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8 Crime Media Culture 3 (2012)

handle is hein.journals/cmctre8 and id is 1 raw text is: Article Crime Media Culture 8(1)3-21 Getting on top through mass 0 The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission murder: Narrative, metaphor, sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav and violence Oo cmc sagepub com OSAGE Lois Presser University of Tennessee, USA Abstract This paper makes a case for narrative criminology by describing the storied nature of mass murder by Jim David Adkisson in Knoxville, Tennessee, USA. Drawing on interviews with and writings by David, I suggest that his narrated identity was central to his violence. The ways in which he conjured himself, his personal and political situation, and despised others, animated his felt compulsion to do harm. In David's story he simultaneously asserted (1) the license to harm and thus triumph over a depersonalized enemy and (2) harm's inevitability. A narrative approach can explain the particulars of crime including its particular seductions. Keywords mass murder, metaphor, narrative, violence Introduction Contemporary social theories of narrative advance three main ideas: (1) self-stories are vehicles for identity; (2) storied identities shape action; and (3) stories are cultural products (Bruner, 1987; Gergen and Gergen, 1988; Kerby, 1991; Linde, 1993; Polkinghorne, 1988; Rosenwald and Ochberg, 1992; Sarbin, 1986; Somers, 1994). Narrative criminology extends these ideas to crime, positing culturally circumscribed self-stories as antecedents to action including criminal action (Presser, 2009). In this paper I examine mass murder through the lens of narrative criminology. I show mass murder to be a storied feat by scrutinizing what convicted killer Jim David Adkisson shared in his writings - dating before and after his crime - and during in-depth interviews after his conviction. On the morning of Sunday, July 27, 2008, Jim David Adkisson, a 58-year-old white man, entered the sanctuary of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist church in Knoxville, Tennessee, USA with a guitar case containing a semiautomatic shotgun. Shortly thereafter he took out the shotgun and began shooting. He killed two people and seriously injured six others before church congregants tackled him. David intended to shoot as many people as he could until police intervened and shot him Corresponding author: Lois Presser, Department of Sociology, University of Tennessee, 901 McClung Tower, Knoxville, TN 37996-0490, USA. Email: lpresser@utk.edu

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