Blood

A scene so common in America today: a lone individual, armed to the teeth with everything from a handgun, through hunter's rifle to AK47 - which he probably bought at his local Walmart - positions himself - for such individuals are invariably male - ready to shoot anybody who passes before his sights.

On August 1st, 1966, Charles Whitman climbed the clock tower of the University of Texas and proceeded to shoot 43 complete strangers. Thirteen of these unfortunate passers-by died. 

As is so often the case in such mass killings, Whitman began with the murders of his wife and mother before heading off to kill strangers.

It may be that Whitman set a trend which, unfortunately, over fifty years later, shows no inclination to fade the way of most insanely-popular-for-a-moment-only-to-disappear-without-trace crazes. 

So what is it about shooting one's fellow Americans that keeps it a viable option for the disgruntled? 

While it should acknowledges that such mass shootings happen in other parts of the world - in 2015, for instance, politifact.com published an article showing research carried out over a fifteen year period that mass killings do, indeed, occur elsewhere. The article is in response to Barack Obama's claim that "we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency." The article argues that Obama's first sentence in inaccurate.

The article then argues that, based on number of deaths per head of population, the United States lags behind only Norway, Finland and Switzerland. So, Obama's second sentence, which is clearly meant to qualify the first, is not so widely inaccurate.

In fact, this is clearly nonsense. The frequency of an occurrence is not determined by its outcome; simply by the number of times it occurs. And in that fifteen year period there were six mass shootings in Germany, four in China and three in Canada. In the same time period there were 133 mass shootings in the US. There is no debate here. Americans have a much greater fondness for shooting each other than any other country. 

It should come as no surprise, then, that Ed Funsch - in Season Two's third episode, 'Blood' - resorts to taking up his rifle and, in a scene clearly meant to evoke Charles Whitman's clock tower massacre, begins taking pot-shots at his fellow Americans who happen to be wandering about the Franklin Community College Campus.

Sometimes, in the X Files, so much is going on that identifying the key issue can be more a case of pinning the tail on the donkey rather than sane analysis. This is one of those episodes. Ed isn't the only one 'going postal' in this episode. The number of Ed's victims isn't stated but, even so there are 31 deaths that can be counted (cf. http://xfilesbodycount.blogspot.com/?m=1) All these incidents are preceded by the perpetrator being instructed, via digital readout, to "Kill 'em all". Which they may be hallucinating due to local crops being sprayed with a substance akin to LSD, that is known to produce a fear response in insects. 

Is there some vast conspiracy at play, where "Ed is a man throughout ‘Blood’ who is desperately manipulated by shadowy forces and events outside of his control"? (cf. https://thexcastblog.wordpress.com/tag/ed-funsch/. )

Social comment doesn't make for entertaining TV. Paranoia and conspiracy obviously do. Especially in a country which so inherently doesn't trust its Government as the United States. Ironic really that, despite having probably the greatest Constitution ever created, the country which sees itself as the pinnacle of free democracy should also be the country that breeds so much fear not only of Government but of each other. 

Let's take note of the fact that Ed Funsch begins this episode as a postal worker, from which form of employment the term 'going postal' originates. (cf. Ames, Mark Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond) What we have in this episode is not a conspiracy but a conflation of events: Whitman's clock tower and the phenomena of postal shootings that maybe began in the 1975 shooting of two postal workers in Gadsden, Alabama stretching through to the infamous 1986 fatal shooting of 14 by Patrick Sherrill and on.

Unlike much of the rhetoric concerning gun control we hear from the United States, the conspiracy lurking in the background of this episode is not meant to be take literally, not meant as an excuse. politifacts.com can play with the numbers however it wishes and the NRA can lobby to its heart's content (though it is debatable whether it actually has one), but the simple truth is, Americans have a penchant for killing each other and when you make the means of doing so easy to acquire you are going to have six mass shootings in Germany compared to 133 in the US. 

Until the United States works out why Americans are so addicted to killing one another it should lock all guns away in a very safe place.