There has been yet another sickening homicidal rampage today, this time in an immigration-services center in the decaying city of Binghamton, New York. It seems that horrors of this sort are happening more and more often in recent years.
Incidents like this throw fuel on the gun-control debate, with restrictionists arguing that the problem is easy access to deadly weapons, and Second-Amendment libertarians arguing that when such havoc erupts, a disarmed citizenry is helpless to stop the rampaging murderer. (My own sympathies are with the latter view.) Certainly these incidents are symptomatic of some sort of societal necrosis, of an increasing breakdown of the mutually supportive relations and obligations that bind human communities (it is perhaps not insignificant that this latest killing-spree occurred at an immigration center). The world is at once more prosperous and more desperate than ever, it seems; more crowded and more lonely, more connected and more fragmented, and the rate of disorienting change will only increase.
When something becomes common enough, it usually acquires a name. Many years ago I read a remarkable book called Stand On Zanzibar, by John Brunner, in which this process of increasing disaffection and violence in a densely crowded and rapidly changing near-future (2010!) world was the central theme. In this dystopic milieu it had become commonplace for people stressed beyond the limits of sanity to run amok in this way — suddenly to slaughter, indiscriminately, until they were killed themselves — and Brunner coined a word for them. He called them muckers. We may all be familiar with the term before much longer.
