It happened again. A school full of innocent teachers & children was attacked by a maniac with a semi-automatic weapon while cops stood by & did nothing. Everyone wants convenient, black-and-white answers to complex social problems like mass shootings, the drug overdose epidemic & poverty. Unfortunately that's not how it works. We didn't get to this dark place in our nation's history quickly & we won't get out with catchy soundbite answers like 'gun control' or 'mental health' or 'good parenting'. These issues are a result of decades and decades of social rot & will require the sustained efforts of all our institutions to even START to correct them.
Let's start with the obvious. There are more guns than people in the United States. You can't talk earnestly about fixing the mass shooting problem without mentioning sane gun laws. There's no reason anyone who hasn't taken a serious gun safety/firearm handling course should ever own said weapon, nor should anyone with a history of violent crimes like domestic violence be allowed to legally buy a firearm. Yet this is the norm. Gun shows allow virtually anyone of age with enough cash to walk out with as many guns as they can carry which is insane. Families in which kids "accidentally" shoot their siblings or others are often not held accountable legally in any meaningful way despite the weapons not being secured out of the child's reach. The problems with our gun laws (or lack thereof) could fill a book.
But it doesn't end there.
Canada has (or had) as many guns as the U.S. at the time the movie Bowling for Columbine was made, according to filmmaker Michael Moore. But they didn't have anywhere near the number of mass shootings & other violent gun crime. That means there's more at play than the sheer number of guns. A quick look at our nation's discretionary budget tells us that 50% of it goes to funding our military which commits atrocities around the globe daily. Does anyone care about THOSE innocent children and women being slaughtered? And what about our militarized police here at home with their bloated budgets that steal from social workers, teachers, mental health & other departments only so they can fail to stop school shooters & take days to identify killers like the Brooklyn subway shooter? They're not exactly a benign presence in our communities either with all their killings of often-innocent, unarmed citizens for which they're rarely held accountable.
If you think this violence at home and abroad doesn't influence our populace, you're dead wrong. It's deeply entrenched & celebrated by our media which I'll get into below. Our government sets the example for the populace.
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| U.S. military budget for 2020 (in blue) |
The way the news covers these horrific mass shootings is particularly dangerous. Rushing to break the story before the details are in: the death toll, the name of the villainous shooter & all the tawdry details of his social media posts--all this does is encourage would-be shooters to go through with their plans to do the same. These things are EXACTLY what other countries know not to do in the wake of these tragedies because they inspire copycat shootings. This is a fact. But does American media care? No. If it bleeds, it leads. 24-hour news stations feed on these stories like vultures, covering them around the clock for months. While us sane people may not see the issue with that, to any would-be suicidal maniacs, this is exactly the kind of thing that could push them to say "Fuck it. I might as well go out in a blaze of glory like that guy. Suicide by cop seems easy enough, and I'll take out some other folks on my way to Hell."
That's how these rage-filled monsters think. If they don't value their own lives, why would they value the lives of strangers? Throw in some hyper-realistic violent video games, movies & music on a loop for months on end and you've got a recipe for disaster. (Of course, the deeper issue is that the parents are often too busy working or doing drugs to supervise their kids & prevent this type of rumination. Kids today are often raised by grandparents, friends or simply couch-surfing & have no sense of family because of the drug and poverty crisis which is a whole other issue. Refer to "it's too complex to fix with any single solution" in paragraph 1.)
The last piece of the puzzle is our lack of universal healthcare which includes mental health. While some people truly can't be helped (psychopaths & others with severe personality disorders), that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. We're the only developed nation without it, and a good chunk of school shooters/other mass shooters have had diagnosable mental illnesses or sought treatment before committing their crimes. Men in America (males make up 99+% of mass shooters) often have the attitude that the only acceptable emotions are "happy" and "rage" which is why feminists say that patriarchy hurts men too. In a sane society, men would feel comfortable expressing a range of emotions such as sadness, loneliness, embarrassment, fear, hope & admiration without having a second thought about their masculinity. Seeking therapy or taking medication for a mental illness would be as natural as wearing a cast for a broken arm & everyone could afford to do so.
But we don't live in a sane society. We live in America, where healthcare is privatized & guns outnumber people.
There's a list floating around on social media of all the school shootings that have happened since the 1990s and it's breathtaking. There have already been 27 shootings in K-12 schools in 2022 so far (it's May). As I've said before, America has a serious issue not learning from history: ours or anyone else's. Until we decide to try new methods of attacking our recurring social problems, nothing will change. More innocent people will die in the prime of their lives. From shootings, from pandemics, from drug overdoses & any number of other preventable causes. And the world will keep spinning.
God help this country.
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