A 14-year-old freshman armed with an AR-15-style rifle killed two fellow students and two teachers and injured nine others in his Georgia high school before surrendering to an SRO Wednesday.
The usual tsunami of fill-in-the-blank reactions quickly followed.
Most predictably, somber words from political muckety-mucks with flag pins on their lapels (if not little AR-15’s) expressed sadness and horror.
Goodness knows they’ve had plenty of practice. If thoughts and prayers were dollar bills, we’d all be quadrillionaires by now.
Some people will blame mental illness as the cause. Others will call for more guns and more heavily fortified schools.
There will be candlelight vigils and moments of silence and flags flown at half-mast.
People are also reading…
And then we will do nothing until the next time.
That’s why, in the days to come, you’ll be hearing the adjective “latest” attached to the words “mass shooting” (there have been 385 so far this year in the United States) before our short attention spans pivot to the NFL or TikTok.
If that sounds cynical, sorry. That’s just the way things are in a nation in which we believe all things are possible … that anyone can be rich and famous or even president. That even distant planets are within our reach. Yet, at the same time, we believe we are helpless to do anything about gun violence.
We have surrendered without a fight.
So many of us are willing to sacrifice our children at the altar of gun fetishism that we are stuck in an endless cycle of shooting, killing and mourning.
This kind of American exceptionalism we surely can do without.
But wait … in North Carolina comes the word that our General Assembly will reconvene next week to discuss schools.
Don’t get your hopes up. Gun violence won’t be on the agenda; the Republican-dominated legislature plans to lavish more taxpayer money on private-school vouchers for people who need them the least. Expect more millions to go to high-income families, some of whom earn more than $260,000 a year.
In some ways that may be a blessing. When North Carolina Republicans have taken up gun legislation in recent years, it has been to relax laws, not to strengthen them.
Meanwhile, back in Georgia a parent is being held accountable.
The father of the teen shooter, 54-year-old Colin Gray appeared before a judge in the same courtroom as his son, Colt Gray.
Colin Gray could be sentenced to as many as 180 years in prison if he is convicted of murder and manslaughter charges “directly connected with the actions” of his son. His son could face life without parole.
At least that’s progress. Parents should be held accountable for the violent actions of their children if they enabled them through neglect, abuse or recklessness.
Arrest warrants say Colin Gray allowed his son’s access to the rifle used in the shooting knowing “he was a threat to himself and others.” According to police Gray bought the rifle for his troubled son as a Christmas present.
If this sounds familiar, there’s a reason. In separate trials in April, Jennifer and James Crumbley were each found guilty of four counts of involuntary manslaughter after their son opened fire with an AR-15-style weapon in Oxford High School in Michigan on Nov. 30, 2021. That weapon also was a Christmas gift to their son, even though they knew he was troubled.
“Opportunity knocked over and over again, louder and louder and was ignored,” the judge in that case said. “No one answered. And these two people should have and sure didn’t.”
Finally, our selective outrage can be both baffling and stunning.
Even as Republicans rightly question that the chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan that cost 13 U.S. service members their lives, they only shrug as Americans, many of them young people, keep dying over and over in mass shootings on native soil.
How can that compute?
How is it that we have taken deadly weapons in such a tight, loving embrace … and turned them on ourselves?
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