In 1988, the photographer Richard Misrach found a couple of Playboy magazines that had been used for target practice near the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, where more than a thousand US and British nuclear weapons had been detonated.

As he looked, a breeze ruffled the pages of the magazine. Every page had a starry constellation of bullet holes scattered across it. Misrach later recalled: “I realized that the women on the covers of both magazines were the intended targets, but that the violence that was directed specifically at the women symbolically penetrated every layer of our society. Every aspect of our society … was riddled with violence.”

I thought of his big color photographs, all ripped through by bullets, when I began to contemplate the Isla Vista massacre which took place a year ago today.

On the evening of 23 May 2014, a 22-year-old went on a rampage that left six dead and injured many more, grazed by bullets or slammed into by his car, before he killed himself with his handgun.

People hug at a public memorial on the Day of Mourning and Reflection for the victims of Isla Vista. Photograph: David McNew/Getty Images

The killer, whose name should not be remembered, who should not be glorified as the Columbine killers were, had no friends, though he had lived there for nearly three years (he grew up on the edge of the Hollywood movie industry). He had long planned a bloodbath as revenge on a world he thought owed him sex, adoration, friendship and success. His hatred was particularly directed at women, and the men who enjoyed their company.

The autobiography the young man posted online that day is notable for its shallowness and its entitlement. Those are harsh words, but there’s no other way to describe his utter lack of empathy, imagination and engagement with the life of others. He’s often described as mentally ill, but he seems instead to be someone who was exceptionally susceptible to the madness of the society around him.

His misogyny was our culture’s misogyny. His sad dream of becoming wealthy, admired and sexually successful was a banal, widely marketed dream. His preoccupation with brand-name products and status symbols was exactly what the advertising industry tries to inject into our minds. His fantasy of attaining power and status at the point of a gun is the fantasy sold to us by the gun lobby and the action movies in which some invulnerable superman unerringly shoots down the bad guys, a god made a god by his gun.

“My first act of preparation was the purchase [of] my first handgun,” he wrote about his long-planned rampage. “After I picked up the handgun, I brought it back to my room and felt a new sense of power. I was now armed. Who’s the alpha male now, bitches? I thought to myself, regarding all of the girls who’ve looked down on me in the past.”

Who was the last victim?

Christopher Michaels-Martinez, with his father and uncle at graduation. Photograph: supplied

Richard Martinez had one child; now he has none. He wears rubber bracelets, the kind given out for charitable causes and campaigns, stacked atop each other on his right wrist. Each commemorates a child killed somewhere in the US by guns, at Sandy Hook and other mass shootings, and he can sort through them and speak of where and when each victim was killed. It’s an arm like a cemetery.



“I would give the rest of my days for one more day with Christopher,” Martinez told me a couple weeks ago.

That day a year ago, the 22-year-old killer stabbed to death three young men in his apartment, apparently ambushing them one at a time. Two were his roommates, one a visitor: Weihan ‘David’ Wang, age 20, Cheng Yuan ‘James’ Hong, also 20, and George Chen, 19. He then set out with his guns for the sorority he thought had the most beautiful women and banged on the door, hoping to go in and massacre them all. Alarmed by the angry, persistent pounding on the sorority’s front door, no one opened it. The killer instead shot three women out front, 22-year-old Katherine Cooper, 19-year-old Veronika Weiss, and a third woman who survived, aided by passersby and then sheriff’s deputies.

While the young women bled in front of the sorority, the murderer had already moved on to shoot at his peers, out on skateboards and bicycles and foot on that mild southern California evening, and to try to run more of them over with the black BMW his parents had bought him. In the end he injured 14 and killed six others before he shot himself while being pursued by sheriff’s deputies.

Christopher Michaels-Martinez, 20, was the last person to be shot at by the killer before he took his own life. At about 9.30pm, a bullet entered the left side of Christopher’s chest and exited through the right side, puncturing the liver and right ventricle of the heart. He died immediately, despite CPR attempts by a 19-year old-woman.



I have the sense, every time I’ve spoken with Martinez, that he had to do something to extract meaning from the unbearable pain of losing his son. He couldn’t escape it, but he could do something with it, so he quit his job as a public defender and went on the road, throwing himself into gun control advocacy.

Christopher’s uncle, Alan Martinez, a San Francisco architect, speaks fondly of the boy’s curiosity and intelligence. He recalls discussing Cicero, the Alhambra, Aids, Buddhism and everything else under the sun with the nephew who loved Latin and basketball. The young man planned to attend law school and, like his lawyer parents, work for social justice.

There’s a photograph of Alan and Christopher lying on their backs on a green California hillside, both laughing at the same joke, or just the joy of the moment. And then there was the press conference the day after, where Alan stood at Richard’s side and Richard said, in a voice thick with anguish, “not one more” – which eventually became the slogan for his campaign for gun control.

Richard Martinez last spoke with Christopher a few hours before his death. To this day, he wonders if they had stayed on the phone a moment longer, or ended the conversation a moment sooner, whether his son would still be alive. So many of the bullets just grazed people or injured them in nonfatal locations; it took an endless string of coincidences to put Christopher exactly where a bullet would rip into his heart.

Uncle and nephew in the grass. Photograph: supplied

Each time I’ve met his father, I’ve seen more of who the son was: in stories, photographs, cellphone videos. He was a handsome young man noted for his kindness, athleticism and intelligence. Each time I see him Richard shows me more videos and photographs, his phone a memorial that travels with him.

At 16, Christopher wanted to go skydiving and his parents forebade it; four years later, a few months before he died, he went. After his death, someone gave Richard the video, which he showed me earlier this month. It shows Christopher in a yellow jumpsuit, preparing to get into the plane, in the plane, free-falling in a blue sky with the instructor, and then falling more gently after the parachute opens, to the green California earth. The great grin never leaves his face.



US stuck in a war zone at home

You can look at the causes of the murder rampage various ways.

Feminists, myself included, focused on the killer’s misogyny, his furious sense that women owed him something, that he had a right to whatever pleasure and adulation they could deliver.

Discussion of this crime spree joined the wider conversation about violence against women. Because men kept popping up to say “not all men”, sometimes in the form of the hashtag #notallmen, a young woman who tweets under the name Gilded Spine coined the hashtag #yesallwomen.

It was meant to say that yes, we know not all men commit these crimes, but the point is that all women are impacted by them. The hashtag went viral in the months after Isla Vista, though Gilded Spine received so many menacing tweets she went silent for a long time. Even speaking up about violence was dangerous, and the men who posted jeering remarks, pornographic images and threats didn’t seem to realize they were all demonstrating why feminism is necessary. Nevertheless, it was perhaps the most widespread of the hashtags that have been, in recent years, the umbrellas for collective conversation and bearing witness about violence and survival.

And then there’s the gargantuan American arsenal of weapons and the havoc wreaked with it.

Thirty three Americans are killed by guns every day, 12,000 a year, more than 20 times the level of other industrialized nations, according to Martinez’s organization, Everytown for Gun Safety. It looks as though the gun homicide rate hasn’t risen, but that’s not because fewer people are shot than a decade ago. More are shot, but emergency rooms and trauma centers are better at saving lives. The number of nonfatal gunshot wounds doubled between 2002 and 2011.

Twelve thousand Americans are killed by guns very year. Photograph: Igor Golovniov/Zuma Press/Corbis

We are a war zone in two ways. The first is the literal war that produces those 12,000 corpses a year, including suicides, domestic violence homicides (3,110 women killed by partners or former partners between 2008-2012), other murders, accidental deaths.

The second is a war of meaning. On one side are the people who constantly tell us that guns will make us safer, and that we need more guns in more hands in more places, stores, on the streets, in the schools and on the campuses. They constantly hawk scenarios in which “a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun.”

It is surpassingly rare that a person with a gun enters a chaotic situation and, like the gunman-hero in a western, shoot accurately and effectively, taking out bad people and not harming good ones. The other scenarios involving guns – homicides, suicides and horrible accidents – happen incessantly.

When small children find guns and shoot friends, siblings or parents, we are told that it was a terrible accident rather than something likely to happen with easily available weapons. The argument in favor of more guns is not about facts, but about guns as icons of identity, of fantasy about being dominant, masterful, in control; the same old impossible macho dream of being, as the killer in Isla Vista put it, an alpha male.

For hardcore gun advocates, the weapons are totemic objects of identity, rather than the tools that actually take those 12,000 lives a year.

One response to the Isla Vista rampage is a California law, AB 1014, that allows family members and law enforcement to petition a court to remove guns from the possession of someone who may be a risk to others. The Gun Violence Restraining Order, as it’s called, could have prevented at least part of the homicidal rampage carried out in Isla Vista and maybe undermined the whole scenario (the murderer’s mother had called the Santa Barbara sheriff’s office to report her concern about him earlier that month).

It may prevent other murders when it goes into effect on 1 January 2016. Good legislation has been passed in Oregon and Washington state as well, Martinez told me, and Texas and Florida measures to expand gun rights were defeated this year. But knives as well as guns, even a car, were used to harm others that terrible evening a year ago.

There is no easy solution to the violence in this country, and no single cause. As Misrach noted when he contemplated those Playboy magazines used for target practice: “Every aspect of our society … was riddled with violence.”

It’s worth keeping in mind that the willingness to negotiate, the love of life, generosity and empathy are also powerful forces in our culture. As the murder spree unfolded, people rushed to comfort, shelter and provide emergency aid to the injured and dying, and 20,000 came to the memorial at the UCSB stadium that week. But the people who embody the best of us, like all of us, live in a climate where violence can erupt anywhere, at any time.

There is a scholarship in Christopher Michaels-Martinez’s name, for English majors who are committed to social justice. There are memorial events, exhibits and a garden being prepared for the one-year anniversary at University of California, Santa Barbara. There are laws passed and pending, and a strong feminist conversation about violence and misogyny.

But the dead are still dead, the bereaved are still grieving and the set-up is still ripe for more murders.

• This article was amended on 26 May 2015. An earlier version said 88 Americans were killed by guns every day; that figure has been amended to 33.