I used to comment fairly often on the various mass shootings in the US. In fact, I actually started to count the number of posts I’ve written with the tag ‘another mass shooting’ but once I hit 30 posts, I gave it up. I did notice that the last time I commented on a mass shooting was almost a year ago. I wrote this:
[H]ow often can you repeat the same weary commentary? Because it IS always the same. Every single fucking time, it’s the same. The names of the victims and shooters are different, the locations are different, the numbers of the dead vary, but the bodies are all dead in the same way and the guns involved are at least similar.
So here’s me, once again, writing the same essential goddamn post. Winder, Georgia. Apalachee High School. Your basic AR-15 platform weapon. A 14-year-old shooter. Fourteen, for fuck’s sake. FOURTEEN! We’re talking late puberty, here. This a period when boys begin to get some sense of who they are…and this kid?
People…everybody…always ask this question after a mass shooting: why? As WaPo writes this morning:
“…the shooter’s motives remain unknown. In a news conference Wednesday, Smith said investigators from the sheriff’s office and GBI had interviewed Gray [the shooter]. The investigators do not yet know why the shooting occurred, Smith said, adding that “We may not ever know.”
Nobody knows why 14-year-old boys do anything. And frankly, what does it matter? Maybe he’s pissed off at his parents, maybe he’s been bullied at school, maybe he’s decided to join Hamas, maybe he thinks he’s being controlled by the Jews of the Nine Universes, maybe he kept losing a particular ‘boss’ fight in Dark Souls, maybe he just wondered what it would be like to wander through the halls of Apalachee High shooting people. What difference does it make?
Let’s face it, this kid’s motives are a distraction from what everybody—and I do mean everybody—knows is the real problem. Easy access to firearms. Even if the kid (and lawdy, he’s just a kid) was bullied—even if he did want to join Hamas—none of this would have happened without access to (what I assume is his daddy’s) semi-automatic rifle. Take the gun out of the equation and the butcher’s bill drops.
But we won’t do that. Because this is America and in America we…well, in America kids are disposable.
Fuck it. Go Wildcats. Go, run for your lives. Ain’t nobody going to help you.
gregfallis.com 
Talk of motives with barely post-pubescent kids committing mass murder makes me want to chew aluminum foil, then lick a hairbrush. Then go outside and stick my eye in dirt. As if we could hone our skills at child-rearing by reverse engineering some motive, spelled out in a journal or digital post. It’s all cover to avoid the real problem. That, and writing the kid off as a monster.
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We wouldn’t have to ask “Why did he DO it?” so often if we limited his ABILITY to do it.
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The kid’s father was just. about an hour ago, arrested and charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter. There was something about knowingly allowing the child access to the weapon.
So it’s the quickest I’ve hear of a parent being held responsible for their child’s appropriation of the parent’s gun and killing people.
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Yes, this needs to happen a LOT more often. Only a small proportion of mass murders are committed by kids whose irresponsible parents gave him unfettered access to high-powered firearms, but every bit helps.
And not just in mass shootings. ANY kid who shoots anybody with a gun that hasn’t been properly secured, the responsible adult should be held accountable.
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you know it really sucks that this continues to happen. I’m really glad that the parents are being charged with murder and that Tim Walz is talking about it on the campaign trail as he acknowledges he was once NRA and now realizes it just makes common sense. Tom
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Sadly, we’re in a situation now where, even if we elect people who’ll act to reduce gun violence, it’ll still take a generation (or two) to see a cultural shift. But you have to start somewhere.
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