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.

Adapting Cormac McCarthy: Tracking Blood from Page to Screen

Stacey Peebles' new book, Cormac McCarthy and Performance, is the first comprehensive overview of the renowned author's writings for film, theater, and the film adaptations of his novels. Uncovering these oft-overlooked works by drawing on primary sources from McCarthy's recently opened archive and interviews with several collaborators, this book examines titles such as the 1977 televised film The Gardener's Son, McCarthy's unpublished screenplays from the 1980s that became the foundation for his Border Trilogy novels and No Country for Old Men; various productions of two of his plays; and seven film adaptations.

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The vice president of the Cormac McCarthy Society, an associate professor of English and the director of film studies at Centre College, Peebles focuses on the emergent theme of tragedy within McCarthy's work, relaying the difficulties of translating his vivid depictions of violence and suffering into the medium of film by giving us a brief look into the unending and often upended saga of adapting 1985's Blood Meridian to the silver screen.

Tracking Blood from Page to Screen

Stacey Peebles

American cinema—and cinema generally—is no stranger to violence. In 1903, one of the first one-reelers, Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery, showcased a group of outlaws who didn’t hesitate to shoot innocent bystanders or beat a man’s face in with a rock before tossing the body off the moving train. Later years would pass milestone after violent milestone: Bonnie and Clyde meeting their gruesome and excessively brutal end in Arthur Penn’s 1967 film (a level of graphic realism that audiences were already seeing every night on the evening news about the Vietnam War, Penn implied); Michael Corleone ordering hits on all his rivals to take place simultaneously with his niece’s baptism in Coppola’s The Godfather (1977); Quentin Tarantino blasting his way into the national consciousness with an unsettling mix of violence and comedy in Pulp Fiction (1994); and the development of the 1970s slasher film into the post-9/11 “torture porn” of Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005). Even now, when a glut of superhero films present violence as fantastical or metaphoric, audiences seem ever willing to consider, even test themselves against, spectacular violence in cinema.

From The Great Train Robbery

The Western, the genre which The Great Train Robbery inaugurated into film, may not be as ubiquitous as it was in the 1950s and 1960s, but it remains alive, resurrected from claims of its obsolescence by films like True Grit (2012), The Revenant (2016), and Hell or High Water (2017). Violence is arguably the genre’s fundamental element, and some films take that bloodiness to an extreme, like The Wild Bunch (1969) or The Hateful Eight (2015). And so an acclaimed Western novel from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author like Cormac McCarthy, whose No Country for Old Men was masterfully (and very lucratively) adapted for the screen by the Coen brothers, would seem like a sure bet, brimming with cinematic potential. (And who remembered the fiasco that was All the Pretty Horses, anyway? 2000 was ancient Hollywood history, and blame it all on Harvey “Scissorhands” Weinstein if you need to point the finger somewhere.)

McCarthy’s 1985 novel Blood Meridian is epic in scope, style, and import. It has a narrative focus and sweep that is, as Steven Frye and others have argued, likely influenced by Western films from directors like Peckinpah. The novel’s language is ineffably literary and, at the same time, richly imagistic. After all, this is no Remembrance of Things Past, a deeply internal exploration of memory and the streams of consciousness. Blood Meridian is a story in which action and landscape speak loudest, and though it may be philosophical, political, historical, and theological, it is perhaps most primarily a vivid, disturbing, haunting spectacle. And spectacle is the very language of film. Despite those attractions and advantages, however, the novel has thus far eluded attempts to bring it to the screen—perhaps indicating that, at least as far as violence is concerned, there are still some places that lie off the cinematic map.

Steve Bourget on Sacrifice, Violence, and Ideology Among the Moche

In a special precinct dedicated to ritual sacrifice at Huaca de la Luna on the north coast of Peru, about seventy-five men were killed and dismembered, their remains and body parts then carefully rearranged and left on the ground with numerous offerings. The discovery of 

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this large sacrificial site—one of the most important sites of this type in the Americas—raises fundamental questions. Why was human sacrifice so central to Moche ideology and religion? And why is sacrifice so intimately related to the notions of warfare and capture?

Steve Bourget is a world authority on the Moche and author of Sex, Death, and Sacrifice in Moche Religion and Visual Culture and coeditor of The Art and Archaeology of the Moche: An Ancient Andean Society of the Peruvian North Coast. He is currently a research associate in the Department of Anthropology at the Université de Montréal. We asked him some questions about his latest book, Sacrifice, Violence, and Ideology Among the Moche: The Rise of Social Complexity in Ancient Peru. His study uncovers some fascinating relationships, like how El Niño conditions influenced broader aspects of Moche religion and cosmology, how a concomitant relationship emerges between the practice of human sacrifice and the rise of social complexity across New World societies, and how uniting iconography with archaeology helps scholars deepen our understanding of the Moche people and their power structures.

Why was human sacrifice so central to Moche ideology and religion?

The practice of human sacrifice in any ancient society is a complex matter. Each situation must be approached with caution and understood within its own cultural context. In the Moche case, the archaeology and its visual culture have shown that this ritual practice was closely related to their power structure. In death, high-ranking individuals are regularly buried with retainers who appear to have been sacrificed, and in life, sophisticated sacrificial rituals were apparently carried out to celebrate the link between these individuals with the divine domain.

Remains of a pair of victims, precisely laid in opposite directions on the ground of the sacrificial site

Ritual violence and sacrifice clearly index the power of the ruler and separate its status from that of the Moche population in general. The most complex rituals depicted in the iconography, the remains of which have sometimes been detected in the archaeological record, often culminate with human sacrifice and the exchange of the blood of the victims between high-status individuals. In these contexts, the rulers possess, like divine beings, the power over life and death. The presence of the same individuals instigating the cycle of ritual violence in the scenes of ritual warfare leading to capture and, eventually, human sacrifice indicates that they oversee all the aspects of the ritual process. They are both the instigators of this violence and the recipients of the benefits of sacrifice.

Therefore, the use of ritual violence and human sacrifice is structurally associated with the development of Moche power and the nature of rulership. In addition to creating a fundamental difference between the rulers and the rest of the society, human sacrifice reinforces the sacred dimension of these individuals and that of their lineages.

Explain how the ritual ecology of El Niño conditions influenced broader aspects of Moche religion and cosmology.

Firstly, the term "ritual ecology" refers to the use of the natural environment in its broadest sense to anchor and validate ideological precepts and religious beliefs disseminated by Moche elite. Therefore, the animal species and the environmental conditions selected by the Moche systematically contributed to highlighting and reinforcing certain ideological aspects. El Niño conditions were embedded in this overall scheme to create a symbolic system of everything that was both ritually and ideologically significant for the exercise of power. By using such an elaborate metaphorical system centered around the impact of El Niño events in the north coast region, their objective was to provide a rationale for the exercise of power and rulership. During the humid conditions brought by El Niño, the land is drastically transformed, the desertic landscape is transformed, countless animal species thrive and multiply, both on the land, in the air and in the waters, and the limitless power of the gods become apparent in the physical world. Harnessing the power of this climatic event to serve their ideological needs has to be recognized as one of the most brilliant ideas ever devised by an Early State society.