The structure of indiscriminate school shootings
I met badass critical geographer Kate Derickson earlier this year at a workshop on urban climate finance. She and I got to talking after the school shooting at Uvalde about what a socialist analysis of school shootings should be. I'd written a little survey of socialists have said about the issue, which I found to be all over the place. So we wrote an essay focusing on a socialist praxis of safety, but we got zero response when we pitched it to editors we knew. It was the strangest thing. A deep silence from venues we'd worked with on other projects. We could only chalk it up to a generalized foreclosure of left thinking about school shootings. So I'm publishing my section of the piece here, which tries to do a little theorizing on the question, weaving in my personal experiences.
I'm from Danbury, Connecticut, the town just west of Sandy Hook where the deadliest indiscriminate school shooting in American history happened ten years ago. I was in graduate school when I first heard the news. My mother told me. The principal of Sandy Hook Elementary, the person who rushed the shooter to try and stop him from going into a classroom, was Mrs. Hochsprung—wife of my seventh grade math teacher, Mr. Hochsprung. Thinking back to Mr. Hochsprung’s classroom and what we were all doing there, learning and teaching—what it means to have things like schools in a capitalist society—starts to bring an appreciation for the structural significance of mass shootings in school, when someone kills students indiscriminately.
The French communist philosopher Louis Althusser did the most to theorize schools in capitalism from a Marxist perspective. His famous thesis is that educational institutions—from daycares to graduate schools to education consultants—reproduce relations of production. They try and maintain the continuity of a society over time. For the ruling classes, schools are places that try and get people accustomed to living and working as they the rulers think think should. In our case, schools’ missions are usually something like preparing young people to be productive members of society. People have to learn to work, to be bossed around, to boss others around, to make money, to follow laws and vote and respect various traditions. They need to know their past, about nature, and language. They need to read maps, count money, read and follow signs. Reproduction, or the renewal of relations that define a society, requires instruction in competencies and submission.
School is an ideological state apparatus, as Althusser put it, caught up the ever contingent struggle between classes of owners and workers. Ideology in turn is an imagined relation to real conditions. The schools instruct these relations, not through physical violence but through suggestion, care, and pedagogy. Ideology charms, repression harms. He went so far as to say school is the number one most effective such apparatus for reproducing dominant capitalist relations among the swarm of ISAs like the family, religion, music, sports, arts, political parties and associations.
Incidentally, the ten deadliest mass shootings in recent history have taken place in and around ISAs like concerts, sports events, churches, and schools. The Buffalo mass shooting was at a grocery store, people shopping for food for their families to replenish their energies. The Las Vegas shooting at the concert. The South Carolina shooting at the church. While school is perhaps the most powerful reproducer of relations, Althusser notes that all ISAs educate to the extent that they recruit for ideologies.
What Mr. Hochsprung was up to at my school was educating, maintaining a certain continuity of society and thus helping bring me into society, recruiting me to society. And that’s what his wife was up to until her last moment in Sandy Hook. Schooling happens outside the point of production, which could be why socialists have a little blind spot when it comes to school shootings. It’s generally part of social reproduction, care work, the work of producing workers, which became even more intense when schools were institutionalized and made compulsory during industrialization and urbanization in the 19th century. Whereas learning happens all the time everywhere, schools for young children are institutions devoted to teaching them specific things in specific ways for specific reasons.
I taught high school for five years, three of those in Washington, DC. My first full time classroom job was at a catholic school that served a mostly Baptist working class black population. I taught literature. In one class, I was doing a lesson on plot and narrative. I was teaching about possible outcomes at the point of dramatic tension in stories. I asked students to tell me dramatic moments from their own lives. One student, a quiet but charismatic athlete, told the story of playing basketball in his neighborhood. While playing he suddenly heard fireworks, screaming, and then sirens. An ambulance drove past. His friends were yelling at him, he said, and when he looked down he saw he’d been shot in the chest. He ran after the ambulance, who was helping on another call, pleading with them to take him too. They did and he survived. He pulled his shirt up to show us the bullet wound scars on either side of him. “Went right through me,” he said.
The ruling class doesn’t want school shootings. Such an incident disrupts the process of their attempt to maintain continuous grip in the din of history. The school shooting is a violent tearing down of a society’s attempt to renew itself. What’s more, the gun is an instrument of physical violent force. It’s a tool of repression, distinct from the ideological force of pedagogical practices in which teachers and students and administrators and their various officials engage. The gun comes from the other part of the state, the part defined by repression—the lawmakers whose laws are enforced by police and defended beyond the country’s borders, where courts and prisons deal with those found to be in violation. The ruling class wants a monopoly on both ideology and repression. School shootings infringe on both to terrible effect, sicking the latter on the former.
The school shooting is thus insurgent, deadly repression on ideological reproduction. The school shooter isn’t an agent of the state. He disrupts the state. There has been a question in left circles about whether the Uvalde shooting is evidence of a failed state or a successful state. Yet the question these questions are trying to answer is what to make of a state where a teenager can go into an elementary school and fire an automatic rifle and kill young children and their teachers. The school shooting is a form of guerrilla warfare at the point of reproduction. Of course, to let a thing happen requires a form of power distinct from overtly making it happen and the extent to which the state permits school shootings to occur when it is within its power to prevent them is less about its success or failure but rather an accounting of its formation at a given time. The successful permission of insurgent warfare at its point of reproduction is a failure to maintain its continuity. Like in Children of Men, and echoing the ineffectual approach of our ruling class to the climate crisis, perhaps there is some deep agreement among those with state power that this society has no future but repression and violence. The school shooting makes us feel, as Jon Ganz noted, like maybe we don’t live in a society after all.
When I was teaching in DC, I had a student named Frank. He was a troublemaker, didn’t do much work, liked to joke around and be mean. He sat in the back of the classroom. I didn’t know what was happening in his life, many of my students dealt with extreme things outside of class. The only thing I saw him get engaged with in my class was when we read plays. He loved to read out loud. He could be funny, tense, and vulnerable. He would've thrived in a drama program, but our school didn't have one--it was a poor school being run by a bankrupt archdiocese. Frank barely passed my class. When he became a senior I only saw him once, on the DC metro, his hoodie up. I’m not sure if he saw me but he got off before I could say hello. After two years in DC, I got a teaching job at an international school in Quito, Ecuador. I moved to Quito. A few months into my job a few students who I was very close with from DC emailed me. Frank had been shot they said. He died in the hospital. I came back to the US for his funeral, but it was unexpectedly postponed after I'd have to leave back for the south. After meeting with my students, I found myself wandering DC, mourning my student, lost in the world that let him die.
But here we have to remember the police in the Uvalde situation. They failed to act. They admit to having made a mistake. Here were the state officials from the repressive apparatus, unsure of whether to face the school shooter, assuming the children were already dead and refusing to put themselves in harm’s way for their sake. Indeed, police retrieved their own children out of the school before they confronted the shooter and it was immigration police, frustrated with the local police effort, who decided to enter the classroom and confront Ramos. The repressive agents were confused, made bad calculations, hesitated. They couldn’t stop the attack on the school, perhaps more accustomed to repressing more traditional violations of capitalist relations.
Note further the insurgent quality of school shootings. They come from the same place any event might: the necessary contingency of everything social. Another reason to foreclose school shootings is that they’re free choices made by individuals counter to so many laws, norms, and practices.
The shooting at Columbine happened when I was a freshman in high school in Connecticut. I was a band geek, and a group of guys in the band were also geeks but liked to wear black trench coats to school, a goth style. After the shooting I noticed them more and imagined what I would do if there was a shooting at school. I thought I’d run to the band room and climb into one of big soft tuba cases. I’d curl up and zip it closed and hide.
To put a finer point on it, the Uvalde shooting, like the one in Sandy Hook, was an indiscriminate school shooting. This is a specific form of school shooting, different than when someone kills a certain person or groups at or near a school for a reason. Shooting up a school just to be shooting at a school—not to kill a girlfriend or a teacher or a peer who’s wronged them, but rather anyone they can get—heightens the structural significance: for the school shooter the society as it is must not continue, it’s perpetuation of itself must be violently disrupted. The indiscriminate school shooting is an apostasy and rejection of the shooter's upbringing. Indeed, Ramos killed his grandmother before going to Robb Elementary. In Jonathan Cox's recent book on gun violence and schools, Children Under Fire, a school shooter Jesse Osborne kills his father before opening fire on his elementary school down the road in South Carolina.
This trend points to an important supporting apparatus in a school shooting: the family. Perhaps the wider meaning for those impacted by the shooting—not the physical victims but their relatives and community and perhaps a world watching—is that a child is someone’s child: a father's, mother's, grandparent's. Not only is the institution devoted to producing productive members of society violent torn into, the apparatus that typically gets those children into the world and cares for them more intimately suffers violence. “My baby,” cried one of the victim’s fathers. In a way, the school shooting is just the description of the setting where the family faces the onslaught, compounding the understanding of indiscriminate school shootings as insurgent war against reproduction.
When I was getting my doctorate I taught at a community college in New York City. As part of an active shooter training for faculty and staff, they showed us the full unedited security footage from cameras in the Columbine cafeteria. I was nauseous afterward and few of us couldn't believe they’d show us that. Ever since, I’ve been unnerved while on campuses and schools, which have been my life as a teacher and then education researcher. I recently moved offices at my current job and I chose to take an office at a small graduate building a few miles off main campus. Most of my teaching is there so it makes logistical sense, but when a colleague asked me if I’d feel left out of events and happenings on main campus, I shrugged. What I thought but didn’t say is that it felt safer being off campus, away from most faculty, staff, and students.
Indiscriminate school shooters are predominantly white teenaged boys, some of whom imagine themselves achieving kind of status, mimicking the Columbine shooters, trying to break records killing more children than others have. Osborne, identifying as a Columbine-like shooter, had ambitions to be the youngest school shooter ever, achieve and push beyond the highest status in his community of Columbine worshippers.
Of course, while the school shooting intensely disrupts education in the moment it also has lasting ideological impacts. Children in the vicinity of shootings, even those who weren’t present but live nearby, can face entire lives disrupted by the trauma. The fear, anger, and loss involved in a school shooting alters psyche and subjectivity in momentous fashion. Another of Althusser’s big ideas was interpellation, the everyday ways that people get recruited to go all by themselves by certain ideologies. An interpellation is a teachable moment that makes you who you are, as a subject of your society. It's the small moments that are a big formative experiences.
Think of a population have who increasingly experienced school shootings as young children. What kind of subject does that produce? Althusser wrote that there’s no practice without ideology, no ideology without subject. Who are the subjects recruited to school shooting interpellations?
Ava, a main character of Cox’s Children under Fire, developed severe trauma after seeing a boy she loved get shot on their playground during recess in Townville, South Carolina. In one harrowing scene, Cox describes a panic episode that Ava has at her house a year after the shooting. She was happily eating when she suddenly tensed up, and her parents knew what was coming. A storm of screaming, hitting, and pushing ensued, requiring her father to restrain her and prevent her from hurting herself. During the episode, her mother tried to remind her that’s she’s Ava, saying her name over and over again. In response to this, restrained by her father, Ava screams “I’m nobody!” over and over. Another student in Townville, who jumped a fence to get away from the shooter, had chronic incontinence and couldn’t control his bowels for years. Of course, the shooter Osborne had been interpellated by the Columbine shootings and the community that emerged around it.
Ending where we began, one can understand the foreclosure of school shootings by some socialists. It’s part of the larger forgetting, as a cousin to one of Uvalde’s victims recently said: people get angry, sad, and then they forget. While certainly news cycles are frenetic and a school shooting particularly horrific, which hastens the suppression of thought about it, this forgetting must also have something to do with the structural feminization of care in the wider society, the work of care always stuffed under the rug, unpaid, recognized at best as noble and necessary but chronically eaten into and undermined by the very society whose continuity it maintains. Sue Ferguson calls this the central contradiction of social reproduction.
The first step in addressing the school shooting manifestation of this contradiction is to actually sit with it, think through it, resist the urge to forget after a period of posting, doomscrolling, and angry sadness. After refusing to forget, then comes engagement with the dialectic. What’s the negation of the school shooting negation? A socialist praxis of safety. And we’ve got resources to think through what this means. Not just laws banning assault rifles (obvious) and not just free, encouraged, effective mental health as a public service (also obvious), but a fight on the whole terrain of social reproduction and care taking into account all the apparatuses and modes of production, dominant and insurgent, that permit ruling class fractions that continue to let this happen.