well sir I guess there's just a meanness in the world.

photo by Michael Kravits

So there was a shooting in a mall in Omaha yesterday - SKS Russian military assault rifle, wielded by a man with military hair and a camouflage vest.  Nine people dead, including the shooter: six employees, two customers.  I've never been to Westroads, but I was just at Lincoln's Von Maur store last weekend.  My mother and I always make fun of Von Maur and try our best to not fit in there - it's the Midwestern attempt at Macy's and Bloomingdale's, with live grand piano players and hundreds of Christmas trees and Juicy Couture and ridiculous prices.  The wealthiest families in Lincoln go there, mothers and daughters with matching perm-straight hair and Louis Vuittons.  Most of my radio stations are Omahan, so I spent the trip to the grocery store listening to survivors sobbing to reporters: "He was tall... so tall... that's what I noticed about him, he was real tall."  And then I went into Hy-Vee to buy milk and salmon and listen to "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" and "My Favorite Things".  

Within an hour the impulse for online, small-time politicos to make a statement could not be stifled.  There's the people who wanted to know if the shooter was shouting "Allahu Akbar", there's the people who said it was because Bush had just been in Omaha an hour earlier, there's the people who said "no more guns" and the people who said "concealed carry for everyone, because you can't rely on law enforcement to protect you". 

In fact Robert Hawkins was "a lost pound puppy that nobody wanted", fired from his McDonalds job for stealing seventeen dollars, dumped by his girlfriend, rejected by Army recruiters, a former ward of the state who'd already received $25,000 worth of psychological services and care, and a drop-out of ultra-competitive public high school Papillion-La Vista.  The middle class family he was staying with thought he was improving, having gotten his high school equivalency and driver's license after dropping out.  There was some marijuana, some alcohol, some misdemeanors.  He'd always been depressed.  He wanted to get out of Omaha.  He stole the gun from his stepfather.  His suicide note said he was a piece of shit, was sorry for everything, didn't want to be a burden anymore and now he'd be famous.  "Like a star," as a friend said.  "He was a good guy."  His gun shot was self-inflicted, as it almost always is.  He was younger than I am - 19.  The recruiters said he was "an average teenager". 

I guess he might be famous.  It's the worst shooting spree since Charles Starkweather in 1958, whom every Nebraskan knows.  On the other hand it feels like these things happen so often nowadays, and all that's remembered is "a man in [city, state] shot [#] people at a [location] in [date]", footnoted at the end of the article when the next one happens. 

Nobody here thinks anything makes sense.  One of the Omaha cops said he hoped everybody could get back into the holiday spirit soon.  From Canadian Reuters: "We're a family business," said Jim Von Maur, chief executive of the chain of 22 department stores. "This is just devastating."