The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 22 - Unauthorized ...

Killers Among Us
it makes them monsters and maniacs and demons, not quite human.
But how was their rage so different from mine? Obviously, that I did not actually
shoot anyone. Though had I shot up a house full of drug dealers, the media
response would have been quite different. And a good many people who have been
successively sickened during this plague year would be considerably less
devastated, perhaps relieved and maybe even a little thrilled. The rage is the same,
only we share the hate.
Calling for the execution of a
murderer. Or in really bad traffic. It's
the same impulse, whether horrific or
honorable, and we've all had it, at
some time and to some extent. Men
seem to have it more often than
women; they certainly walk into
places and start shooting more
frequently. We've heard the theories:
men are rewarded for their aggression;
men are more avid consumers of the
pop death cult; men are reared to
believe the world will bow before
them and are frustrated to learn it's
actually the reverse; men are denied
outlets for their pain. . . . Most of
these explanations, myriad as the talk
shows and magazines that pander
them about, all suggest that men kill
because of something society does to
them. But in nature, animals who don't
watch TV or work in go-nowhere jobs
kill all the time: for survival, for
ON THE BRINK: A POLL
According to the Gen Y2K Report, a recent
survey of 2,000 young men and women:
Of those ages 16 to 19, 41 percent say there are
people they want to get even with.
43 percent say they sometimes are pushed too far
and feel they will explode.
58 percent of this explosive group agree they
would use a gun "if I had to."
53 percent of this group watch TV movies,
compared with 34 percent of those who do not
feel they will explode.
The study's authors, Liz Nickles and Laurie
Ashcraft, report that controlling parents may be
to blame for kids' volatility. "Most people assume
that teens who exhibit . . . violent tendencies are
the result of hands-off parenting," Nickles says.
"In the population we studied, the opposite is the
case." Says Ashcraft, "Overscheduled, pressured
children are an emotional powder keg."
territory, for power. Men who kill do so for the same simple objectives, however
demented or hateful their reasoning may be. It may be as simple as that: men are
animals, perhaps a little more so than women.
So, "animals kill, guns don't kill," to paraphrase the National Rifle Association's
boilerplate regurgitation? Well, that's true, in its own disingenuously dense way.
Obviously, hatemongers with guns are much more efficient killers than
hatemongers with knives and baseball bats. But I think there is something to guns
beyond their convenience. In their very design, they are an eerily perfect extension
of rage. The handgun in particular: you make a fist and point the metal finger at the
thing you hate. Impulse to twitch, and a hard, hot bolus of fury hurtles out of you at
hundreds of miles per hour. Point and click. Point and click. From urge to
execution in a flash.
There have been many times in my life when I'm now happy I did not have a gun. I
was a dour teen-ager, I'm told, and if I had had a handgun, I might have not shot up
my school but perhaps a couple of particular individuals, including myself. There
were plenty of other kids in my school who could have made the cover of Time
and Newsweek, with enough ammo.
Even as a hormonally stable adult, I didn't need something as gut-wrenching as the
murder of a friend to unleash the impulse. Being jostled along the crowded,
steaming streets of New York, there were days when, if I could have simply
pointed my finger. . . .
Table of Contents
August 22, 1999
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