By Elaine Carlson

When I think of superlatives I think about questions of geographic extremes. Like on earth what is the tallest mountain? The highest mountain? The longest river? The answers are Mount Kea in Hawaii (32,696 feet from base to top); Mount Everest (29,029 feet above mean sea level); and the Nile (4,132 miles). Just think if that fellow who in 1994 set up an online bookstore had decided to name it after the longest river in the world a lot of us would now be buying books and a lot of other things from Nile. 

The worlds of sports, publishing, buildings (the Empire State Building was only the tallest building in the world for 67 years but the Great Pyramid in Egypt was for 3,800 years), art and music all have records.

Recently America has had many mass shootings. And always a large part of the reporting concentrates on how the current mass shooting stands out from earlier such crimes – for example how it has more victims, the suspect is younger or traveled farther to commit the crime. 

A lot of suspects act as if they are well aware of the details of past crimes and are intent on doing something "bigger" or "better." But what gets me is how some people are willing to throw away their lives just for a chance to stand out. I know those criminals can expect to be in the spotlight for more than fifteen minutes. Still the chance to die at the scene or to have to spend a whole life in prison to me doesn't seem to be a good trade off for the notoriety. 

In an editorial National Public Radio's Director of Digital News Saaed Ahmed announced, "It's 19 weeks into the year and America has already seen 198 mass shootings. [NPR May 16, 2022]." He also says, "Around this time last year, the U.S had a similar number of mass shootings: also, about 10 a week." 

The 198th mass shooting was an attack on Saturday May 14 at Tops Friendly Supermarket in Buffalo New York. The store was in a predominately Black neighborhood. The suspect killed ten people and injured another three. He started live streaming his actions on Twitter thirty minutes before he began his attack [CNN Wed May 18, 2022]. 

Ahmed said the attack was the "deadliest mass shooting of the year in the United States." He also said, "Prior to the Buffalo attack, the largest-scale shooting this year was at a car show in Dumas, Ark., on March 19. That attack killed one person and injured 27."

In a heading in bold print he states, "Such shootings are an American phenomenon."

"The tally came from the Gun Violence Archive, an independent data collection organization," he said."The group defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people are shot or killed, excluding the shooter." 

Robert Donald, a 75-year-old man who owns Vintage Firearms in Endicott NY, personally sold the Bushmaster XM-15 semi-automatic assault rifle used in the assault to the suspect. He told reporters,"I know I didn't do anything wrong, but I feel terrible about it [NY Post May 15, 2002]."

"Donald's response – an uneasy mix of shock, innocence, and guilt --- is as familiar as it is peculiar. We have long grown used to the tiresome debates over what makes this country exceptional, yet here we have an example of an atrocity that, in the particular way it happened, could have happened only in the U.S. 

"That it is not recognized by many Americans like Donald for what it is – one of our defining failures --- proves that any full accounting of this place's singular violence is drowning in delusion and denial [Zak Cheney-Rice, America's Impenetrable Fog of Innocence:," New York Magazine May 17. 2022].

"The chain of events that ended with ten corpses on the floor of a Buffalo supermarket may be foggy for Donald, but it was clear to the alleged shooter," Cheney continues, "A 180-page manifesto that the 18-year-old [suspect] seems to have written details a trip in January to Vintage Firearms, the gun store Donald owns." 

That manifesto tells how the suspect carefully chose to go to the Tops Friendly Supermarket which was three hours from his home because the demographic data he studied showed it would have a lot of Black customers (10 of his 11 victims were Black).

The manifesto also contains a vivid account of the trip he took to that supermarket the day before his killing spree. He spent hours watching the store and was especially careful about observing its security. 

Cheney-Rice also says the suspect was familiar with the experiences of earlier teenage gunmen. He used that knowledge to decide to wear body armor and a helmet at the supermarket. Those efforts "shielded him from the bullets fired by the guard he knew would be there."

I don't know if it is really a good idea to compare mass killings and refer to some as breaking records. Could this process be the reason why some unstable people actually decide to engage in criminal activity? If so in our competitive society we can only expect to have more of those crimes, And we can look forward to many more victims as the crimes get bigger.

We all have heard the expression records are meant to be broken. And that particular adage is true for criminals as much as for musicians, writers, architects and civil engineers. And I don't know how as a society we could effectively reduce the completion and therefore the motivation for crimes.