Why was there so little reaction to recent mass college slayings?
Left, students and others gather for a candlelight vigil after a shooting that left three students dead the night before at the University of Virginia Monday, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Right, officers at an apartment complex south of the University of Idaho campus on Sunday, where four people were found dead. Credit: Zach Wilkinson/The Moscow-Pullman Daily News via AP, AP/Shaban Athuman
I don’t know how to live in a society where we hardly skip a beat when a gunman kills three fellow students on a university campus.
That the three dead, and the alleged killer, were all current or former football players at the University of Virginia makes the lack of media splash even more astonishing.
And the fact that there were actually two mass slayings of college students within 24 hours, the other one leaving four dead in an off-campus apartment at the University of Idaho — and that even the dual tragedies sparked so little interest or outrage — what is this nation becoming?
Christopher Darnell Jones, 22, a University of Virginia student who was on the football team in 2018 but did not play while rehabbing an injury, has not been on the team since. Late Sunday, on a bus, he allegedly shot five football players who’d just returned from a field trip Jones also attended. Three died, one was seriously injured, one has been released from the hospital.
Jones faces three charges of second-degree murder. His father says his son had become “extremely paranoid” and believed people had been picking on him. Word of those killings came on Monday morning’s news shows, but coverage was light. And the 24-hour news stations, later in the day, gave it little attention.
Tuesday morning, I texted a friend, sharing my shock that at no point in the day had I discussed that killing with anyone.
In reply, my pal texted, “And Idaho … and it’s expected,” adding the vomiting-face emoji at the end.
But the implication, of tragedy in Idaho, meant nothing to me until I Googled.
Police in Moscow, Idaho, believe an edged weapon killed the four students this past weekend. The bodies were found Sunday after an anonymous 911 call. The town and campus are on edge; police have neither apprehended nor named a suspect.
And both mass murders have been relegated to the glove box of our consciousness, like an old map. It’s there, but what of it?
I’ve discussed what feels like a change in our consciousness, after so many dulling deaths, with friends and colleagues. They’ve pointed out that the UVA killings were not random mass murder, in that Jones knew the victims, and that the Idaho killings were not gun deaths, and likely not random, either.
And one cynical pal argued that the UVA killings would have been huge news … if the shooter were white (both he and the three dead men are Black).
He may be correct. Certainly, there are regrettable differences in how suspects and victims are covered, based on race and age and attractiveness and gender and income and, really, the interest level of the public.
I don’t know if that’s why these killings caused such tiny and temporary ripples. My best guess is that, in the wake of Vegas and Parkland and Sandy Hook and a hundred smaller killings we don't remember, the outrage bar is now set staggeringly high.
But we’re supposed to care more than this, supposed to be more shaken than this, there ought to be more outcry than this.
And we should care about the fact that we seem to care so little, and be shaken by it, and create more of an outcry about the lack of one.
Columnist Lane Filler's opinions are his own.
Lane Filler is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
