“With a gun, with a gun, you will be what you are just the same…” – Steely Dan, With A Gun
Here’s a true story, from the heart of America. A 13-year-old boy is suspected of posting threats about shooting people at his school on a popular messaging server. The FBI comes to the boy’s house and questions him and his father. The boy denies making the threats and the father denies that the boy has access to his hunting guns.
Seven months later, that father goes Christmas shopping for his son, and decides to buy him an AR-15 platform automatic rifle.
Nine months after getting his gift from Santa, the boy, now 14, takes his automatic rifle to school with him. During a morning class he excuses himself and leaves the room. Some time later he returns, armed with the gun, and knocks on his classroom door to be let back in. Students in the classroom behind the door, which is locked, see the gun and run for cover. The boy turns around and proceeds to kill two other 14-year-old students and two adult teachers, and to wound nine others.
When the School Resource Officers arrive on the scene, the now 14-year-old murderer sits down and surrenders. This Christmas – and likely every other one for the rest of their lives – will be spent in prison by the boy and his father. And this Christmas, four more American families will grieve the violent killing of their loved ones in an American public school.
Media coverage of the event, and the tragically many others like it, tends to try hard to answer the ‘why’ behind these crimes, as if a quick overview of the life circumstances that are knowable about an individual or a family can somehow explain the unexplainable.
I believe these things can never really be explained. Other people are a mystery. We cannot ever hope to know their true motivations, even with people close to us, never mind strangers in a far-off town.
That said, I find the above story completely incomprehensible – if it was fiction I’d think it was dumb. But it’s real, and it raises all kinds of questions. What thoughts, what decision-making process led the boy’s father to buy him the gun? What goes through the minds of parents who give their kids training and access to high-powered weapons? What frame of mind does one need to be in to believe that killing another human is your prerogative?
These questions, and the many real people in this country whose actions lead me to ask them, are in my opinion unanswerable. Other people are a mystery. Thus we waste time focusing on the cause of each incident, each flare-up, without looking at the smoldering fire burning all around us daily.
I submit that this is not an individual problem, as the NRA would have it (recall the slogan “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”), but rather a societal illness. Put differently, the question is this:
What kind of environment has made thinking that settling personal issues with gun violence is acceptable and appropriate?
From that perspective the answer to ‘why’ seems to become a whole lot more obvious, starting from the fact that people in the US are shooting each other literally every day now. Here are a few headlines from today’s local news website here in North Carolina:
Two Injured in Early Morning Shootings in Raleigh
Granville County double shooting suspect arrested
One shot, two others injured at Benson bar
Teen murder suspect arrested after being seen at Raleigh high schools
That’s just one day. So, it’s clear that people shooting people has become a commonplace thing here in America.
Thus, it’s not a stretch to suggest that kids have a lot of role models all around them that could lead them to consider using guns as a normal, or even the best means of settling problems and disputes. It’s no secret that gun ownership has skyrocketed in the US over the past few years, roughly commensurate with the mounting toll of dead and wounded that we in this country seem to have come to accept. Sure, when school shootings happen someone, like this time, always calls it “evil”, and someone always says, “it has to stop”. Then the killing goes on.
Still, what could possibly lead someone to buy an assault rifle for their child for Christmas? At first this struck me as the most mysterious part of the whole story – isn’t Christmas supposed to be the season of Peace and Joy? But then I remembered, it was not so long ago that adults were given their own role models for this choice – by Republican politicians who sent out Christmas pictures of themselves and their families armed with automatic weapons. One even says “Santa, please send ammo!” (see cover photo – this was a US Representative, Thomas Massie).
Frankly I find the behavior of these people, elected public representatives with real responsibilities to the public they are supposed to serve, totally incomprehensible as well, despite their feeble claims that they are merely expressing their support for the second amendment. These people are a mystery, but their behavior must necessarily be held to a different standard than that of the father who bought a gun for his kid at Christmas.
Put differently, one can argue that son and father are, at least to some extent, merely products of their environment, following the signals and cues around them and doing as their role models do. This might help to explain the father’s tearful protests in court that his son had been ‘bullied’ and called ‘gay’. For many of us this would not come close to rising to cause for violent retribution. But for other people, for whatever reasons, it most manifestly does.
Likewise, many of us wouldn’t dream of giving our kid a gun for Christmas, or at any time of year. So again, trying to understand why a man whose home had been visited by the FBI to investigate threats allegedly made by his 13-year-old son would then buy that same son an assault rifle is utterly beyond me.
However, the influences all around him that might have helped lead him to that act are there for us all to see, in the daily headlines, and in the endless stream of killing and violence that the population of this country has seemingly willingly unleashed upon itself.
And that, to me, is a total mystery.
*With sincere apologies to the late, great Martin Amis
Cover Image: US Representatives Thomas Massie and Lauren Boebert, Christmas 2021. Photo: Twitter/X
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