Life in the Big City

I don�t know what that means. We are following the sniper story with a certain detachment and grim fascination. The seventh and eighth shootings have not brought our boy to closure. I am presuming here, but I’m fairly sure our “boy” is just that. A hunter who has graduated to game that he considers always in season. I am hoping that he is not some deranged vet, preferring to think he is some slack-jawed degenerate from the back-woods, maybe a home refrigeration specialist that the traffic on the Beltway has finally driven to some Charles Whitman-like act of desperation. I think Whitman had been a Marine before he decided to climb up on the tower. This guy seems to be a little more cunning, setting up his blinds and preserving his means of retreat. More like Sniper Alley in Sarajevo, something with which we became familiar in a television sort of way not long ago.

The first four were people doing the ordinary. A guy mowing the lawn outside an auto agency. A guy topping-off his tank at a self-serve filling station. Women going about their daily routine. Nothing in common, no racial or gender agenda apparent, though we may find out otherwise when this is over, when we can connect the dots.

The initial spate of shootings happened the day before I left Colorado. I blinked when I saw the headlines in the Rocky Mountain News.

“Oh great. Now what” I said.

Yesterday it was a thirteen-year-old just arriving at Middle School back in Maryland where this string started. Ballistics testing has linked the shootings to a .243 caliber. I am pleased it is not a 30-06 like the old family piece in my closet. There were four killings in Maryland, around the Silver Spring area. Then one in the District as what might witnesses said might be a white van with two men in it moved south, down to Fredericksburg.

Dozens of white vans have been stopped, so many that the cops have taken to putting an orange sticker on them to indicate they have been checked out already. I don’t know if the pressure is geting to him. Maybe causing him to stand off further, since the last two were not kill shots. A lady was loading packages in her van outside a Michael’s craft shop at a mall. She lived. Then yesterday’s assault at the school. The kid is reported as being in critical-but-stable condition. Both of the last two were torso shots, high percentage but not necessarily fatal with modern medicine.

There is no easy way to profile this guy. He shoots  white, black, Indian and Hispanic, old and young. He has left no pattern or physical evidence or witnesses.

On the elevator going up to the office yesterday someone asked a rhetorical question about how he picked his targets. I said he probably picked his place of concealment first, and then it was just luck about who walked into the crosshairs. A strong sense of self-preservation is still working with this workmanlike and very disturbed individual.

The parents at the school were predictably distraught, and the school was predictably locked down, our usual knee-jerk reaction to a situation that is over, as if the hunter was wearing bright orange and still in his stand at the edge of the meadow. According to the radio, children are prohibited from going on recess or leaving school grounds at lunch. One father reported that when he arrived at the school to pick up his kids the blinds were down. The disturbed individual gunman is about to have the full attention of the National government come down on his head, since the Attorney General and the President are apparently willing to loan the resources mobilized for the Global War of Terrorism to track him down. At a press conference last night the representatives of all the law enforcement agencies in the area, all the jurisdictions, were present. They seemed very irritated. They must be talking to the shooter through the media, or at least that is what NPR tells me this morning.

No one here seems too panicked. We are around the Beltway counter-clockwise from the area with the greatest concentration of attacks. And we are somewhat blase to all this. After all, this is personal-scale and we have become desensitized to killing on a boutique scale after the nightmare of plunging airliners. I have quite reasonable and measured conversations with people about the advantages of living under hundreds of feet of granite, and the means we might use to minimize the inconvenience of the fallout of radiologic or chemical weapons.

There was a sharp explosion here on Saturday. It was close enough that I waited for the shards of glass to tinkle to the deck. Then the radio shut down and I realized we lost power. I sighed. Just a transformer blowing. It is interesting about how we respond to things. There was a Fellini film from the 1970s. It might have been The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoise, (�Le Charm Descrete de la Bourgoise”) made during the Red wave of bombings in Italy. Random explosions punctuated the film. They had nothing to do with the main story line, it was just something that was part of everyday life.

After all, the District produces hundreds of killings a year. A friend of mine ran the Balkan Task Force at the Pentagon during the hight of the madness there. He tried to put things in perspective. He used to take the aggregate shootings in Sarajevo and put it on one side of a viewgraph and the comparable statistics from the District on the other side. The leadership didn’t want to see it and made him take the District numbers off. We seem to get upset when only when the violence spills out into the suburbs. It will be interesting to find out what petty grievances have driven our boy to this acting-out behavior.

They are saying that the emphasis on school protection is what attracted him to the latest target.  I hope that they can catch him setting up for another one, maybe with a Predator. That is life in the big city these days. A little like living in a film by Fellini.

Copyright 2002 Vic Socotra