Jay McDivitt is Pastor of Christ the Servant Lutheran Church in Waukesha, Wisconsin. When he was a student at Luther College he spent a summer as an intern at the peaceCENTER.
1. Anyone who uses violence to intimidate and terrorize civilian community is a terrorist, engaged in acts of terror. Some identify with ideologies and/or with ideological organizations, but they are all terrorists. To make distinctions, largely due to nation of origin, skin color, or religious persuasion, is simply racial bias – revelatory, but not meaningful.
2. Anyone who is able to dismiss the basic humanity of “an other” to the point of being freely able to kill – whether targeted individuals or indiscriminate mayhem – must be suffering from some form of mental illness. We have a collective illness of dehumanization, in which “othering” is the process by which we justify inflicting pain on, or ignoring the pain of, “others” who are not “us.”
3. When we call “our own” folks “mentally disturbed” to explain their acts of terror, we distance ourselves from them. We contextualize them so as not to believe we, too, are indicted by their behavior.
4. When we call “other” folks “terrorists” to explain their acts of terror, we de-contextualize them so as to reinforce our biases about “them.” “Our folks” are individuals with complex mental processes that become diseased through individual trauma, etc. “Other folks” are part of a problematic collective – an enemy element, a corrupted culture, a fanatical ideological group. Again, these are revelatory distinctions (for they betray our biases), but they are not meaningful for understanding and mitigating violent behavior.
5. All civilian shooters are mentally ill terrorists, individuals acting out disturbed fantasies and members of a collective society that systematically dehumanizes and demeans the lives of “others.”
6. So let’s drop the racist nonsense, and the demonization of the mentally ill, and focus on the real problem at hand: We live in a diseased culture that celebrates violence, devalues human life, and allows nearly unfettered access to the tools with which to enact this violent script. Surely something can be done to address this reality – including, but by no means limited to, some reasonable and meaningful restrictions on the proliferation of guns. But gun control is only dealing with symptoms, not the disease.
If you live with addiction, it’s a good idea to stop using the substance to which you are addicted. But there is a disease beneath the behavior that also must be addressed.
We are addicted to violence, so it’s a good idea to find reasonable limits to accessing the tools of terror. But there is a disease beneath the behavior that also must be addressed.
That takes all of us, not “us and them.”
