Rose Week 7

SECTION  
  Columbine, Aurora, Newtown. Each of these names has the potential to silence a room.  Santa Monica, Austin, San Ysidro. Reciting these names has the potential to spark recollections of sun soaked skin and serene water. What do the former names have in common that those in latter list do not share? What links certain mass atrocities to certain places? How do others seem to escape this generalization? American identity is fundamentally tied to the mass atrocities perpetrated by its gun wielding citizens. While scholars have widely debated both the significance and history of these ties - notoriously placing blame on the Second Amendment often shirking the arguments suggesting that gun laws accompanied it - few have explored the broader history of these occurrences and the way in which they impact place. 

   With increased media attention in recent years, the rhetoric of mass shootings has favored more contemporary instances of violence. Often these short histories, begin with the 1984 McDonald’s Massacre in San Ysidro in which James Huberty shot and killed twenty-one people; few lead with the case of Charles Whitman, a former U.S. Marine who killed fourteen people at University of Texas at Austin in 1961. Even fewer begin with the story of Charles Unruh, who’s 1949 “Walk of Death” was dubbed “the First Mass Murder in American History” by the Smithsonian. Using Congress’s updated definition of “mass killing” as “three or more killings in a single incident,” the history of mass shooting in America stretches back almost half a century further. In August 1903, Winfield Kansas was home to the Barden Mill, the Camon Military Band, and the first mass public shooter in America, Gilbert Twigg. On August 13, 1903 at 9:15pm, he would unload all twelve bullets of his twelve-gauge shotgun into a crowd of 5,000 people, eventually killing nine and injuring twenty-four. This marked the first documented mass shooting in America, perpetrated for reasons unrelated to race.

   Before unpacking the nuances of the 1903 shooting, it is important to clearly understand the terms that will be used to define the incident, as well as, the events leading up to it. The term mass shooting seems pretty ubiquitous today - it graces magazine covers all over newsstands, banners of news broadcasts, and newspaper headlines - but governmental organizations have been unable to come up with and stick to a firm definition. While not legally defined, According to a plotting of books through Google’s Ngram Viewer, the term “mass shooting” first appeared in print in 1916. Use of the word spikes dramatically between 1940, perhaps as a result of its usage in the 1949 shooting, until it drops in 1950. After its short, sharp decline, it has continued to trend upwards up to the present. The word “massacre” would have been most used to describe a shooting of more than three people in 1903. While the term stirs up connotations of war not evident in “mass shooting,” the sanitization of language is clearly a result of the frequency of usage. Seeing the word “massacre” as the cover of the newspaper every day would not be wise to encourage morale. However, none of the newspapers reporting the subsequent days after Twigg’s attack used massacre in the headline. Rather they each indicated that a “man” “shot” or “fired” into a crowd. This language, while alarming, does not carry with it the same weight as the term “shooting,” which helps to shed light on the sensationalism that has become of the topic of mass shootings. 

   After tracking the historical uses of descriptors, I still have to define the current terms in circulations before settling on the definition that will be used for the purposes of the paper. The two main terms relating to events that involve the murder of multiple people in one event are “mass killings,” “mass murder,” and “mass public shooting.” In a piece of legislation enacted on January 14, 2013  in the wake of the Newton school shooting, congress defined the term ‘mass killings’ as “3 or more killings in a single incident” (P.L. 112-265). This definition is not tied with a single location. In 2005, the FBI published a monograph following a symposium on serial murder. In the publication that defined “mass murder” as four or more murders “occurring during the same incident, with no distinctive time period between the murders.” While this definition is also not tied to location, the publication mentions that the “events typically involve a single location” citing San Ysidro and Virginia Tech as two places in which shootings had occurred that would fit such perimeters. This definition is also favored by criminologist Grant Duwe, one of the foremost scholars in the study of mass shootings in America. While I find each of these useful, neither term indicates the sense of place that is ultimately impacted by the event of a multi-homicide event. Further, the public nature of the mass shootings in recent memory also resonates with their individual stories. Moreover, barging into a private home and killing the inhabitants in front of a few visiting guest, while unimaginably awful, does not equal an active shooter firing into a crowd of over one hundred at a movie theater. This fact, signals the importance of qualifying the number of witnesses, as it bears importance to the memory of the place in which it occurred. For that reason, I will be using the term “publicly staged mass shooting.” This term encompasses the following three criteria:

four or more murders 2) perpetrated by an active shooter 3) occurring during the same incident with no distinctive time period between murders (<12 hours) 3) in a place of public use* 4) with fifteen or more people present.

*“place of public use” means those parts of any building, land, street, waterway, or other location that are accessible or open to members of the public, whether continuously, periodically, or occasionally, and encompasses any commercial, business, cultural, historical, educational, religious, governmental, entertainment, recreational, or similar place that is so accessible or open to the public” (2332f(e)(6) of title 18, United States Code)

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