The slaughter of the Amish children: just another day in America
Rod Liddle says that a society brutalised by violent imagery and the death penalty has learned to expect such horrors as the bloodbath in the schoolhouse It was what the psychiatric services, with commendable understatement, often call a ‘special’ murder: obscure in its motive, repugnant in its selection of vulnerable and powerless victims, excessively brutal in its denouement. Charles C. Roberts, a milkman, marched into the West Nickel Mines Amish School in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, at 10.30 a.m. with a nine-millimetre automatic pistol, two shotguns, a stun gun, two knives, two cans of gunpowder and buckets containing both plastic restraints and KY Jelly, a sexual lubricant. Roberts, who was not Amish and apparently harboured no grudge against the sect, ordered 15 boys (and a pregnant woman) out of the classroom and then began shooting; five children were killed, six more were seriously wounded. Roberts then turned the gun upon himself. His wife, speaking via a family friend, said Charles was really a quite lovely chap, all things considered, and very good with the kids — but also added that shortly before 10.30 he had called her to say he was tormented by dreams of molesting children, having sexually abused two young relatives many years before. This fact apparently came as news to her. There is no evidence, despite the KY Jelly, that he molested any of the schoolchildren.
So far, so singular, you might suppose. There are madmen around and every once in a while one of them will do something particularly deranged and violent. In Britain, when things like this happen about once every ten years, we accept that it is a singularity about which not very much can be done — but we nonetheless scour our souls and our legislation, just in case we’re wrong about that. The Lancaster County murders carried superficial echoes of our own Dunblane massacre of 1996, when Thomas Hamilton broke into the Scottish school and shot dead 16 young children and a teacher. Both Hamilton and Roberts were middle-aged men around whom dark intimations of paedophilia hung. In the case of Dunblane, the story occupied the front pages of our newspapers for a week or more and was the front-page lead for days; we agonised in public — how could it happen? We enacted more stringent — and possibly useless — legislation over handguns as a result, examined the efficacy of our psychiatric services, our police, our school security systems and so forth. Dunblane was sufficiently shattering to remain in the public consciousness even now — there are still websites insisting that the whole thing was a weird conspiracy or a cover-up or both, evidence perhaps of the national trauma at the time.
Will the same trauma afflict the US, away from Lancaster County? You would doubt it; ennui, perhaps, but not trauma. One day after the attack, both the Washington Post and the New York Times had relegated the story to a single column, although still on the front page (just). You doubt there will be soulsearching and legislation, except perhaps among the Amish. But this is not so much a mature response to an awful singularity because the case of Charles C. Roberts was not remotely, however you look at it, a singularity. In the seven days before Roberts picked up his guns, there were four similarly deranged attacks in schools across the nation: a teenage girl shot dead in Colorado, two killed in North Carolina, a teacher shot dead in Vermont, a principal killed in Wisconsin. There have been seven such attacks, in total, in the month. The stated motives in each case were different, of course, but this should not deter us from recognising that the similarities are more than merely superficial; not simply that they happened ‘in a school’. A blind and incoherent rage, for example, drove each perpetrator; it helped too that firearms were easily accessible — in the latest year for which figures are available, some 6,000 American children were expelled for carrying guns or explosives on the premises of their schools. Some sexual motive, hidden or otherwise, was also present in most cases — but then this is pretty much a given; the profile of the indiscriminate killer of people much more vulnerable than himself almost always involves a reference to the killer’s burning sexual inadequacy and dysfunction. I will not labour the point with predictable observations on the close and uncomfortable ménage a trois between sex, power and violence.
The US is nowhere near the top of the international table of homicide rates; that honour can be bestowed upon Colombia. However, excluding the former Soviet states and South Africa, the US is at the top of the table for industrialised First World countries. And more pertinent is the extraordinarily high percentage of US murders that are not motivated by robbery, narcotics, domestic argument or any of the other causes which in most countries account for 90 per cent of murders. In the US, some 39 per cent fall outside these familiar categories, and a remarkable 16 per cent are apparently ‘motiveless’.
Which is where we — or the Americans, at least — should begin a bit of hand-wringing. Examining the American penchant for ‘special’ murders, social scientists have a tendency to gather around the word ‘brutalisation’. Violence — and especially extreme, photogenic violence — is present in perpetuity, from cradle to early grave. An investigation in 1998 by the US’s Federal Trade Commission into the marketing and content of violent films assessed that by the age of 18 American citizens would have watched on average 200,000 acts of violence and 40,000 murders on screen. Violence, even more than sex, has become the chief staple of mass entertainment.
And, of course, murder is sanctioned by the state. The US is the only industrialised country which will execute its citizens for ‘ordinary’ murders, i.e., your everyday, run-of-the-mill, beat-the-wife-to-death stuff. The death sentence has not acted as a deterrent (and, of course, could not do so in the case of nutters who intend to kill themselves after murdering other people). In a recent study in Oklahoma it was noted that the level of ‘stranger’ murders (people murdering those not known to them) substantially increased following media reports of the state execution of an unrelated murderer: this is the ‘brutalisation effect’. As the social scientist Peter Morrall puts it, ‘Far from preventing murders, the liquidation of a citizen by the state ... serves to encourage some forms of homicide. Rather than identifying with the executed person... the would-be murderer takes his or her lead from the brutal example of legalised killing.’ Murder levels are increasing, in the US and worldwide; it is expected that they will have doubled between 1990 and 2010. And where the US leads, we have a regrettable tendency to follow.
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