by Barry Grey
The US has witnessed yet another shooting rampage, this time in the
exclusive environs of the Buckhead district of Atlanta, Georgia. By now
the basic facts are well known: Mark Barton, a 44-year-old
chemist-turned-stock market day-trader, killed his young wife and two
children (from a former marriage) last Tuesday and Wednesday, and on
Thursday went on a shooting spree at two brokerage firms.
When Barton was finished, nine lay dead at the offices of All-Tech
Investment Group and Momentum Securities, and another seven had
been critically wounded. Some hours later, cornered by the police,
Barton took his own life.
To all appearances, Barton, a devoted father and Boy Scout master, was
a fairly typical middle class resident of the quiet Atlanta suburb of
Morrow. But his benign countenance masked a man in agonizing despair.
He was reportedly in the midst of a painful separation from his wife, and
deep in debt as a result of losses from his stock market ventures. He had
ceased trading at All-Tech since April, evidently because securities bets
gone sour had wiped out the $40,000 minimum required to maintain his
account with the day-trading firm. Some press reports estimate his losses
at more than $80,000.
“I have been dying since October,” he wrote in a computer-generated
note left at the apartment where he killed his sleeping wife and children.
“I wake up at night so afraid, so terrified that I couldn't be that afraid
while awake. It has taken its toll. I have come to hate this life and this
system of things. I have come to have no hope.”
Barton's note goes on to explain that he killed his children, whom he
loved, to spare them “a lifetime of pain.” He loved his wife as well, but
in
some way held her responsible for his “demise.” His message concludes:
“I don't plan to live very much longer, just long enough to kill as many
of
the people that greedily sought my destruction. You should kill me if you
can.”
This is clearly a man whose mental and emotional being had collapsed. It
may not have been the first time Barton snapped. Although never
indicted, he was the prime suspect in the brutal slaying of his first wife
and mother-in-law six years ago. Barton took out a $600,000 life
insurance policy on his first wife shortly before she and her mother were
found slashed to death at a campground in northeast Alabama. He
continued to protest his innocence of that crime, making a point of it
in
the confession-suicide note he left with the bodies of his current wife
and
children.
Much has been made in the media of Barton's vocation as a day-trader,
and there can be little doubt that the frenzied, pressurized life of a
small-time market gambler played a significant role in his undoing. Some
reports say he often traded thousands of shares at a time, rooted in front
of a computer screen, in accordance with this particularly alienated form
of social practice, in an attempt to cash in on the momentary fluctuations
of various stocks. One industry source said the average day-trader, of
whom there are an estimated 5 million in the US, makes between 2,000
and 3,000 trades in the course of a market day. That averages out to
more than 300 trades per hour.
And while there may not be a direct causal relationship between Barton's
murder spree and the sharp drop in the market on Thursday (down more
than 200 points when Barton walked into Momentum Securities),
witnesses have reported that the assailant spoke of the day's losses
before he pulled out his guns and began firing.
In a concentrated way, the get-rich-quick fever which permeates the bull
market—and is promoted by the media as the highest form of human
endeavor—dominates the life of such people. In a matter of minutes, a
lifetime's savings can be wiped out, and most of those who enter into this
form of activity end up on the losing side.
But it would be a form of self-delusion to conclude that day-trading in
and of itself is the explanation for this latest example of social pathology.
In any event, the phenomenon of day-trading is organically linked to a
complex nexus of economic, social and psychological conditions that
make up present-day America.
No less vacuous are the attempts to reduce this latest massacre to a
question of gun control (in the manner of Hillary Clinton and other liberal
politicians), or the need for even more draconian law-and-order
measures (as suggested by some pundits who have focused on the failure
to arrest Barton for the murder of his first wife).
Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell has been widely quoted in connection with
Thursday's rampage. However the one remark of some honesty and
perception which he made, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting
spree, has gone largely unreported in the press. Obviously shaken by the
carnage, Campbell noted that similar tragedies have occurred with
increasing frequency across the country, and that “at least 23” have died
in Atlanta alone within the past three weeks. Campbell was referring to
a
domestic dispute that erupted into the shooting death of six people on
July 12.
Something was seriously wrong with America, he said, and he went on to
describe the eruptions of violence as a “cancer.”
The time, in fact, is long since past when anyone with eyes to see, a brain
to think and a modicum of intellectual integrity could deny that America
is
a sick society. Here is just a partial list of Atlanta-style shooting incidents
since the beginning of the year:
* In January a woman walked into a downtown Salt Lake City office
building with a grocery sack of bullets and opened fire, killing one
person.
* In March a Johnson City , Tennessee man shot his lawyer and another
client in an apparent dispute over his wife's will.
* In April a 71-year-old man raked the first floor of the Mormon Family
History Library in Salt Lake City with .22-caliber handgun fire, killing
two people and wounding four others before police shot him to death.
* Last month a psychiatrist in Southfield, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit,
was shot by a former patient, who then gunned down a 45-year-old
woman and wounded four other people, before fatally shooting himself.
Then there is the wave of high school shootings, culminating in the
carnage last April at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.
Atlanta was the scene of another high school shooting in May, which
resulted in numerous injuries.
To this list one could add the fact that two days before the Atlanta
massacre the Surgeon General issued a report on the alarming increase in
the suicide rate in the US.
It is a damning commentary on the state of American society that,
shocking and traumatic as events such like the Atlanta rampage are, they
have become almost routine. As one of those who survived Barton's
rampage said, “You joke that these things are becoming just another
daily event. ‘Oh, another mass shooting.'”
In a bizarre and tragic way, these explosions of individual rage and fear
are expressions of the acute social contradictions that lie just below
the
surface of American society. It is not so much that they belie the official
picture of a prosperous and powerful nation. Rather they are an essential
product of a society that is increasingly riven by class divisions, with
the
flaunting of obscene levels of wealth by a privileged few existing side
by
side with an ever more difficult, even desperate, struggle for survival
on
the part of broad masses.
The glorification of the market, wealth and greed goes hand in hand with
a relentless assault on the economic security of the general population.
There is no avenue within the political system—little more than a wholly
owned subsidiary of big business—for the needs and concerns of
working people to find expression. There are no mass organizations that
give voice to and fight for the interests of working people. The media
and
the entertainment industry promote the most backward social
conceptions—religious bigotry, chauvinism, selfishness, militarism—and
assiduously serve the agenda of corporate America both at home and
abroad.
On what is American “prosperity” based? Consider the fact that the
immediate cause of the mini-panic that hit the stock market on the day
of
the Atlanta massacre was a report that wages had risen faster than
anticipated—a mere 1.1 percent. That the entire edifice of inflated stock
values and the vast fortunes they generate rests on the continued
suppression of the living standards of the masses reveals just how brutal,
perverse and explosive social relations in the US really are.