The Tucson Killings: The Battle over Mind

The allegations are clear enough. It took a Glock 19 handgun and a determined assailant to kill six people and wound thirteen others over the weekend in Tucson, Arizona. Among the dead is US District Judge John M. Roll. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords finds herself in a critical condition.

The focus on such killings often tends to spark a hysterical interest in mental instability. How could such a person undertake that particular course of action? Surely sanity must have been abandoned in favor of some dark motivation. Little thought is given to the fact that the irrational impulse is often less dangerous that the rational one. The road to the mass grave is paved with reason and concerted planning.

Within the mind, a society obsessed with mental illness and a regime of medicated panaceas shall find the cure. Locate it, contain it and excise it. Read the self-help manuals, available in their thousands, should you choose to do so. Search for inner goodness or the inner evil, depending on what rocks your boat. At the very least, the public shall have an explanation (futile, of course), but a reason why a person chose that path. U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, despite being an ophthalmologist, already has the answer, explaining to Fox News how, ‘From a medical point of view, there is a lot to suggest paranoid schizophrenia.’

Jared Lee Loughner, saddled with alleged responsibility for the shootings, is another candidate for America’s fascination with the mind gone wrong. Nathan Thornburg in Time Magazine (Jan 10) asks the question why the ‘mentally ill’ are still bearing arms and why records on the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) are incomplete. For Thornburg, the real issue here was how the alleged gunman ‘was allowed to buy the murder weapon in the first place.’ Background criminal checks are shown to be ineffectual. This was, according to Thornburg, a simple matter of bureaucracy and faulty book keeping. That mental illness is so complex, and hardly simply a matter of designation, is ignored. The ‘nutter’, in short, is a potential killer in the hands of a lethal weapon while the untagged ‘sane’ individual is perfectly entitled to hold weapons of mass lethality.

The question of how one outlines mental illness in a society that treasures fire arms is surely a matter of conjecture. The members of the National Rifle Association are touted as politically sane, though gun abolitionists might question it. The US Supreme Court has given a legal gloss for hand gun ownership, suggesting in 2008 that local rules forbidding them would contravene the Second Amendment. Indeed, it is tempting to ignore the fact that Giffords herself, who will no doubt rapidly assume a place on the pro-gun control mantelpiece, was herself a champion of Arizona’s gun owning tradition.

Just as Mutually Assured Destruction premised itself on the idea of potential annihilation in the name of safety by arming state powers with suitably destructive nuclear weapons, so we have a similar argument by pro-gun lobbyists for escalating the pursuit of guns at the national level. Both arguments are deemed rational and mentally stable, yet there is every reason to question both. Charles Heller of the Arizona Citizens Defense League is convinced, for instance, that the shootings demonstrate ‘more than ever why people need to have the tools of defense’. Loughner gets them out of their predicament. Beware the mentally ill.

Thus, we return back to a primitive frontier mentality, where all need arms in the face of danger. A sense of this can be gauged in the reactions of a few judges to the shootings. In the words of a fearful Robert Gettleman, US District Judge in Chicago, ‘We certainly don’t want to live our lives like judges in some other countries (like Russia, Kenya) must, under constant guard’ (Time Magazine, Jan 9).

We can dabble endlessly in explanations of what took place. One might even resort to that old hand of psychoanalysis, Erich Fromm, who claimed that destructiveness arose from an unlived life. But the same holds true for a society that demands danger and then patchy solutions to cope with it. The sick personality, cushioned by the Second Amendment, is in vogue. The rational mind, always titillated by violence, is thankful. In a world where gun violence is sacrosanct, Loughner is merely its excuse.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark[at]gmail.com

© Scoop Media