Volume CXXXII, Number 6 October 25, 2002 f

Why we fear the sniper
TODD BUELL
COLUMNIST

Washington, D.C. is a tense city. Over the last three weeks, a sniper has killed ten people and wounded three in a murderous rampage. Reading the major D.C. newspapers, The Washington Post and The Washington Times, helps one grasp the impact the sniper has had on the region.

High schools have postponed or relocated many football games and other athletic activities. Many communities have cancelled public festivals and outdoor events. The State of Maryland has postponed its hunting season. Judging from the way the metropolitan population altered its daily life, the sniper has reason to believe what he wrote on a Tarot card following one of his early attacks: "Dear policeman, I am God."

Yet this mass reaction is not rational when one looks at statistics. Despite the flurry of murders in recent weeks, a recent Washington Times article shows that one's chances of being a victim of the sniper are remarkably low. According to National Safety Council statistics, one has a 1 in 465,000 chance of being killed by the sniper. One has a far greater chance of perishing as a result of an auto accident. The council reports that 100 people die daily in the United States from road accidents and that one's odds of dying in that fashion are 1 in 5,887.

This means that roughly 2,000 people have died from auto accidents during the three weeks that the sniper has terrorized the D.C area. If one divides the 2,000 deaths by the number of states plus D.C. (51), one gets about 40 traffic deaths per state over the last three weeks. That is four times the number of sniper victims.

These statistics beg the question: Why does our society obsess over a sniper but complacently accepts deaths in traffic as an inevitable consequence of life?

One answer lies in how we understand ourselves philosophically. The late contemporary philosopher Leo Strauss argues in his book What is Political Philosophy? that one of the fundamental tenets of modern philosophy is the idea of "conquering chance." Strauss was referring to the Italian philosopher Machiavelli, who devised aggressive and morally dubious means in his seminal work The Prince to help a prince acquire or maintain his power.

Strauss knew of course that he was not only describing Machiavelli but was also indicting the way contemporary society views our condition. We attempt to conquer chance in innumerable ways. Everything from the daily weather report to human cloning is a manifestation of the principle that humans not only can fully understand seemingly random events but also that we can conquer them and use them for our own improvement.

We as a society have become beholden to the principle that we can overcome all of the contingencies and chance that intersperse our existence. This helps to explain why we so easily ignore preventable deaths in auto accidents. We attempt to reassert our control over the situation when we think about these scenarios. How often have we all uttered statements such as "I am a good driver; I won't get into an accident."

Cars at least theoretically present us with a way to avoid the risk: one can hopefully drive safe cars, obey the speed limit, live in rural areas (like Maine), or take public transit in a city. The sniper on the other hand has shown that he is willing to kill anyone of any profession at any time. As George Gray the acting director of Harvard's Center for Risk Analysis explains "in this case, it's hard to think of one thing you could do to avoid risk."

The dearth of escape routs around the sniper is the root of our fear of him. He removes us from our protective shell of airbags, seatbelts, exercise, fat-free cream cheese, and all of our other scientific risk buffers that we use to control the most inevitable chance: death. The sniper scares us because he violently reminds us that there are certain things in the world that we cannot control. More precisely, he shows us that we cannot control anything perfectly; even in our most advanced and modern society, some things are always left to chance and no advancement of science or police protection can ever change that fact of life.