In 1966, on a hot August morning in Austin, Claire Wilson walked out of the University of Texas’ Student Union with her boyfriend, Tom Eckman, to go feed the parking meter. They’d met as summer-school students only three months earlier, but they were already deeply in love. They shared the same deep political convictions and love of literature, and Tom didn’t care that Claire was five months pregnant.
At 11:48, a shot rang out from the university’s Main Building tower. It entered Claire’s body just above her left hip and pierced her abdomen. Before Tom had time to finish saying, “Baby, what’s wrong?” a second shot hit him in the chest, killing him instantly. Claire laid on the burning concrete for the next 96 minutes, watching in agony as the sniper systematically shot 45 other people.
Even in shock, she knew that Tom was gone. She knew, too, that the baby had stopped kicking. All that remained, as she bled on the sidewalk and pleaded for help, was to find out whether she would join them.
Seventy-three years before University of Texas shooting, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented an essay entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” during the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Turner argued that American democracy was invented neither by Puritans seeking a city on a hill, nor by Founding Fathers versed in Enlightenment thought, but rather by ordinary men moving westward in search of fortune, Sharps rifle in hand.
The underlying premise of Turner’s thesis is the notion that the frontier was a savage wilderness waiting to be “won” by settlers, and that in the course of mastering the west and its benighted peoples, a new nation could define itself. In Turner’s mind, the inherent racial superiority of white European settlers was transformed into something altogether new through generations of individual struggle—an American people, born in violence and free of the decadent and calcified structures of the Old World.
Turner’s thesis is widely disputed, and the only frontiers left to us reside in the imagination. Yet the frontier consciousness remains an essential part of American life. It exists wherever race, class, gender, and power intersect; wherever the Sisyphean task of progress meets its sternest resistance, and the boulder is sent rolling back downhill. The systems of American power manifest in many ways, but their indispensable tool, now as in the days of the frontier, is the gun.
A gun is never only a gun. A hunting rifle locked away in a safe nevertheless retains its potential as a political tool. What a gun offers, after all, is power. For America’s desperate underclass, a gun may be an equalizer, a path to status and security that seems impossible otherwise to attain. But guns are more often a tool of reaction than disruption. They reinforce and amplify existing systems of power, ensuring that the relative positions of society’s winners and losers are never reversed.
The frontier consciousness is essentially masculine, in addition to being essentially white, and it plays upon traditionally masculine fears: the fear of being perceived as weak; the fear of being disrespected; the fear of being physically dominated. In place of a literal frontier, we have both an imagined frontier and the “wilderness” which surrounds it. In this wilderness, the frontier consciousness tells people to maintain order in a savage land. It tells them that they should perceive the unfamiliar faces around them as threats. It tells them, finally, to stand their ground.
“All you need for a movie,” the French director Jean-Luc Godard is supposed to have said, “is a girl and a gun.” In this formulation, each is a possession which promises something more to the viewer; sex and violence, yes, but also the establishment of control and the satiation of desire. Violent movies, television shows, and video games reflect their audience’s desires, they don’t create them. But these media, especially in America, uncritically reiterate and glamorize the frontier consciousness for their consumers. Even in the hands of a mediocre artist, brutality can be made erotic and war can be made virtuous; the authority of traditional powers can be replenished; and strangers can be transformed into a hostile, alien Other.
Violent media are also essential to the creation of a modern American masculinity. With no frontier left to conquer, our cultural definitions of masculinity depend on the actors who perform it. Men are haunted by icons, by their rituals and talismans: by the specter of Humphrey Bogart, cigarette perched on pursed lips, .45 in hand; by Steve McQueen, snubnose revolver holstered under his shoulder; by Bruce Willis, sneering about his new Uzi. Individualistic, rebellious, and tough, these saints of the frontier transcend death by forming a masculine canon.
In a society that alienates us from ourselves, our neighbors, our work, and even the natural world around us, our imagination assumes primary importance. The critic John Berger, writing in his essay collection Ways of Seeing, describes this modern crisis of dissociated identity: “The pursuit of individual happiness has been acknowledged as a universal right,” he writes, “yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless. He lives in the contradiction between what he is and what he would like to be. Either he then becomes fully conscious of the contradiction and its causes, and so he joins the struggle for a full democracy…or else he lives, continually subject to an envy which, compounded with his sense of powerlessness, dissolves into recurrent day-dreams.”
The modern interpretation of the frontier consciousness which results from this alienation—a violently paranoid perspective, an aggrieved and entitled masculinity, and a theatrical vision of eternal fame—finds its nightmare climax in the mass shooter. Powerless in his own life, the mass shooter casts his victims as supporting players in his power fantasy. Initially, these fantasies are contained within the confines of the shooter’s home life; most mass shooters are also domestic abusers. As they widen the scope of their violence from private tyranny to public spaces, their fantasies become more elaborately rehearsed. Shortly before the Columbine shooting, for example, the killers made a student film, Hitmen for Hire, which depicted them as avenging assassins dressed in black trench coats.
Mass shooters detail their imaginary frontiers in YouTube screeds and 8chan manifestos. They declare their enemies—perceived bullies, minorities, and women, always women—and make their violent bids for internet martyrdom, joining a misanthropic canon of incels, fascists, and nihilists. To paraphrase the theorist Friedrich Kittler, what the AR-15 annihilates, the iPhone camera makes immortal.
Or, to quote the UC Santa Barbara shooter: “Who’s the alpha male now?”
The terror of the mass shooter is the terror of the frontier consciousness writ large. If any place can be a frontier, any person—not just the traditional victims of reactionary violence—can be targeted as an inhuman savage in the wilderness. Mass shooters lay bare a truth that oppressed groups have always known: absolute freedom for one can mean absolute deprivation for another.
The contemporary mass shooter finds his nearest antecedent in the lynch mob, who, in midnight ambushes, race riots, and massive public spectacles alike killed thousands of black Americans and other minorities. The rationale for this violence—that the patriarchal, white supremacist order will otherwise be fatally undermined—not only has helped to prevent meaningful gun reform, but also carries on in the theory of the “Great Replacement,” a staple of shooter manifestos. Mass shooters have specifically targeted black people in Charleston, Jewish people in Pittsburgh, Hispanic people in El Paso, and women in Santa Barbara, but the end result of an imaginary frontier is that any person, at any time and for any reason, can become a target.
Meanwhile, we as a culture are left to make sense of the ruin their paranoid fantasies leave behind. How is it that these boys with guns seem able to remake their worlds during a few fleeting moments of terror? How is it that the communities they violate—the lost innocence of Columbine, the bottomless chasm of grief in Newtown, the resilient children’s crusade in Parkland—can be met with such surreal indifference by the political establishment? How are we to reckon with a strain in the American character that predates the nation’s founding?
Claire Wilson didn’t join Tom and the baby. After three months in the hospital, she became the first survivor of a mass shooting in modern American history. In the rare instances when the shooting was mentioned at all in the years that followed, her friends referred to “the accident.” She was never able to bear children again—the man in the tower, who had aimed for her womb, took that from her, too—but she raised an Ethiopian boy, Sirak, as her own, and persevered through his physical and mental health issues and the financial pressure of being a single mother.
On the 50th anniversary of the shooting, Claire returned to Austin and laid down in the place where she’d lost her first family. She had been made to pay the price, in blood and grief, of another man’s imagined frontier, and for half a century, she pursued a frontier of her own. A place where she might find her own freedom, liberated from trauma. A place where the endlessly replaying drama of the shooting might finally draw to a close. A place of peace, and healing, beyond the shadow of the tower.
Works Consulted:
“Gun Control, White Paranoia, and the Death of Martin Luther King, Jr.,” by Rich Benjamin, in The New Yorker
Ways of Seeing, by John Berger
“96 Minutes,” by Pamela Colloff, in Texas Monthly
“The Reckoning,” by Pamela Colloff, in Texas Monthly
Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, by the Equal Justice Initiative
“Angels in Digital Armor: Technoculture and Terror Management,” by Marcel O’Gorman, in Johns Hopkins University Press
“Who’s the alpha male now, bitches?” by Andrew O’Hagan, in the London Review of Books
“The Terrorist Next Door,” by Rafia Zakaria, in The Baffler