Someone drives to a car wash, someone else has coffee with a friend. A man carefully unpacks his supermarket shopping. A woman lies on a yoga mat and gently stretches her calves. In Raising a School Shooter (7 July, 10pm) the Scandinavian film makers Frida and Lasse Barkfors devote quite a lot of time to the tedious and the quotidian, the message of their searching and ultimately profoundly moving documentary being not only that life must (and does) go on even after something unimaginably terrible has happened, but that human survival often depends on the humdrum. For those whose world has been razed to the ground – and for the people in this film, the devastation has been total – domestic routine is a kind of hand rail, a rope to be used to pull themselves along as the hours turn into days, and the days into weeks, months and (eventually) years.
Since 1970, there have been 1,677 shootings in American schools; 598 people have been killed, and 1,626 injured. What protocols have come to surround these all-too-common crimes? The news crews arrive. Behind a cordon, a crowd weeps. Later, there are funerals and memorial services, and a usually futile argument about gun laws. But for the parents of those who embark on such sprees – most are under 18, and still living at home – there is no etiquette. “Do you bring a casserole to the house of somebody whose son has shot up a school?” asks Sue Klebold, the mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the two teenagers who, in 1999, killed 12 students and one teacher at Columbine High School, Colorado. Her neighbours were mostly very kind, turning up on her doorstep bearing homemade food. The scrutiny elsewhere, however, was hard to bear. She and her husband were now “lesser human beings”. When, she wanted to know, would she be allowed to say sorry to Dylan’s victims? The authorities thought this an inappropriate question, perhaps even an inappropriate impulse.
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