Instruments of Ill-Omen

Well, it’s happened again— yet another deranged person, full of suffering, rage and despair, has gunned down a classroom full of innocents using modern military weaponry. Last week this all-too-familiar story played out at Northern Illinois University. Several months ago, it happened at Virginia Tech. Before that, it was the one-room schoolhouse in Pennsylvania and the slain were Amish children. Before that, it was grade-school students in Conyers Georgia… before that, in Nashville Tennessee… Santee California… the Texas Tech tower gunman… oh yeah, don’t forget Columbine too. The list of school shootings is now so long that it would fill this whole column were I to list them all. Grade school, High School, College, Kindergarten, it doesn’t matter— it seems that children and students of all ages are the easy targets of rage and despair.

As the saying goes, “What we have here, is a pattern.”

There is obviously enormous suffering associated with these events, not just with the innocent victims, but also with (and originating from) the suffering of the gunmen themselves. The Buddha-Dharma has a great deal to say about human suffering; the first of the Four Noble Truths is that Life is Suffering. Moreover, not only is life full of suffering, but the nature of suffering is that it tends to radiate outwards to affect others, like the ripples that radiate outward from the proverbial pebble dropped into a pond of still water. What all of these horrible events have in common, is that the suffering always originates with one person or perhaps two people, who then export their inner hell to others.

Modern psychology is trying to understand this violent phenomenon. In the online Crime Library website (www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/weird/kids1/cats_4.html), I found the following quote, about one of these child-gunmen who murdered his classmates:

“While many people believed there was no motive, students who knew him disagreed.''He was picked on all the time,'' said one. ''He was picked on because he was one of the scrawniest guys. People called him freak, dork, nerd, stuff like that.''

Bullying by peers can be brutal, it's true, but what's wrong with these kids? Lots of people get picked on, but don't reach for guns and bombs as the appropriate response. Is there something that makes these kids different?

Some are just angry and may have been influenced by violence in games, movies, or on television shows. However, there does appear to be a group of children that is set apart: those with "rejection sensitivity."

According to this article, the essence of this “rejection sensitivity” is two-part: (1) that these kids (and those who reach adulthood) are thin-skinned by nature, and thus more likely to perceive hostility from others and be hurt by it; and (2) they subsequently tend to easily de-humanize their tormentors and other people generally, as a defensive mechanism to protect their psyche from the pain and suffering. Once others have been de-humanized, some of these kids and adults then act out on their suffering, with horrible results.

I am not a credentialed psychologist and so I can’t say how valid this thesis is. But I am a Buddhist and a novice priest, and my tradition has something to say about this sort of human pain and suffering. And it has to do with clinging and attachments, which the Buddha taught us will always generate suffering. In these instances, it is not only the perpetrators whose inner pain generates these horrible events. It is also our society at large which enables them as well. How so? Simply, our society is deeply attached to firearms.

Buddhism teaches us, that we are all in this together, and thus we, too, are complicit in these horrible events, to the extent that we tolerate the proliferation of weaponry. It is a kind of mass clinging, rooted in the national myth of rugged frontier individualism. We even have a popular saying for it— “Stick to your guns,” meaning someone who stands by an opinion no matter what evidence to the contrary is presented. With more than 200 million guns in circulation (!) (see www.ncjrs.org/txtfiles/165476.txt), and a typical life-span of about 50 years for each well-maintained firearm, it’s clear that even if all gun sales ended immediately (which they won’t), we are going to have a problem here for a long, long time. No matter where you live in America, it’s easy to get guns, legally or illegally. Based on the regular outbreak of school shootings nationwide, this obviously applies to children as well.

What can be said about this horrible situation, from a Buddhist perspective? First, it is clear that weaponry and the Dharma simply don’t mix very well. The first of the Ten Precepts is to Not Kill Living Beings, and the tenth of the so-called “minor precepts” prohibits an ordained Buddhist from storing or owning weapons. So, as Buddhists, we can repudiate our insane national obsession with firearms by simply observing the precepts.

But that is not all we can do. We can live our lives with the kind of compassion that notices the pain and suffering of other people. We can refrain from ridicule, and we can teach this to our children. By living this way, just maybe we can help the troubled person who is prone to “rejection sensitivity”— or at the very least, we can notice their dysfunction, and flag their suffering to the attention of professionals whose intervention may prevent a catastrophe. This is how compassion can save lives, by not being always self-absorbed and instead, being attuned to the suffering of others.

And of course, we can support ideas that will reduce our insane, insecure and dysfunctional national obsession. Although it is not a Buddhist text, the Tao Te Ching has a passage which perfectly coincides with the Buddhist perspective on this problem: “Weapons are instruments of ill-omen, therefore followers of the Way never own them or have anything to do with them.”