The Father’s Guns and Teacher Ayla Kara

Responsibility, Visibility and the Erasure of the Victims in the Kahramanmaraş Attack

From the very beginning there has been one concrete question waiting for an answer. How did the 14-year-old perpetrator get hold of the five pistols and seven magazines belonging to his father, a police chief inspector? This question must be put on the table before the debate that “children play video games”, before the discourse that “social media corrupts the young”, and before the cliché that “our family values are eroding”. This grave incident requires us to scrutinise an important matter: the arrangement of guns in a police chief inspector’s home, the responsibility a state official bears as a father, and how a licensed gun in this country can pass so easily into a child’s hands.

In many respects, the attack in Kahramanmaraş differs from the school massacres this country has seen. What is decisive in this case is, to some extent, that the perpetrator’s father is a public official serving within the state’s security apparatus. On 13 April, about two days before the attack, there was a child practising shooting with his father at the firing range of the Provincial Police Directorate. That father was a public official authorised to carry a weapon, serving as a police chief inspector within the state’s security apparatus.

This decisive institutional background was pushed into the background amid the noise of debates centred on social media. For when the matter is handed over to a vague heading such as “gun culture”, responsibility evaporates. Yet the concrete legal questions are much clearer:

• Why does a police chief inspector keep five 9 mm pistols at home beyond what his professional duties require?
• Were these guns securely locked and stored separately?
• Has it been clarified under which rules a state official was allowed to take his 14-year-old son to a police firing range and have him shoot firearms, and how the administrative responsibility for this will be assessed?
• And when the boy entered that range with his father, did anyone question it?

The negligence and responsibility of the father, a permanent member of the state’s security personnel, is not a minor detail in this case but one of the central issues of the file. Whatever is said about teachers, parents or social media companies, the fact that the father was a police chief inspector and that the child learned to use firearms at an official firing range must occupy a central place in this case. It appears that the child was made to shoot with guns from the home of a state security official at a public police firing range. And shortly afterwards that child carried out a massacre in a school corridor. At every link of this chain there is a question of negligence and responsibility.

Naming the Negligence

Unfortunately, as on many other issues, the state paints an inconsistent picture here too. On the one hand, visible security measures such as metal detectors at school gates are being discussed; on the other, the arrangement of guns in the homes of the state’s own personnel, shooting practice at its own facilities and the guns that ended up in the hands of its own personnel’s child are left covered up. The police officer in charge of the range was suspended on the grounds that the perpetrator had been allowed to shoot there. The father’s administrative and legal responsibility, by contrast, has not been discussed publicly with the same clarity.

It is said that the licensing process in Turkey is subject to certain checks. But how effective these checks are in terms of how guns are stored at home and how children are prevented from accessing them must be questioned separately. Besides the conditions that must be met when a gun licence is issued, are there also established standards for how those guns are to be stored? And if there are, how far can they be enforced?

The perpetrator was a child, yes. But the facts concerning the adults who made it possible for that child to obtain a gun are the most important links this criminal file must focus on. The distinction in criminal law between what is called “the perpetrator’s act” and someone making another person’s act possible, knowingly or unknowingly opening the way for it, stands on very clear ground in the Kahramanmaraş case. The fact that legal proceedings have been initiated against the father and mother shows that this chain of responsibility has at least become the subject of an investigation. Whether that will be enough, time and the law will tell.

In short, nine children and a teacher lost their lives in Kahramanmaraş. It is of course possible to investigate the institutional and social ground behind the perpetrator’s act. But we must also bear in mind that the repetition of such painful acts can make the nature of that system invisible in the eyes of society.

There is another area that this system has not made sufficiently visible: the victims.

Teacher Ayla Kara and Nine Children

As these events are discussed, we see two different spheres of discourse emerging.

In one, the perpetrator’s name, biography, the guns he used, the files on his computer and which foreign killer he referenced were debated; in the other, less visible, the names of the victims were mentioned. Mustafa Aslan, Furkan Sancak Balal, Bayram Nabi Şişik, Belinay Nur Poyraz, Zeynep Kılınç, Şuranur Sevgi Kazıcı, Kerem Erdem Güngör, Adnan Göktürk Yeşil, Yusuf Tarık Gül, and the teacher Ayla Kara, who threw herself in front of her pupils to protect them.

As a natural reflex, it was the perpetrator who set the agenda. For the perpetrator offers a story: dark, dramatic, obsessive and angry. The attention economy of the media clings to this story. The reference to Elliot Rodger (the killer who murdered six people in the US in 2014), the Telegram channels, the notes written on the computer before the attack, the visit to the firing range, the guns packed into a backpack… All of this creates a “profile”, and that profile becomes news. Yet nine children and a teacher also left behind a story that deserves to be told.

In which class did Ayla Kara teach? How many years had she been a teacher? From which province had she come to teach at a middle school in Kahramanmaraş? What exactly happened in the classroom at that moment, and did she shield her pupils deliberately or out of momentary instinct? How many reports followed this for days and persistently sought answers to these questions? Very few. But I know that content about the notes on the perpetrator’s computer, the date he went to shooting practice and which digital spaces he followed took up far more space.

Why Is It So Hard to Put the Victims at the Centre?

This is no coincidence. The victim does not offer a neat story, but the perpetrator does. The victim resists becoming material for a fictional narrative. The perpetrator, by contrast, has an identity carefully constructed with an online aesthetic, and this identity fits the levers of media language. There is a template at the source: a lonely young man, social exclusion, violent fantasy, and finally the attack. This template can easily be produced and consumed visually, aurally and textually.

The nine children were fifth-graders. Think of that age group: children of barely 10 or 11 who came to school in the morning, went out into the corridor in the afternoon, entered another classroom and never came out again. These are real people, with their individual life stories, their quirky tastes, and all the human details of their loves and fears. But these details were drowned in the profile of a perpetrator.

Yet are these not exactly the questions that journalistic ethics, writing with a conscience and the public interest seek to answer?

• In whose interest is this content?
• Who benefits from reproducing the perpetrator’s identity, allure and dark details again and again?
• Does it meet an ordinary reader’s need for information, or does it, while sustaining the perpetrator’s digital career, offer reminders to potential perpetrators of copycat attacks?

Studies on mass attacks and school attacks show that such acts spread not only as individual deviations but at times also through a contagion or imitation effect. A 2015 study by Sherry Towers and colleagues published in PLOS ONE points to a statistical contagion effect in school shootings and mass killings. A study by J. N. Meindl and J. W. Ivy published in 2017 discusses how media coverage that in particular magnifies the perpetrator, grants him visibility and fame, and turns the attack into a dramatic narrative can increase this risk of imitation. That is why a style of coverage that repeatedly circulates the perpetrator’s name, aesthetic, digital traces and dark biography does not merely inform; it can also produce a model of imitation, a call, or a ground of legitimisation for the next attacker.

The bigger the “story” the perpetrator is turned into, the more likely the next case may become. This should not be seen as a merely theoretical warning. The fact that the Siverek and Kahramanmaraş attacks took place only 28 hours apart indicates that the copycat effect must be seriously investigated in our part of the world too. And the media refills the fuel of this mechanism every day.

In my view, the right course of action is this: let the media tell the story of Ayla Kara. Let it tell the stories of Mustafa, Furkan, Bayram Nabi, Belinay, Zeynep, Şuranur, Kerem, Adnan and Yusuf Tarık. Let it make the weight of the loss felt. Let it discuss the chain of access to guns and the legal dimensions of institutional negligence without putting the perpetrator’s name in the foreground. Let it stop creating a new field of attraction around the perpetrator. This distinction should not be dismissed as a simple matter of intention; it should also be seen as a matter of survival.