Eight Years Since Sandy Hook

In memory of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre, read a brief excerpt from From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter by Seamus McGraw, out April 2021.

From Chapter 3

To Kill the Last Killer

There was nothing in his demeanor to suggest that he was being anything less than forthright. He had answered every question precisely the way cops are trained to: be succinct, stick to the facts, and above all, report only what you observed. No matter how horrible.

The investigators asked again. “You never went into the classroom?”

“I took the perimeter,” he said.

They knew there was no point in pressing him further. He wasn’t lying, if lying means that one is consciously trying to deceive. At least he wasn’t lying to them.

One or two of the other cops who had been there that day might have tried, intentionally or unintentionally, to mislead the investigators in ways that would not materially affect the outcome of the probe. Guys who might have hesitated a moment or two longer than they should have before going in may have omitted that detail in their reports, for instance. Almost every guy wants to imagine that he’s a hero. Even heroes sometimes need to believe that they’re more heroic than they are. You do enough after-action police reports, and you learn to expect a certain amount of self-image bias, and you learn to calibrate for it.

But this was different. This hard-bitten veteran cop had been one of the first officers on the scene. He had been part of one of the four-man teams that had burst into Sandy Hook Elementary School even before the full scope of the atrocity was fully understood, when all they knew was that at least one gunman with at least one semiautomatic rifle was loose in the school, and he was shooting children. His team hadn’t hesitated. They rushed toward one of the two classrooms where most of the killings had taken place with one mission: stop the killing, then stop the dying.

They hadn’t gotten there fast enough to do either. By the time they entered the classroom the massacre had already ended, and the killer had already blown his own brains out. The mass killing had lasted just eleven minutes from its bloody start to its bloody finish. They did not know that, of course, when they stormed into the building, passing the bodies of two slain adults and a wounded woman as they rushed down the hall and into the classrooms.

There are no words for what they saw that day. Children, twenty of them, not one of them older than seven, had been shot at close range by a killer armed with a Bushmaster rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition designed to inflict the most grotesque wounds to grown men on a battlefield somewhere.

And this cop had seen the worst of it. The three other members of his team, all veteran cops themselves, men who had known and trained alongside this man for years, all swore that he was right there beside them, that he did exactly what they did and saw exactly what they saw.

“I took the perimeter,” he insisted to the investigators.

That wasn’t true. But he wasn’t lying. At least not to them.

How do you measure a horror like the December 14, 2012, massacre at Sandy Hook?

Those who gaze at crystals will tell you with absolute conviction that the human soul weighs twenty-one grams, or so a physician and amateur researcher concluded in 1907 in a roundly debunked study.1

They’re wrong, of course. It’s far heavier than that. The weight of the souls of the twenty children and seven adults killed on December 14, 2012, was enough to bring most of this country to its knees, at least for a few days following the massacre. It was enough to bring a president to tears.

You can count bullets or bodies. You can measure blood spatters to the micron. But what is the measurement of horror?

Here’s one metric. A veteran cop, a man who by temperament and training is supposed to be steeled to horror, is so overwhelmed by the atrocity he witnessed that his brain simply shuts down, refuses to record it, and replaces it instead with a false memory.

“I took the perimeter,” he insists.

That’s the measure of a horror that eclipses all the horrors that came before it.

And that, say researchers, analysts, and the cops who have studied the Sandy Hook massacre and other mass shootings, may have been precisely what the murderer had in mind as he plotted the atrocity in Newtown, Connecticut.

1. “Soul Has Weight, Physician Thinks,” New York Times, March 11, 1907.

Making America Confederate Again

Mississippi and Alabama officially observe Confederate Memorial Day. Recently, a candidate for Virginia governor was endorsed by a prominent neo-Confederate at the 'Old South Ball'. Accounting for the rise in hate crimes and racially-motivated incidents since Trump's election, we're looking back at a piece of scholarship with alarming relevance today. 

In 2008, Euan Hague, Edward H. Sebesta, and Heidi Beirich, published a groundbreaking book, Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction, that described a fringe movement of political activists who promoted an ideology of Confederate nationalism. Advocating for the secession of fifteen states to form a new Confederation of Southern States, neo-Confederates advanced a politics that was at its core anti-democratic (and anti-Democratic). Of course, almost ten years later secession has not happened, but as many scholars have long suggested about political movements, what purports to be new can

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often be found by taking a deeper look at the recent past. Indeed, as President Abraham Lincoln is reported to have said, “Every effect must have its cause. The past is the cause of the present, and the present will be the cause of the future.” It is this understanding that makes Neo-Confederacy a prescient guide to what was to come. As Hague, Sebesta, and Beirich noted, neo-Confederate activists at the end of the twentieth century wanted nothing less than “to change the [U.S.] social order,” arguing for a need to transform “American cultural, educational, political and religious practices.”

As Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction describes, this meant valorizing whiteness and “Anglo-Celtic” culture, praising violence and masculinity, while simultaneously rejecting “political correctness” and international governmental collaborations, vilifying ethnic and sexual minorities, vociferously opposing non-European immigrants, and questioning American democratic processes of both the electoral system and the franchise. Neo-Confederacy wrapped these positions up in an appeal to Constitutional orginialism, “orthodox” Christianity, and a demand for national self-determination for the US South. Revisiting the book almost a decade after its original publication, one cannot but think that the collection’s assessment of this political fringe describes a phenomenon that, albeit perhaps now ostensibly detached from its forthright advocacy of a new Confederate nation-state, has moved powerfully into the mainstream of American politics. As esteemed historian James Loewen noted in the foreword, in examining neo-Confederacy, “Hague, Sebesta, and Beirich have done the heavy lifting... they have created an essential tool for those who work to bring justice and healing across racial and sectional divides in America.” Given the current state of US politics, Neo-Confederacy is an urgent primer for our new reality.

Dr. Euan Hague is a Professor of Geography at DePaul University, and Edward H. Sebesta is an independent researcher. We asked them to comment on how this 2008 collection, Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction, resonates with the rhetoric and policies advanced by the new Trump administration.

Dr. Michael Hill speaking at a Confederate Memorial Day Parade, Northport, Alabama, 26 April 1997. (Photograph by Gerald R. Webster)

A Nationalist Call to Arms

Euan Hague and Edward H. Sebesta

Like many American magazines in January 2017, Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture had on its cover a photograph of Donald Trump: “Time to Begin” read the caption. This was not the first time that we had encountered Chronicles or its publisher, the Illinois-based Rockford Institute. In the 1990s, Chronicles had led an ideological charge that rejected much of US domestic policy as unconstitutional, lamented US foreign policy and transnational organizations, decried ‘activist judges,’ and railed against multiculturalism. Its editor, and lead contributor at the time, was Thomas Fleming. Fleming had also been a cofounder of Southern Partisan magazine in 1979, an imprint of the Foundation for American Education, which regularly published interviews with leading figures of the Republican right such as Trent Lott. At the Rockford Institute, Fleming invited colleagues from his Southern Partisan days to write for Chronicles and, in June 1994 alongside twenty-six others, he helped establish a new political party: the Southern League (which was renamed as the League of the South in 1997). Influenced by growing right-wing ethnic nationalism and nationalist leaders in Europe, such as those contributing to the collapse of Yugoslavia and Umberto Bossi in Italy, a year later Fleming and Southern League President James Michael Hill issued their nationalist call to arms in The Washington Post. On 29 October 1995, “The New Dixie Manifesto” set forth a Confederate nationalist agenda that argued for devolution of federal power to the states, local control over schools and education policy, and for the right of peoples to pursue and preserve their “authentic cultural traditions.” The Manifesto questioned the very concept of “America” as a united country of states and lamented that “national uniformity is being imposed by the political class that runs Washington, the economic class that owns Wall Street and the cultural class in charge of Hollywood and the Ivy League.” What was needed to challenge this US “multicultural, continental empire, ruled from Washington by federal agencies and under the thumb of the federal judiciary,” was an emboldened populace that would reject both the Democratic Party and craven establishment Republicans, and instead elect bold representatives that would reject federal regulations and interventions in state and local affairs. Those leading this charge would “insist upon a strict construction of the Constitution” and be “real people” from “the provinces, the sticks, the boondocks,” in particular the former states of the Confederacy. The manifesto envisioned a nationalist party, the Southern League, to advance these aims. This nascent right wing ideology gained supporters as Southern League members contributed essays and political analyses to websites, newsletters, and conservative talk radio stations. Advocates outlined their ideas in numerous books, often published in their tens of thousands by small, specialized presses that could maximize sales online to a dedicated audience of enthusiastic supporters. Some contributors were faculty members at prominent institutions in Georgia and Alabama; others, as Neo-Confederacy:A Critical Introduction documented, were white nationalists, such as Jared Taylor of American Renaissance and members of the Council of Conservative Citizens. Neo-Confederacy aligned with ideological positions, such as those proposed by Samuel Huntington, that understood the United States (and the Western world more generally) to be engaged in a ‘clash of civilizations’ with Islam and the Islamic world. Within such a conceptualization of global geopolitics, neo-Confederate organizations like the League of the South demanded that a person’s ethno-religious identity is their primary basis for belief, and echoed this perspective in the United States by valorizing a “white, Anglo-Celtic” ethnic group and its “orthodox Christianity.”