Here we are again.
Another mass shooting. Another set of grieving families and friends. More calls for sensible gun control. More fist-shaking about Second Amendment rights. More inaction.
Susan Shaw
In the 2016 movie The Limehouse Golem, the catchphrase of entertainer Dan Leno is “Here we are again!”
Indeed.
A primary theme that runs throughout The Limehouse Golem is the culpability and complicity of those who watch murder as well as those who commit it.
The film is set in 1880 in a poor East End district of London where a bloodthirsty killer stalks the streets. At one crime scene, the killer writes on the walls in Latin a quote from early Christian apologist Lactantius, “He who observes spills no less blood than he who inflicts the blow.“
“He who observes spills no less blood than he who inflicts the blow.“
The film intertwines fiction and historical realities, harkening back to real 18th and 19th century murders where the public tramped all over crime scenes, eager for a glimpse of the bodies. A newly literate public clamored for news of gory crimes, police investigations, trials and executions, and journalists readily provided it for them.
For the killer in the movie, murder is a performance, a spectacle for audiences eager to participate vicariously in the bloodlust while remaining safely at a distance from it. The killer, however, recognizes those who stand by are also guilty and are implicated by their fascination with the killings.
Here we are again.
How guilty are we?
Time after time, Congress has shown an utter lack of moral courage and political will to ban assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines. People who love guns more than they value the lives of other human beings have insisted their right to own weapons of war supersedes the right of the rest of us to live in safety from gun violence. Voters have continued to return to Congress politicians who are in the deep pockets of the NRA. We watch the news clips and continue to stand by as others are mown down, and some of us ineffectively shout our moral outrage into the wind because it feels like the only thing we can do.
Here we are again.
In the U.S., our individualist self-understanding has provided us with a convenient way to excuse ourselves from any responsibility for mass shootings. After all, I didn’t shoot anybody. It was one bad person. Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.
The ancient Israelites had a much more communitarian understanding of themselves. What one person did was what they all did. So if one person sinned, the nation sinned.
“It is our votes, our values, our actions and inactions as a society that have made mass shootings so pervasive.”
Imagine if we applied that to our own situation. If one person took up a gun and murdered people, we all took up that gun. It’s not a far stretch to realize the truth of this. After all, it is our votes, our values, our actions and inactions as a society that have made mass shootings so pervasive. No other developed country in the world has this problem.
When some folks in the early church were arguing over whether or not it was OK to eat meat sacrificed to idols, Paul concluded that, while there was nothing inherently wrong in eating the meat, sometimes we should give up things that are OK for us to do for the sake of people who might be harmed.
What if we thought about guns that way? We can agree that, as Americans, we have the right to own guns. But, as people who love others, we will give up the right to own those guns so we can stop the harm that comes from guns. After all, we know for a fact that when there’s a gun in the home, the person most likely to be shot by it is someone in the home.
Is it really so hard to give up guns if that means we can save the lives of others?
Or are we as a country so selfish that we’d willingly let people bowling or having dinner or attending a concert or going to school or worshiping be killed just so we can have our guns?
I guess for some people shooting an assault rife on the weekends might be fun. Is that more important than the lives of people in Maine?
Maybe a high-capacity magazine in a gun makes someone feel tough. Is that more important than children in school or people at church?
Are we not as culpable as the shooters when we continue to enable their mass killings by our inaction?
No! No! No! Most people will answer. We did not pull the trigger. We are not responsible.
In the crime drama The Fall, the killer videotapes his serial murders. At one point, he turns the camera toward himself and asks, “Why are you watching this?” During his interrogation, the detective shows him the video and asks him, “Who were you talking to? Yourself? Me? The people who like to read and watch programs about people like you?”
In that moment, the show turns on the viewer and implicates us in the violence.
I teach courses on gender, race and class in British murder mysteries and crime dramas, and I ask the students to give examples of pop culture that implicate the viewers. We talk about how things like breaking the fourth wall and speaking directly to the audience, as in You, remind us that we are a part of the story we are watching. We also talk about shows that encourage us to root for really bad people, such as The Sopranos, Dexter, Killing Eve, Breaking Bad. After all, what does it say about us when we are cheering for a mobster, serial killer, assassin or meth dealer?
As one of my students pointed out just this week, the nightly news turns on us too. We aren’t removed from what we watch. We are part of it, and we are implicated in it. We are as guilty as those who inflict the blows or the gunshots.
So let’s watch the news. Let’s learn about the killer. Let’s feel bad for the people killed and their loved ones. Let’s listen to politicians prevaricate. Then let’s move on until next time.
Here we are again.
Susan M. Shaw is professor of women, gender and sexuality studies at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Ore. She also is an ordained Baptist minister and holds master’s and doctoral degrees from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Her most recent book is Intersectional Theology: An Introductory Guide, co-authored with Grace Ji-Sun Kim.