Shared Experiences of Mass Shootings

A Comparative Perspective on the Aftermath

Johanna Nurmi

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367884338
• eBook ISBN: 9781315440668
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Mass violence and terrorism are a salient phenomenon in the late modern society, showing no sign of decline. Proactive results from the long, ongoing debate of how to address these issues are therefore increasingly necessary – not just in the context of prevention, but also in the context of the aftermath.

Shared Experiences of Mass Shootings develops an understanding of the collective experience, consequences and recovery processes after mass shootings. Drawing from in-depth case studies of two mass shootings in Finland and comparing them with other international cases, it explores how communities work through violent tragedies employing social memory and memorialization practices that can be seen as either tools for recovery, or as something that needs to be restricted.

Contributing a novel understanding of how experiencing mass violence is deeply gendered through the social patterns and narratives of men's and women's emotions, this timely monograph will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers, interested in fields such as: Sociology of Violence, Criminology, Social Work, Memory Studies, Media Studies and Cultural Trauma.

Chapter 1

Mass Shootings

Global Reasons and Consequences

In November 2007, for the first time in Finnish history, a rampage school shooting took place when a high school senior in the small suburban town of Jokela killed eight people in his school and then committed suicide. Less than a year later, in September 2008, a very similar shooting occurred at a university of applied sciences in the town of Kauhajoki, resulting in ten victims killed and the perpetrator’s suicide. As unexpected acts of mass violence, these shootings seemed inconceivable, and were understood in public discussion as deeply shocking for the targeted communities as well as for the whole of Finnish society. The incidents pointed towards a global phenomenon of copycat rampage attacks that, before those shootings, Finland was somehow thought to be extremely unlikely to experience. Residents in both communities described their disbelief and astonishment about the fact that a mass violence incident had occurred in their home towns, which they considered peaceful and quiet environments. Locally, the shootings deeply changed the lives of the communities, at least for some time.

This is such a small town that I think everyone knew someone who was killed or a family who lost a loved one. At least everyone knew someone whose child went to the targeted school. So it was very personal for everyone in this village. (…) At some point I guess I felt like maybe I don’t want to live here anymore. The memories are always here. The school [building] constantly reminds me of [the shooting]. (…) At first it changed the community a lot. But then, little by little, things have returned to normal. But it did change things; it left a scar that now reminds us [of the shooting].¹

These were the words of a community organizer and resident in Jokela, the site of the first large-scale school shooting in Finland. Her account illustrates some of the most typical aspects of the shared experience of mass shootings that small communities go through and that the rest of the nation—and often parts of the global audience as well—witness through different media. Mass violence shakes communities. It sends everyday routines and social practices into turmoil, temporarily creating new ways of interaction and belonging. In the long term, mass violence potentially shapes the images and identities of the targeted communities. Memorials are held, communities recover, and everyday life may resume as before; but the violent event and the happenings that led to it and followed it stay in the collective memory of communities. This book describes and analyzes the shared experiences and social processes that take place in the aftermath of mass shootings.

Defining mass shootings

We are regrettably used to reading and hearing news about mass shootings occurring, especially in North America but also in many European countries. Examples since the mid-2000s include school shooting cases such as in Winnenden (Germany) in 2009 or Newtown (USA) in 2012. Shootings have also occurred in public spaces such as a pub in Uherský Brod (Czech Republic) in 2015 and a Christmas market in Liège (Belgium) in 2011. Mass shootings with political motives encompass hate crimes and acts of domestic terrorism, such as on Utøya Island (Norway) in 2011 or at the Oak Creek Sikh temple (USA) in 2012. These incidents are referred to as mass shootings, shooting sprees, rampage shootings, or active shooter attacks. The unfolding of events usually follows a similar pattern: (male) perpetrators open fire in a public place, shooting and killing people at random. Although mass shootings are relatively rare occurrences, as mediatized violence their images and meanings effectively spread around the globe, which means that they have the “potential to nurture the collective imagination of destruction and fear much beyond their physical power” (Muschert and Sumiala 2012).

It is not a simple task to define mass shootings. With school shootings, for instance, researchers use differing definitions that have different consequences for research findings and that make carrying out meta-studies challenging (Harding et al. 2002, 177–178; Böckler et al. 2013, 3–6; Larkin 2009; Lankford 2013; Kelly 2010). In general, the terms ‘mass killing’ or ‘mass murder’ refer to four or more victims being murdered during a single incident (see Fox and Levin 2003). Since the 1990s, many of these mass murders have occurred in schools (Kelly 2010, 7) or on university and college campuses: they are planned acts of mass violence that are committed by current or former students of the targeted educational establishment, and include multiple, random victims (Harding et al. 2002; Newman et al. 2004; Muschert 2007a; Larkin 2009).

Mass shootings are sometimes divided into targeted and rampage shootings, the latter involving the random selection of victims. However, some level of targeting is usually involved, even in seemingly senseless and random rampage shootings (Fox and DeLateur 2013). Perpetrators may target one victim, such as their boss, and randomly select others, such as co-workers who happen to be around. They may randomly select victims within a specific group, such as women, people of color, or a religious community. Many mass shooting incidents combine elements of targeted shootings, hate crimes, and rampages.

In this book, I define mass shootings as killings of four or more victims in a single episode, with at least some level of unpredictability in choosing the victims. This rules out shootings motivated by revenge that target only predetermined victims. I focus on mass shootings that include some kind of randomization of the victims, because this element is crucial in the aftermath; making sense of a mass shooting with random victims is notably more complicated for targeted communities than the sensemaking process after, say, a targeted revenge shooting.

Recently, acts of terrorism such as mass shootings, bombings, and attacks involving driving vehicles into crowds of people have also occurred in several European countries. While some of these attacks are also mass shootings and do include randomly selected victims, their motives, planning, and realization—as well as the public reactions to the incidents—are different from so-called “lone-wolf” attacks. In this book, while I do not concentrate on coordinated mass shootings by terrorist organizations, I do discuss acts of domestic terrorism where the perpetrators have not been confirmed as members of terrorist organizations. These include the shooting on Utøya Island, Norway, in which the perpetrator claimed to be a member of a Christian Knights Templar order that he claimed was at war with Marxism and multiculturalism (Widfeldt 2015), or the shooting at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where the perpetrator pledged allegiance to Isis (Perez et al. 2016).

This book examines the global phenomenon of mass shootings by focusing on the social processes that define and conduct the aftermaths of these incidents. I will closely analyze two Finnish mass shooting cases, contrasting them with findings and descriptions related to other cases in Europe and North America. While little might be known of the Finnish cases by people outside of Europe or the Nordic countries, there is likely a certain familiarity in the descriptions of these incidents. As mass shootings often follow a recognizable pattern that has become common around industrial countries since the mid-1990s, so, in fact, do the collective responses and memorialization practices that follow these incidents. In this book, these elements that create shared experiences of mass shootings are considered a global form that travels and is adapted differently in different geographical and cultural contexts (see Collier and Ong 2005).

The increase of traveling and the more effective and real-time media coverage have made localized crises and disasters more international and their consequences broader (Eyre 2007). The central place occupied by social media in recent years has further increased global communication that is presented from the viewpoint of individuals, adheres to emotional experience, and happens in real time. In this way, the global forms related to mass shootings and how people experience them are shaped by mediatization—the process of the media affecting and framing shared experiences, individual and collective identities, and the formation of social relations throughout the world (Muschert and Sumiala 2012). This allows people to be strongly affected by incidents of mass violence that happen on the other side of the world—especially in places and cultural contexts that are easily relatable to them.

Analyzing shared experiences of mass shootings

This book explains and analyzes collective experiences, community life and recovery processes after mass shootings. It recognizes that different recovery strategies are not only connected to local characteristics of the violent incidents and the targeted communities, but are also influenced by global, highly mediatized and gendered patterns of memorialization and collective grief. As research of mass shooting cases outside of the US and analysis of the consequences of mass shootings have been lacking (see Muschert 2007b), my aim in this book is to develop an international, contrastive perspective to the analysis of the consequences of mass shootings. I do this by conducting in-depth analysis of two Finnish cases. This book combines voices from different levels of the communities that experienced school shootings to paint a picture of how mass violence was experienced and what consequences it had in the studied towns.

Experiences can be defined as memories of events that individuals have lived through, and narrating these experiences makes them meaningful (Klein 2006). With this in mind, I have listened to the stories of distant witnesses—those who lived in the towns where the studied mass shootings occurred but who were not eyewitnesses or personally harmed in the shootings. I have also talked to crisis workers and to the parents of one of the perpetrators. While the overall narrative voice and the interpretations in this study are my own, I have tried to keep the stories and the voices from the two communities alive throughout the book.

Public discussion and media coverage on the school shootings in Finland have strongly centered on the perpetrators’ actions and on their personal lives, leaving the victims aside as a group of anonymous people without voices or faces (Hawdon et al. 2012b). The same applies to much of the international research on school shootings. The focus on perpetrators is important when the aim is to provide reasons for and explanations of why shootings and other mass violence occurs. However, at the same time, the people who live with the consequences of the shootings—not just the victims’ families but the local communities as a whole—are underrepresented and understudied within the literature on mass violence. The extensive media coverage of the perpetrators can also fuel the copycat effect, which is a considerable factor in mass shootings (Fox and DeLateur 2013). Because this study focuses on the consequences of the shootings in the targeted communities, I use detailed descriptions of the perpetrators and their actions sparingly, and provide only the background information necessary for examining the aftermath of the incidents. This enables us to focus on ordinary people’s experiences, memories and stories.

Looking at the shared experience, sensemaking and memorialization of mass shootings, this book applies the perspective of glocalization, in which the global is seen as “refracted through the local” (Roudometof 2016). The global phenomenon of memorialization after mass shootings was sometimes referred to when people in the Finnish communities reflected on the spontaneous grief and solidarity that emerged in their towns after the shootings. These global patterns do not, however, necessarily destroy or absorb local practices, but may work together to shape the actual mourning and memorialization practices that can be witnessed locally. According to Victor Roudometof (2016), glocality means “experiencing the global locally or through local lenses.” For many of the residents of the Finnish communities who lived through the mass shootings in 2007 and 2008, the experience was just that: the global phenomenon of school shootings and public memorialization were sometimes seen to have been adopted in Finland, but these practices were also described in terms of Finnish and local cultures, identities and traditions.

The unique and diverse responses to mass shootings globally share many elements in different cultural contexts, such as distant witnesses building what are called spontaneous memorials from flowers, candles, notes, stuffed animals, balloons, or other objects (see e.g. Doss 2010; Petersson 2010; Haney et al. 1997). These memorials—sometimes also called spontaneous shrines or vernacular memorials—are originally connected to the Catholic and Latin traditions of marking the sites of death, such as the roadside crosses that memorialize those killed in accidents (Santino 2006). In the United States, spontaneous memorials are often traced back to the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial Wall in 1982, where people started leaving personal objects such as photographs, medals, boots, or flags as offerings that changed the official memorial into a “memorial by the people” (Linenthal 2001, 133–134).

Throughout the book, I discuss the Finnish cases in relation to research on mass shooting cases in North America and other European countries to identify commonalities and differences. However, because very few studies have concentrated on the shared, community-level experiences, meaning-making and recovery processes after mass shootings, I mainly use material and results from the Finnish cases, contrasting them with findings from case studies and descriptions from other countries when possible.

This book develops a multifaceted understanding of the post-disaster, community-level belonging and recovery after mass shootings. I introduce a conceptualization of the community-level emotional orientations and recovery strategies after mass shootings, and explain how the interplay of these orientations and strategies shapes community-building and recovery processes and how they are connected with the gendered understanding and framing of the phenomenon. In this way, I hope to contribute an international, contrastive voice to the discussion on the consequences of mass shootings which is dominated by case studies conducted mostly in the United States—a problem also present in contemporary sociological studies on death and grief, if the analyses conducted in Anglophone countries are used to refer to “modern” or “Western” societies (Walter 2008).

Another aim of this book is to incorporate gender perspective into the analysis of the aftermath of mass shootings. I argue that gender and gendered expectations of appropriate emotional reactions are central in managing the emotional experience of mass shootings. However, in public as well as academic discussion, the consequences of mass shootings are rarely discussed as gendered phenomena. While it is noted that formal post-crisis memorialization often enforces traditional ideas of gender (Doss 2010, 165–166), there exists very little analysis of how these gendered patterns of interpreting and memorializing mass violence are reflected in local communities as they frame, manage and police the emotional reactions and experiences of community members.

In this book I am working towards a more comprehensive international picture of the consequences of mass shootings. My contribution is both theoretical and empirical: by expanding the scope of analysis to the Nordic mass shooting cases we can gain a new perspective on this global phenomenon; and, through this international perspective, we can elaborate upon existing theoretical interpretations and create a broader sociological understanding of the consequences of mass violence. Before moving on with this discussion of the global phenomenon of mass shooting, I will start by introducing the Finnish communities studied in this book, and describe the mass shootings that shook these small towns in 2007 and 2008.

Mass shootings in Finland: Jokela and Kauhajoki

Jokela

Jokela is a small suburban town in southern Finland. It is situated a 40-minute train ride from the capital, Helsinki, and its metropolitan area. With a population of 6300, Jokela is administratively part of the larger municipal district of Tuusula. Historically, the local identity centered on the match and brick industries that helped the town develop at the turn of the 20th century. The old match factory now houses a prison that employs 90 people. The present-day image of Jokela is that of a growing but quiet middle-class suburban town. A large number of its res...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Mass Shootings: Global Reasons and Consequences
• 2. Stories of Grief, Strength, and Communities
• 3. Chaotic Death: Evil, Fear, and Exclusion
• 4. The Gendered Experience of Mass Shootings
• 5. Memorialization: Practices of Solidarity and Conflict
• Index