Mass Shootings: Part 2 - A History of Violence

The first “mass shooting” as we now understand it probably took place at a San Diego McDonalds in 1984. On July 17 of that year, James Huberty called a San Diego mental health clinic to request an appointment. He left his details and waited patiently by the phone for hours for a return call, but because he had been so calm when asking for the appointment, his call was logged as a “non-crisis” inquiry and ignored. The next day, he kissed his wife, said goodbye to his daughters, and drove to a busy McDonalds in San Ysidro.

Huberty walked inside and aimed a shotgun at one of the cashiers and pulled the trigger. The shotgun didn’t fire, so he gunned her down with an Uzi. He then murdered several more inside the restaurant, walking from table to table and screaming at people before shooting them at point blank range. He went outside and gunned down a trio of boys who had rode up on their bikes. He then saw an elderly couple who were walking toward the entrance, and he shot the woman in the face with the shotgun and wounded the man. As the old man lay cradling his dead wife, Huberty cursed at him, then shot him in the head. After a gun battle with police, a SWAT sniper killed Huberty with a shot to the heart. Twenty-two people had been killed, including an infant, and nineteen were injured. The killer left no letter or manifesto, and no traces of drugs or alcohol were found in his body. He’d been fired from his job recently for poor performance, so that may have contributed, but many people have been fired. “He didn’t like anybody,” said the San Diego Police Chief, and that’s about as close as anyone was able to come to a motive.

Nothing quite like the massacre in San Ysidro had happened before in America. Charles Whitman had gunned down over a dozen people from a tower at the University of Texas in 1966, but he had an aggressive brain tumor that pushed him to madness. The slaughter inside that McDonalds felt like something different, something terrifyingly modern in its melding of fast food and television cameras and an addled sociopath ignored by an ineffective and impersonal bureaucracy. It was something unfathomable, and yet something that also seemed built from various parts of a modernity that was on the fritz. It was not the political attacks that terrorized the 60s and 70s, nor was it a robbery or mugging or something for material gain, as plagued the cities in the 1980s. This was chaos, pure destruction — a splattering of blood on brightly colored plastic as focus-grouped jingles played over the McDonalds Muzak machine. A Frankenstein’s monster of the Television Age.

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As the 80s rolled on, the madness made its way into the workplace. What popular culture came to call “going postal” referred to a string of mass shootings at U.S. post offices, the first and most deadly being the massacre at a post office in Edmund, Oklahoma, in 1986. On August 20 of that year, a postal worker and Marine Corps veteran named Patrick Sherrill went to the office and sought out a pair of supervisors who had reprimanded him the previous day. One had overslept and wasn't in yet, but Sherrill found the other and killed him with a .45 caliber pistol. He then went about the building shooting others at random before he put one of his pistols to his forehead and shot himself. He killed fourteen people and injured six.

The slaughter at the Edmund post office remains the deadliest workplace shooting in American history, and began an odd string of seven different killings at post offices over the next twenty years, with other scattered in the years after that. The most recent was in 2017, when a postal worker named DeShaune Stewart walked naked into a post office in Dublin, Ohio, to kill his supervisor and the area postmaster. Workplace attacks like these came to be known as “rampage killings,” and over time they would become a looming specter within American workplace culture in a way that hadn’t existed before the 1980s. As corporate culture tightened its technocratic screws and sought new inhuman ways to drive productivity and compliance, it became good advice to keep an eye on the guy who looks like his mind might be a bit strained at the weekly all-hands meetings.

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1991 saw an attack similar to the one at the San Ysidro McDonalds, when 35-year-old George Hennard drove his pickup truck through the front window of a Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas. He exited the vehicle carrying two pistols, then walked around the restaurant shooting everyone he came across save for a woman carrying a baby, to whom he said “You with the baby. Get out before I change my mind.” Hennard killed twenty-three people and wounded twenty-seven that day, then shot himself in the head when he ran low on ammunition.

Like with James Huberty in San Ysidro, Hennard left no manifesto or letter or anything spelling out his motive. Acquaintances of his in Killeen said he had long shown antisocial tendencies, and often engaged in angry confrontations with people in town. He appeared to harbor a general hatred of women, had stalked some of them in town, and shouted “Bitch!” at some of his female victims during the attack before shooting them. Descriptions of Hennard painted a picture of chaotic rage ambling around an aimless life, a human bomb created from both everything and nothing with a lit fuse that had run out of length.

The Luby’s location cleaned up the blood and broken glass and reopened a few months later.

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Columbine had a prelude of sorts in 1998, when 15-year-old Kip Kinkle murdered four people in Springfield, Oregon. Kinkle had been complaining of voices in his head commanding him to commit acts of violence, and he got in trouble at school for putting a loaded handgun in his locker. Kinkle’s mental state deteriorated and the voices grew louder, and the afternoon after being sent home from school pending expulsion, he murdered both of his parents, coming up behind them one at a time and shooting them in the back of the head. He stayed home with their bodies that night as he played Wagner on the family’s sound system. The next morning, he drove to his high school with a pair of pistols and a hunting rifle and over a thousand rounds of ammunition, and began shooting at students on an outside patio. He killed two of them and wounded twenty-five more before a group of students tackled him to the ground.

When the police went to Kinkle's home to find the bodies of his parents, Wagner was still playing on the sound system.

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All of these acts of violence were unique, but their nature and their velocity heralded a new era of anti-social mayhem in American culture. The events cascaded into the Columbine Massacre in 1999, and from there into a 21st Century where the slaughter of strangers became much more frequent, even as the general violent crime rate declined amid purposeful and brutal crackdowns by law enforcement (that trend has since reversed). What before may have happened once a decade throughout the entirety of the United States now happens several times a year. Though still much more rare than other violent crime, this brand of killing shocks because we know it suggests something more profound about what has happened to American society in the last fifty years.

And so the rage expressed by the killers has leeched into the poisoned public discourse of a culture trying to figure out why this is happening — an addled and flailing culture that becomes more fractured by the day.