Photos: The everyday sites of mass shootings make a map of American terror

Our movie theaters, our burger joints, our schools, our churches

Demolition crews bring down the building that was the site of the 1993 Brown’s Chicken slayings on April 25, 2001 in Palatine, Illinois. (George Thompson/Chicago Tribune/TNS via Getty Images)

Mass shootings happen here with such alarming regularity that they’ve become a defining fixture of American culture. That a spontaneous shooting can occur almost anytime is discomforting enough, but the often innocuous sites of attacks—movie theaters, high schools, cafeterias—can work to heighten the perception of threat. Violence in banal settings is a special kind of terror.

In our hyperreal mediascape, sites of great tragedy are quickly canonized as images seared into public consciousness through repetition. Think of the World Trade Center in New York, where a tragic loss of life is tethered to the far more tangible death of an iconic structure. Today the grounds are memorialized in negative space—a literal absence of a location, two holes in the ground where the towers once stood. But such tidy postmortems are an outlier in the post-traumatic landscape: Most places where horrible acts occur remain intact and ready for scrutiny, irrevocably marred by the events that happened there. This is why many sites of mass shootings are eventually renovated, paved over, or demolished. Columbine High School underwent a thorough renovation after its 1999 attack; the San Ysidro McDonald’s where 21 people were murdered in 1984 was completely razed.

It’s commonly understood that historical trauma does haunt the present. Pain can be inherited through family and community—it can also stick around on the surface of things, shifting the meaning of a place from one day to the next. When sites of trauma are memorialized in pictures, a longing for that place—and what it once stood for—becomes real. In America, where lives are snatched by unpredictable violence amid the most pedestrian of backdrops, it’s the defamation of normality that stings as much as anything.

A tourist from Los Angeles takes a photo of his wife as she poses outside the McDonald’s restaurant in San Ysidro, California, where 22 people were killed by a gunman in 1984. The restaurant was later demolished. (AP/Lenny Ignelzi)

Damage to the cafeteria and library at Columbine High School on April 22, 1999, where fourteen students and one teacher were killed when two students opened fire on their classmates two days prior. (AFP/Getty Images)

Exterior of the Century 16 movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado, where 12 people were killed and many injured on July 20, 2012. (AP/Ed Andrieski)

(left) Police officers gather outside Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, at the scene where a gunman killed 23 people including himself, with semi-automatic gunfire during lunchtime on Wednesday, October 16, 1991. It was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history at the time. (AP/Rick McFarland) | (right) Ten years later, the former Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, is shown with its sign muted by paint and its parking lot empty in 2001. (AP/Harry Cabluck)

On November 2, 1999, Xerox Corporation employee Byran Uyesugi shot two of of his co-workers in this room on the second floor of a warehouse in Honolulu. Uyesugi proceeded to shoot five more people elsewhere in the building. (AP/Ronen Zilberman)

The Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, following a mass shooting that left 49 people dead in 2016. (AP/Chris O’Meara, File)

The schoolhouse where a gunman killed five students and himself in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, on Monday, October 2, 2006. (AP/Mary Altaffer)

Drapes billow out of broken windows at the Mandalay Bay resort and casino in Las Vegas on Monday, October 2, 2017, following a mass shooting at a music festival that killed at least 58 people. (AP/John Locher)