The media, understandably, are struggling to find a reason for Stephen Kazmierczak’s shooting spree Thursday at Northern Illinios University. One phrase that keeps cropping up, in media sources across the board, is a variation on the theme that “he had become erratic after he had stopped taking his medication.” I have two big problems with this narrative.

First, erratic behavior is something more along the lines of not wearing any pants in public, or suddenly becoming a Scientologist. A meditated, multi-weapon assault on unarmed civilians is not erratic.

Kazmierczak’s attack displays a startling amount of premeditation. All the weapons used in the attack, a 12-gauge pump-action Remington 870, a Glock 9 mm, a Hi-Point .380 and a Sig Sauer 9mm, were purchased legally, and Kazmierczak possessed a valid state-issued firearms owner card. Kazmierczak had at least two types of ammunition with him and reloaded the shotgun once. All of these facts suggest directed, linear thinking. Further foresight is seen in the fact that Kazmierczak had erased his laptop hard drives, and drove to the campus, carrying the concealed guns with him.

Depending on which wildly divergent eyewitness account you read, Kazmierczak was either blindly firing bullets

into the mass of students, oblivious to whom or what he hit or he was methodically aiming at individuals, picking each one off. The commonality in all the accounts is that Kazmierczak was calm and emotionless while shooting. None of these behaviors sounds erratic. Rather, they sound like the careful planning and execution of a purposeful objective.

The second problem I have with this constructed narrative is the continuing caveat that he had stopped taking his medication. This creates a constructed separation that places a divide between the obviously deranged killer and us, normal citizens. By constructing an image of Kazmierczak as a man who was outside the confines of normal society, we avoid looking for underlying themes and causes in our own culture.

The implication in that statement is that if Kazmierczak had only continued to take his medication, he could have remained a functioning member of society, his homicidal impulses safely restrained by a cocktail of drugs: just another medicated American. By casting Kazmierczak as an Other, we are able to judge his actions through our lenses of society. If the media did not turn Kazmierczak into an Other, we would be forced to view him as a Same, as one of us, and we would be forced to find an explanation for his actions. By castigating him and separating his mindset from our societial mindset, we stop short of actually examining our own societal group and are able to demonize his actions, or at best the gun companies’.

The most disturbing aspect of this Othering is the fact that Kazmierczak fit into our societal expectations very well. A successful

graduate student with an interest in social justice and the prison system, Kazmierczak seemed the type of individual who would contribute to the betterment of society.

School shootings have been a persistent news story nearly every year, often multiple times in a year since 2000. Despite our best, and ongoing, attempts to cast these people as imbalanced, dangerous Others who are antithetical to our own established society, a clear trend has emerged. There is a deep and dangerous schism in our culture: a gulf where once a person finds himself on the far side, there is no hope of return, only violent gun-related deaths. What exactly this gulf is, I cannot say. In truth I cannot imagine the mental landscape wherein these actions seem the only recourse of grievances. But there is very obviously a state of mind wherein such actions seem the only possible course. Such an incomprehensible act demands a reason, and this is why the media begins to craft a narrative regarding the individual, as a way of interpreting and assimilating such events. However, by misconstruing and mislabeling the shooter, we continue to perpetuate an uninformed ideology.

We, as a society, need to have a better and more open dialogue about our concepts of mental illness and traumatic disorders and how we treat them. Our vain ignorance in these areas is seen in many different examples; from the way we deal with returning war vets who are left to pick up the pieces shattered lives without assistance, to our rabid desire to medicate everyone – creating a soma-induced world where we live in a pill-induced hazy of complacency.

The shooting at Northern Illinois University was neither erratic nor unplanned; it was intentional, well thought out and carefully executed. Such actions demand a frank and honest evaluation about our current social trends and to simply pigeonhole Kazmierczak as an unmediated erratic Other simply ignores the larger issue of society-based causal factors.

By labeling Kazmierczak as a sufferer of mental illness off his meds, we place the blame on him for refusing to take his medications. With so many school shootings in the recent years, the time has come to examine society at large. Kazmierczak is indicative of a larger anti-social trend, which, until examined and dealt with, will continue to fester, resulting in more deaths and more tragedy.

– Quincy Miller is a senior in English from Altoona.