Northern Ill. University: Was the Killer Crazy, or the Campus Hopeless?

Unlike Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui -- a sullen misfit who could barely look anyone in the eye, much less carry on a conversation -- Kazmierczak appeared to fit in just fine. -- Deanna Bellendi, Associated Press

Why? Why did this rage massacre at Northern Illinois University happen? Why did Steven Kazmierczak, "armed with three handguns and a brand-new pump-action shotgun he had carried onto campus in a guitar case," step from behind a screen on the stage of a lecture hall at NIU and open fire on a geology class, killing seven, wounding many more?

The explanations are a repeat of the ones we hear after every other massacre, leading nowhere: gun crazy, evil perp (Nazi, anti-Semite), didn't take his meds, broke up with girlfriend ... none of them are satisfying, none of them lead us anywhere except away from genuine examination.

In my book Going Postal I proposed looking at these uniquely American and uniquely post-Reagan massacres without cheap moral blinders. Look at the setting of the crime, look at the people who live in that setting, and look at the genealogy of the crime.

These rage massacres began in the mid-1980s in post offices, one after another, all seemingly "senseless." Mass killings like the one in Edmond, Oklahoma postal massacre in 1986 which left 14 dead, were quickly transformed into water cooler joke material: The phrase "going postal" replaced "having a cow," and the clash between the Happy Days-era world of mailmen and dawning age of rampaging maniacs was too silly, and seemingly safely confined, to be spared this transformation into cheap black comedy.

But by the end of the 1980s, the water cooler crowd started getting shot as well: workplace massacres spread like a nasty virus from the postal service to wider private sector, and they haven't stopped. The jokes got more nervous. Workplaces transformed into little Atticas, with surveillance cameras, badges, armed rent-a-cops, along with snitches and mutual suspicion.

But the jokes about "going postal" didn't really end until rage massacres spread to the next logical place in Middle American life: our middle-class schools. Suddenly horror and revulsion overwhelmed the irony. Privately, in the safe anonymous world of the Internet, the Columbine killers have become heroes to untold numbers of America's kids, just as they'd set out to do. Like so many terrorists and insurgents, Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold set out on a suicide mission to "kickstart a revolution." And like many successful terrorist or insurgency movements, they succeeded by spawning an ever-growing supply of schoolyard killers.

Over the past few years, the killings leapt from the K-12 schools to universities. Not the top universities, which seems significant to me, but rather to obviously-second-rate universities, as well as the third-rate "vocational" schools. This is relevant, because in a culture so obsessed with being number one, and where the socioeconomic gap between the Number Ones and Everyone Else is growing so wide that it's starting to take on medieval dimensions, it's the ones stuck in the vast middle who face real existential terror.

We're just starting to learn a bit about the NIU killer, 27-year-old Steven P. Kazmierczak: he's been described as a "fairly normal, unstressed person," as well as a bright honors student. Before there was a photo and a name, he was described as a "skinny white guy" wearing all black and a ski mask. In other words, a caricature of evil. Now, one look at the photo of the pimply, pinheaded, goggle-eyed Kazmierczak, and it's hard to match the evil to the recognizably twerpy, sympathetic face.

A Northern Illinois law student told the Washington Post, "The person who did it is a loser. He doesn't deserve a name or picture reference. You're not Kurt Cobain if you do that."