have a very good idea of what it feels like to burn in someone else's. It is ironic, to put it mildly, that this rampage took place just a few days before we commemorate the loss of 6 million of our people in the Holocaust.
We don't know exactly what to make of Richard Baumhammers' writings on race. We don't know at what point, or under whose influence, his paranoia turned outward, into a murderous rage. But it was marked, as it so often is, by a demonization of the "stranger," the "other," the ones who either look different or pray to a different God.
It seems a negation of the very principle of America, where everyone (except the Native American) is from somewhere else and where everyone is different. And it is somehow even more discordant to see it from a first-generation American.
Where does the demonization come from? From hatred. It seems that hatred has become an overriding emotion in this country. Much of it is brushed off as anger, a sort of generic road rage. But you don't have to look far to see anger spilling over into hatred. In the language used in Miami about Janet Reno. Even in the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. Listen to snatches of lower-level political rhetoric, or to the lyrics of some forms of popular music. Or just to the crowd at sporting events.
Much of this hatred is visceral. It is blind, simple, mindless, unreasoning hatred. But some of it may be more insidious, fed by fear. What are these haters afraid of? Of having someone, the "stranger," the "other" take away something that they think should belong to them, and only them. Their culture, whatever that means? Their country?
Is this why he chose to kill two workers at a Chinese restaurant? Or a clerk in an Indian grocery? Did he believe that they were a threat to him?
It seems quite likely that most of our questions will never be answered, at least to our satisfaction. The trouble is that we look for rational answers, and nothing in this situation seems rational. But what if we were to discover that some of the ideas in Baumhammers' head came not from his inner demons, but from outside? In this country there are plenty of sources to choose from.
A Post-Gazette article Monday was quietly aghast at the visit by a German journalist to the scene of the crime, and the international extent of the coverage. What will they think of our city now? It isn't the city that foreign media wonder at; it's the entire country. America, it seems, has not learned the difference between liberty and license.
Freedom of speech does not include the freedom to shout "fire!" in a crowded theater. But it does include the freedom to demonize Jews, blacks, minorities of every persuasion, even government employees, on the Internet and in the further reaches of the media. And when the violence happens, the denials come very quickly. "None of this, you understand, is direct incitement to violence, and if one of my readers takes it into his head to go and shoot up a Jewish community center in Los Angeles, that has nothing to do with me."
What utter nonsense. We, the rational, the sensible, may think we can read that trash without being influenced - maybe. But there are many vulnerable people in this society, and it only takes a little nudge to push them over the edge.
There have to be limits, or our freedoms disappear. The Jewish world learned the hard way that if you want to kill people, you first use words to demonize them, to make them out as less than human, to turn them into figures of fear. And only then can their neighbors turn against them. This wasn't a fantasy spawned by mental illness; this was the deliberate decision of perfectly sane people.
Synagogues around the region are now putting in extra security. Minority-owned stores will probably be doing the same. Everyone, and I mean everyone, feels less safe than they did on Friday. So what's next? Metal detectors at Chinese restaurants? Is that the inevitable consequence of freedom of speech?
There is one inevitable postscript to this story. We have to stop the trade in guns.
As we know, Richard Baumhammers' possession of a gun was entirely legal. That offers us no sense of relief. And soon we can expect to hear the familiar refrain: "Guns don't kill people, people kill people."
Well, the reality is that "people with guns kill people." Since we can't restrict the circulation of people, perhaps we should try to restrict the circulation of guns. Nowhere else in the world are firearms so readily available. Nowhere else are they so frequently used to kill the innocent. You want to talk about insanity?
All that is needed is for our politicians to face down the gun lobby and act in the interests of Anita Gordon, Anil Thakur, Garry Lee, Thao Pham and Ji-Ye Sun. And Sandip Patel, who may never walk again. And Thao Pam's 5-year-old son, who doesn't understand why his father will never play with him again.
It's too late for the first five. What about the rest of us?
Nicholas Lane lives in Point Breeze. He is a national officer of the American Jewish Committee and a member of the Lithuanian and Estonian Historical Commissions to Investigate Crimes Against Humanity, 1939-1991.