Tom Diaz - Tragedy in Aurora: The Culture of Mass Shootings in America

Tom Diaz is a graduate of the University of Florida and of the Georgetown University Law Center. He clerked for Chancellor William Duffy of the Delaware Court of Chancery after graduation from law school. Although he practiced law in Washington, D.C., from time to time, he has generally preferred to follow his muse into research and writing projects, eventually focusing on books about guns, gangs, and terrorism.

Diaz was a reporter covering national security affairs at the Washington Times newspaper from 1982 to 1985, after which he was promoted to assistant managing editor responsible for overseeing the papers overall news operations. During this period he also traveled to and reported from Central America during the conflicts of the mid-1980s, as well as India, Pakistan, the former Soviet Union in transition, and the Middle East (where he covered the first Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm). After leaving the Washington Times , he studied and wrote about terrorism and international organized crime at a small think tank, the National Strategy Information Center in Washington, from 1991 to 1993.

He was Democratic counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Crime and Criminal Justice from 1993 to 1997, where his subject-matter specialties included terrorism and firearms regulation. He later became senior policy analyst at a Washington-based gun violence reduction organization, where he wrote monographs about the American gun industry, its products, and their impact on public health and safety.

Diaz grew up in the family of a career army officer and learned to shoot in the Boy Scouts. He enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1958. After his active duty he served in the air force reserve and in the District of Columbia Air National Guard, where he was a firearms instructor. He was honorably discharged in 1964 but joined the Maryland Army National Guard in the 1970s, where he became an antitank platoon sergeant. He also served as a reserve police officer in the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department. As a result of his military service and his continuing personal interest in recreational firearms, Diaz is familiar with most types of military and civilian firearms. He handled his first AR-15 (later M16) assault rifle in 1965 in Bangkok, Thailand, while serving as the civilian administrative officer for an Advanced Research Projects Agency joint military research and development field unit. Diaz supports responsible gun ownership. But largely as a result of his work on the issue as a congressional staff member, he came to believe that the gun industry and its allies have grossly and dangerously distorted the American domestic gun market.

Lonnie and Sandy Phillips are the parents of Jessica Ghawi, who was murdered in the massacre at the midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises in the summer of 2012 at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater. In order to attend the trial of Jessis killer, they rented out their home, bought a camper trailer, and lived on their friends property for four months. After the trial, Lonnie and Sandy decided they would live off their retirement money so they could travel the country speaking on gun violence prevention and forming coalitions with other survivor groups. In the six years since their daughters death, they have been on the ground in the immediate aftermath of ten mass shootings and founded the nonprofit Survivors Empowered, which provides resources, guidance, and a soft place to land for survivors of gun violence.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Diaz, Tom, author.

Title: Tragedy in Aurora : the culture of mass shootings in America / Tom Diaz ; with Lonnie Phillips and Sandy Phillips.

Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019001791 (print) | LCCN 2019015883 (ebook) | ISBN 9781538123447 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781538123430 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Mass shootingsUnited States.

Classification: LCC HM866 (ebook) | LCC HM866 .D538 2019 (print) | DDC 364.152/340973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001791

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

DEATH: There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said,

Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture, now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.

The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?

That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

From Sheppey , a play by William Somerset Maugham

012 was a bad year in America for gun violence. For public mass shootings it was horrible.

Public mass shootings are those thunderclap events when someone armed with a gun, usually a male, walks into a public space and kills as many innocent people as he can. They are a special subclass of mass shootings. Death itselfadministered clinically on an impersonal and industrial scaleis both motive and objective. American polemicists produce acres of writing and terabytes of electronic disputation splitting angry hairs about what exactly is a mass shooting or a mass murder, how many there are, and whether their number is waxing or waning. But public mass shootings are like pornography. You know one when you see it, or hear about it, or God forbid are caught up in it. The names of the venues are instantly inscribed in our lexicon, entries in a thesaurus of social and moral decay.

Parkland. Las Vegas. Orlando. San Bernardino. Aurora. Sandy Hook. Virginia Tech. Fort Hood. Sutherland Springs. The list goes on, and even more will be added tomorrow, next month, or next year.

This book is largely, but not entirely, about public mass shootings. Not entirely because it is impossible to separate all the strands that weave together all manner of gun violence in America and indeed the world. Popular firearms designs, global gun industry marketing, background checks, preventative mental health interventions, constitutional rights, cultural divisions, and ultimately the paralysis of polarized politics are wound tightly around and knit through any discussion of any form of gun violence in America.