The preliminary hearing for James Holmes had been held back in early January 2013. The prosecution had its first opportunity to present some of its evidence, and then Judge Sylvester would decide if there was enough for Holmes to go on trial (in this particular case, the hearing was merely a formality that both sides had to go through; nobody doubted that Sylvester would bind the young man over for trial).
We asked Eric to join us at the hearing and watch the legal system in action, something he’d never done before. Many parents have one day a year when they can take their kids to the office and show them how they make a living. Since we were self-employed and worked at home, we’d never been able to do this; going to court with him would be something akin to that. He agreed to come along, and we all bundled up for the trip out to the Arapahoe County Justice Center. A large group of media and spectators wanted to attend the proceeding, and all of us had to stand outside at dawn in the bitter cold and ice to see if we’d get a seat in the courtroom. Fortunately, the three of us did, and we crowded in next to several people around Eric’s age, a few of whom were there to support the defendant. Brightly colored spiked hair, black clothing, tattoos, and attitude were on full display.
Eric watched the morning session before telling us that he was driving back to the house in his own car. The details of the case, the forensic evidence, and the other things his parents had been sitting in courthouses and absorbing for the past couple of decades didn’t interest him much. A little police testimony about what Holmes had actually done inside the theater was enough for him. He was more interested in the society and culture that had produced Holmes than in the physical results of the rampage. As he’d told us more than once, his generation had grown up with this kind of violence and was more or less inured to it. They’d never been aware of an America that wasn’t at war somewhere in the world or wasn’t home to these mass shootings and had come to accept all of this as nearly normal.
Something else Eric repeatedly told us was that his male friends didn’t pay a lot of attention to books. They played video games, watched movies and documentaries, and viewed brief film clips online; outside of the classroom, they didn’t read many books for recreation or pleasure. They were too busy or their focus was elsewhere. The instant gratification of new forms of media had greater appeal than spending hours reading about one thing intently.
This wasn’t what we wanted to hear, but if you practice investigative journalism long enough, you get used to confronting obstacles in front of you.
“If your work was easy,” someone had told us a long time ago, “everybody would be doing it.”
Our son was good at raising sticky questions, and one of them flowed from this observation: If we were trying to write something about people his age, but they didn’t read books, how did we expect to accomplish anything? It was all part of the larger challenge of taking on this very difficult subject matter. Many older people also didn’t want to know the details of what Holmes had done or want to think about the mass-shooting phenomenon.
Sometimes, we were asked to speak publicly about the books we’d written. When we brought up the James Holmes case at these gatherings, one person or more inevitably said something like, “Why is it taking so long for him to go to trial? Why do we have to go through all this? Why don’t they just kill him? Why don’t they line him up in front of the police and shoot him or electrocute him or hang him or give him a lethal injection or do whatever they do to people like him now? Why all the waiting? Everyone knows he’s guilty, so why can’t we just get rid of him?”
The longer the Holmes defense team avoided going to trial, the more people naturally became frustrated with the delays, and the more of these comments we heard. Coloradans didn’t understand a legal system that devoted years to bringing a confessed killer to trial. They didn’t grasp why lawyers would fight for so long over a definition of legal sanity or insanity. They didn’t see any reason to take months to select a jury for an obviously guilty man. They didn’t like paying for all this, especially when they hadn’t yet seen any results. But there was more to their grumblings than that. Fundamentally, they didn’t understand mass shootings, were appalled by them, and wanted them to go away and never come back. They were reluctant to talk about this, and at the start of our conversations about Holmes, we usually heard things like:
“If we just didn’t have to think about these tragedies anymore . . . If these kids would straighten up or if they’d go off somewhere and shoot themselves and leave the rest of us alone . . . They’ve had all the advantages in life, and now they’re doing this to the rest of us?”
All of this reflected the profound American desire for a quick, easy, and sanitary resolution to things . . . Just line him up against a wall and shoot him.
Yet if we didn’t stop there, if we kept the discussion alive, we could eventually break through this initial resistance and engage with people on the issue. They’d start to listen and to ask questions and to share their own ideas and feelings, which were always more complicated than take him out and kill him in order to cut the taxpayers’ expense, which could easily run into the millions. Gradually, they’d begin to see themselves as part of this new and disturbing reality, instead of being totally removed from it or just victimized by it.
From a different direction, in the off-Broadway Barrow Street Theater in New York City, British comedian Jonny Donahoe was putting on a one-man show about mental illness called Every Brilliant Thing. Before each performance he walked through the audience and gave everyone a slip of paper containing a phrase like “ice cream” or “water fights”—little reminders that his on-stage character used to help cheer up his suicidal mother. In trying to engage people in a very uncomfortable subject, Donahoe asked them to become part of the show and to act out various roles with him. He employed humor to get them to connect with a painful reality.
“I think that’s just the best way you can deal with it,” he said in an interview with National Public Radio, “not just in a show, but as a human being . . . You are going to, whoever you are, at some point experience mental health issues, whether that is because you suffer from them yourself or your partner does or your parents. But it’s too common for it to pass you by.”
In our own way, we were trying to do something similar. We weren’t telling others that we had the answers to the confounding tragedies caused by mass shootings; we were simply trying to start a conversation, and to identify some of the problems, and to pose the right questions. Maybe they could help us do that. Maybe our dialogue could be useful. Maybe they could be part of our journey in writing this book.
What emerged from this was the realization that no one had ever talked with these people in any depth about this subject. While communities across America were being shattered by these shootings, those we spoke to felt no sense of community around this phenomenon. No one had asked them to participate in any kind of give-and-take about it, until now. No one had wanted to know what they thought or felt. Everyone had wanted to ignore the issue.
The underlying truth was that the challenges in America today weren’t like those in the past, when there was often a clear and obvious enemy. Now we were fighting ourselves in ways that didn’t make any sense, at least on the surface. If people could see themselves as having some involvement in these events, they began to open up about this wrenching topic and to think more about being a citizen in a troubled but participatory democracy. They began to use their intelligence and empathy instead of offering the kneejerk reaction of using violence to get rid of the rampant violence we were seeing everywhere.
And they began to realize something more pervasive and subtle: There was no leadership for dealing with any of this. No politician wanted to touch the subject and no religious leader, either, for that matter. The silence around the shootings had accomplished nothing. We were confronting something new, and that meant having to think about it in a new way. And that meant that everyone needed to contribute to the solution.
Without the start of a critical discussion in America about why young men commit mass shootings and the culture of violence that subtly justifies this behavior, there was no indication it would stop. Change starts when people realize they have choices—when they can say or do or explore what they hadn’t thought about exploring before. Change begins when they can see alternatives that they’d never thought about before.
No issue in America was more in need of alternative thinking, and alternative actions and strategies, than the mass-shooting phenomenon. There were people who’d quietly been working in that direction for years.