My thoughts about the Civic Association massacre of 13 innocents and the suicide of the shooter revolve around two themes. Mental illness and easy access to weapons. Jiverly Wong was clearly a deeply disturbed man. He had come to the US as a 22 or 23 year old from Vietnam. He was a refugee from a land that had suffered under several generations of war. He had trouble learning English and was clearly defensive about it. Thus he was alienated from his origins and couldn't fit into his new environment. His murder/suicide letter that he sent to Channel 10 in Syracuse showed him to be illogical and paranoid. He did time in jail in California for cashing an "empty check". When he applied for a pistol permit, his father said in a letter to the sheriff's office that he didn't want his son to hold a gun. There are other questions that arose when he applied for US citizenship. There were enough indications that he had trouble adjusting to life in the US all along, but none of them were so strong or consistent that either police or mental health professionals started focusing on him as any more dangerous than a lot of other people. He hid his problems well. When he took up shooting guns and rifles it looked like a normal hobby. His family says that they were unaware of his fascination with guns. So when he finally snapped, it seemed to come out of nowhere and make no sense. It fact it still makes no sense to anybody why he did his killings at an immigration center where he had received help.
I think we have all seen enough mental illness in people around us to know that faulty thought processes and strong emotions feed on each other in ways that we can't even begin to comprehend. I can surmise that a person who has spent his whole adult life struggling not only with language difficulties, but also with unresolved issues of war, culture shock, unemployment, marital difficulties, and who knows what else would feel more and more enraged at and isolated from those around him.
Do I feel anger towards him? Of course I do. We all do. His response was outside the pale of any civilized human being. It was a response of suicide combined with a rage that said that he was going to take as many people with him as he could.
When I say that we need to find compassion for him it is not to say that what he did was right. No one will ever say that. What I do want people to understand is that the human mind is a fragile thing, that no one is at all times perfectly sane, and that each of us has our limits of how much stress and isolation and other trauma we can endure.
What is galling to me is how much our culture creates and nurtures and justifies violence as the bottom line. It is absurdly easy and normal for anybody to get a gun. The sophistication of the weaponry that is available is appalling. And the very thought of violence creeps into all of our very thought patterns almost immediately. And that we want to make a quick judgment on those who kill without seeing the whole picture betrays the reality of human frailty and the flooding of our social environment with weapons. We want, by force of habit, to approve of violence when any thin veneer of authority is thrown over it. We must question how warped our culture's view of what it means to be a human being is when so many people feel incomplete without a gun. I believe that a human being is more of a human being without a gun than with one--just as one is more articulate without obscene language than with it.
We need to do a reality check here. Our government spends over 500 billion dollars per year on weaponry, uses it all over the world, and routinely breaks its own and international laws especially in regards to torture and interventions and invasion in so many countries over the years. It is no wonder that private citizens think in terms of so called justified violence more and more with such an example. We tried to name and address the culture of violence the very next day after the massacre at our vigil at Peace Park. This culture starts from the top down, and has the blessing of those in charge of our civic religion of perpetual war making. Human beings are treated as other and disposable, possible enemies, therefore killable. The fragile individual mirrors the flawed and warped collective. Until all weapons, official and individual are done away with, or we are at least headed in that direction, the storm of violence will continue. There are so many weapons made only for killing other human beings. Those with homicidal rage--or war making intentions-- will have less to hurt others with when these weapons are eliminated. This won't remove the rage--or the orders of the war makers--but it will make the killing of innocents much less likely and life for all of us a little less precarious. Hurricanes lose their power over dry land--just so this storm. One final note--one of the gun advocates, amid all his other arguments which I don't have space to deal with here, spoke of "the Binghamton incident". It was not an incident!! It was a massacre carried out by a flawed, deranged individual with weapons he should not have had. Real people died. Using trivializing terms makes the suffering and deaths of real people into abstractions. The misuses of abstractions distance us from the human condition in ways that make it harder for us to learn or change anything, making life and death meaningless. Life and death are not meaningless.
