Shoot, Shooter, Shot: the Quotidian Language of Mass Violence

Semantics are often dismissed as trivial, but they are sometimes significant in a way that extends to larger social phenomena. Le mot du jour is "shooter." How many times have you heard or read this word in the last ten years or so? It's everywhere. Once upon a time, the doer of a violent deed involving firearms was generally referred to as a murderer, killer, assassin, or some other term appropriate to the individual case. Those words are sometimes still used, but not as much today. They're being crowded out by the all-purpose term, "shooter." My purpose isn't to condemn everybody who uses the term, but the only thing I can say in favor of it is that it's better than calling a murderous rogue or homicidal bank-robber a "gentleman." But that isn't saying much.

It's fair to acknowledge that the word "shooter" entails some opprobrium for the person referenced by it: you probably wouldn't say or hear a sentence such as, "the shooter was defending his home from armed robbers." No, you hear it only in reference to people who have committed a crime or even a mass murder. Still, it's often employed in such a way as to bestow a status akin to normalcy on whomever we're talking about: not so much in the sense of, "What do you do for a living, Frank?" "Me? I'm a shooter" but perhaps worse than that: it isn't so much that we're saying a shooter is like a bricklayer, baker, or candlestick maker, but we may be granting him a special, heightened status. We're bestowing occupation-bling, I suspect: a shooter isn't just any fool; a shooter is someone who gets his or her name in the paper in big bold-face type, often while the victims go largely unlamented and scarcely named. It's almost glamorous to be a shooter, it wood appear, like something straight out of a violent rap video. There is collusion in this act of bestowing, a cooperation between language and social fact: the truth is, our society has become so depraved and violent that hearing about "shooters" isn't out of the ordinary. Recently came Tucson's turn -- it's a nice, laid-back university town that deserves better than to become famous for a murder spree with political implications.

I think it's worth considering whether this kind of term is doing some damage, or is evidence of some damage, to the country's social woof and warp. To me, the word is just as likely to obscure what we are trying to understand as the metaphysical term "evil." It's satisfying to declare someone or something evil, but when we do that, we short-circuit genuine analysis. It's easier to use the almost morality-free, decontextualized word "shooter" to describe the perpetrators of certain kinds of gun violence. This is not an argument about gun control, it's an argument about a word and what our current way with it may reveal. What does the unreflective, repetitive, media-disseminated usage of the term "shooter" reveal about who we are and where we find ourselves at the present time?