ISLAND OF LOST SOULS
The Sniper
Reflections on a murder spree.
What to do about a sniper on a murder spree? Catch the criminal, comfort the suffering; grow stronger as a nation. A writer can't help with the main items, one and two. (Anyway, this writer can't.) But every writer should do his little bit to assist with three.
Aristotle believed that tragedy onstage should create "catharsis" ("purification" or "purgation") by engendering terror and pity. A real tragedy does likewise, but should also increase empathy, and our historical grip. When I hear "sniper" I think Ernie Pyle, who told the story of the U.S. infantry's brutally hard fight against Germany and Japan in World War II. Snipers enter the story after D-Day. The picture is hard to grasp, but a sniper murdering people near Washington, D.C. (where you have friends and the friends have children and you go to visit them), makes it just slightly easier.
After D-Day, allied infantrymen pushed the Germans back through Normandy--darting and crouching, panting and shooting and dying their way through small fields enclosed by dense hedges infested with Germans. Pyle described the scene in "Brave Men" (which might be the best book title in history). As the Germans retreated they left snipers behind, hidden in the hedges, to kill Americans until their food or ammunition ran out, at which point they surrendered--counting on America's famous forbearance toward defeated enemies. (Here we stop to ponder German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's worries about whether American war-making principles are quite up to Germany's high ethical standards.) "There is something sneaking about it," Pyle writes about these German sniper attacks--you can feel him steadying himself--"that outrages the American sense of fairness."
Pyle wanted Americans at home to see what the war was really like. It hit home with special force when Pyle himself was killed by a sniper. His last book ends with an Associated Press item datelined Ie Shima, Ryukyu Islands, April 1945: "Ernie Pyle, war correspondent, beloved by his co-workers, GIs and generals alike, was killed by a Japanese machine-gun bullet through his left temple this morning."
Israel has no Ernie Pyle to report with simple, honest, straightforward, unsentimental passion on the war she is fighting. But reading about the D.C. sniper, I think about Israel too, where parents are assigned to figure out every morning how to deploy their children so as to minimize the chances of their being blown up, murdered by some hero of the Palestinian resistance. Palestinian heroes, like German snipers, don't mind surrendering when no further random-murder opportunities present themselves.
How do you prevent crimes like the D.C. murders? I don't know; but I do know that John Donne claimed in 1624 that no man is an island. And at the time that was no mere theological assertion, it was a fact; but sometime during the 20th century, it stopped being true. In modern America (and for the last half century at least), many men are islands. The vast majority are harmless; no doubt nearly all are unhappy; a few are potential mass murderers. Citizen murderers of the D.C.-sniper type are drawn from the (in Donne's sense) island population.
Tools for mass murder--guns, bombs, poisons--have been widely available for centuries. The police work of past centuries was incomparably more primitive than today's. But on the whole, private murder sprees are a fairly new thing.
Is it possible that everyone has a right to privacy, but not anonymity? Or: that everyone has the right to be known, at least by someone? And the duty to be known? In a society where no man is an island, any sufficiently bizarre murderous act would set off a light bulb in someone's mind: it seems like a thing X might do. We need suspects. But we also need to decrease the potential murderers' tendency to become actual.
There is no more affable, neighborly country than America, and the right to be known (if only as an eccentric loner) used to be taken for granted. Size, suburbs and the impersonality of modern commerce have changed all that. Maybe we should change it back. I don't know how. I can think of suggestions, but none that would work.
A final point. After September 11, many American liberals pointed out that, no matter how enraged you felt, it was an especially good time for Americans to underline their unshakable belief in religious toleration and their acceptance of Muslim Americans. The liberals were right; many Americans duly sounded off. The unsolved D.C.-area murder spree is another fine opportunity for principled people to put themselves on record.
Anyone who has read John Lott's "More Guns, Less Crime"--a cool, calm, collected, unanswerable proof that widespread gun ownership leads to lower crime rates--please stand up. Owning a gun is no help whatsoever in fending off a hidden sniper. It is plenty of help if a criminal breaks into your bedroom, and in certain other unpleasant situations.
Last January, a lone gunman on a killing spree at a Virginia law school was stopped by three brave students--two of whom had run for their cars, grabbed their guns and rushed back to point their weapons at the killer. (Mr. Lott himself points out that of the 280 news stories he had turned up on this law school shootings, all but four had somehow forgot to mention that the heroic students had been armed with guns.)
All you rational, honorable, facts-not-emotions Americans who spoke up for Islam last September--and more power to you!--how about a big rousing cheer for gun ownership right now?
Mr. Gelernter, a professor at Yale, is the author, most recently, of "Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology" (Basic Books, 1999).
