Parkland, Florida high school shooting survivor Sydney Aiello, 19, suffering from PTSD and survivor's guilt, shot herself in the head a week ago
A day or two after her funeral, an unnamed sophomore also a survivor of last year's Marjorie Stoneman Douglas HS shooting also took his own life
And most recently, Jeremy Richman, father of one of the 20 elementary school children gunned down at Sandy Hook in 2012, also committed suicide.
The cost of allowing rampant gun violence to go essentially unaddressed, other than with obvious caution, reaches far beyond the simple death tolls that accompany the news of each shooting. It's a grim sport we practice, watching the initial reports, waiting to see if the shooting is going to go to double digits, as with Sandy Hook and Parkland, or if will reach the unfathomable body counts of Las Vegas or Christchurch.
But still, we wait when the news comes in. We wait and we count, as if numbers can make the horror of decivilization manageable. We wait through the initial reports that inevitably say there was a second, or sometimes even multiple, gunmen. It's always just one gunman.
Maybe we think if it's two or three shooters, if it's organized, that makes it more sensible. It's an evil organization in the world. Violent men manipulating other men--always it's men--makes sense. True diabolical evil would send others to do their bidding, like petty Lucifers. Then there's a guiding intelligence to the bloody chaos; then there's a rationality, at least.
Because who could hope to benefit from this slaughter directly? Because how can we live in a world where one lone man could cut down 20 or 50 or even a few strangers?
We understand the angry ex-husband, usually drunk, lashing out at his abused former partner, a loser making the ultimate loser move of destroying the one life. We understand the crazed mother drowning her child in a tub. It's horrifying, but it's an intimate murder, a private dysfunctional family matter that boils over with passionate hatred. It's graspable, because it's irrational.
But the irrational violence of the mass murderer targets victims, and the most helpless victims imagineable--school kids, churchgoers, movie watchers. They could be any of us and so it has that intimacy. But it's strangers killing strangers, so it's still detached, an event at a peaceful social gathering. It's random, but it's personal. It's impersonal, but it's life shattering for the families of the victims, and ultimately for the society that sees the violence on television
