The Colorado Shootings and Beyond

Maik Nwosu

Last week, the world witnessed what has now become a deadly American ritual: another public shooting, in Colorado. On Sunday, December 9, a 20-year-old white man with a handgun opened fire at the Youth with a Mission office in the Denver suburb of Arvada. Apparently, the gunman was offended that his request to spend the night at the mission was refused. Notably, Youth with a Mission prepares young people, especially, to be missionaries around the world. About 12 hours later, a gunman with a rifle opened fire in the main foyer of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs. Police believe that the two shootings are connected. In all, five people, including the gunman, were killed, and five others wounded. The gunman was shot dead by a member of the church’s armed security. The Colorado shootings occurred only a few days after a 19-year-old white man opened fire at a mall in Omaha, Nebraska, killing eight people – including himself. A few months earlier, America had witnessed its worst public shooting when a student at Virginia Tech shot and killed 34 people, including himself.
In the dying year, 2007, too many of these public shootings took place – for reasons ranging from sadomasochistic depression to things buried too deep in the psyche to be entirely fathomable. It seems that for many more young Americans, it is a new kind of ‘cool’ to try and shoot the world around them to tatters when something goes wrong in their own private universe – some sort of ego-massage or an attempt to master the world for the span of a headline, even one dimmed in blood. Is there something American about this? Is there something about the country and the people that explains these deadly eruptions?
Or is there even something about the midwestern State of Colorado in particular that explains this latest shooting? In the past year or so, there have been a number of such shootings in Colorado, a state still remembered by many for the shocking Columbine school shootings. Too many shootings. Too many killings. The month that I moved to Denver, the capital city of Colorado, a man went into a popular store and simply opened fire. Every time I go into that store now, I can’t help wondering if that would happen again. Because it could. These shootings are not statistical fillers; they recondition lives. And to universally begin to comprehend the meaning of their meaning is to look beyond specific geographies. Denver, fondly called “the mile-high city” because it is one mile above sea level, is the New York or the cosmopolitan centre of the Rockies region. Ranked as the twenty-fifth largest city in the US, it has the tenth busiest airport in the world. Yet, besides the busier and the glitzy districts such as the downtown area, there is a suburban feel to the city that makes you sometimes wonder whether it is a village that thinks it is a city or a city that has not forgotten that it was once a village. Denver, and Colorado at large, in fact seems too sane a place for these shootings.
If these shootings are not uniquely American or particular to Colorado, then the answer – not that there is a tidy one waiting patiently to be unravelled – perhaps lies somewhere else. There is undeniably something about America that apparently facilitates these shootings – the liberal gun laws, the fragile egos, the solitude or void that explains rising suicide rates –, but we live in a world increasingly troubled by a rage of violence that clearly extends beyond geographies. The world is incredibly old, but we have not become correspondingly wise. In fact, it seems that each new generation arrives at the frontier all over again and that our world is forever commencing.
On the Sunday that the Colorado shootings happened, I was returning to Lagos after a weekend trip to Onitsha. At Ore, the road became impassable because the Lagos-bound traffic had somehow taken over all four lanes, the two for traffic to Lagos as well as the two for traffic from Lagos. Everywhere, there was the usual Nigerian lament: “When will we ever learn?” It is, of course, quite a leap from blocking the traffic to shooting people, but it is not as distant as it first seems. There is a comparable logic of dominion and violence that underwrites them – the same logic that perhaps explains forty or fifty armed robbers banding together to take over an entire street in Iju, about vaccine trials rendering hundreds blind in Kano, about public corruption that results in preventable deaths because hospital infrastructures are consequently underdeveloped.
In America, these shootings point to individuals gone amok while in Nigeria the entire society or system sometimes seems to have become unhinged. And it is not so much about what the government can do for us, even though that is a significant part of the problem, but about what we can do for ourselves and the people around us. About our sense of self and our public spirit. Which is a pointer to what America, Nigeria, and the world desperately needs in this century: a rebuilding of our sense of community and a rediscovery of the humanism that makes us better than animals. Whether we live in America or in Nigeria, the tide of violence, sudden or insidious, should make us pause. Because we are in the world and the world is in us.