There Has Been Another School Shooting

There has been another school shooting.

There is always another school shooting.

I’m an elder Millennial. I’ve been watching school shootings happen since I was a teenager, when Harris and Klebold murdered thirteen and then themselves. Since then, there have been 416 school shootings. By the time you reads this, there might well be another. This latest shooting happened at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, and the death toll is four. The shooter was a 14-year-old boy. He’s being charged as an adult so his name is all over the news, but I can’t bring myself to write it. I don’t think children should ever be charged as adults. The murderer’s father’s name is Colin Gray, and he’s been arrested for second degree murder, involuntary manslaughter and cruelty to children, because he seems to have known his son was dangerous and still given him access to a gun. Charging the parents who let young school shooters have guns is a new step being tried, to deter school shootings. Time will tell if it works.

Two of the dead this time are adults, math teachers. One of them had a baby at home. The other two are children, fourteen-year-olds, the shooter’s age. And there are nine wounded badly enough to be taken to the hospital. As for all the cases of post-traumatic stress disorder that will  certainly result from all this– those are yet to be counted.

My prayers go out for the dead.

My heart goes out to the survivors. I can’t stand to think about what they’ll have to suffer. I can’t stand to think about a fourteen-year-old boy who was so mentally ill that he thought to pick up a gun and murder other children.

For some reason I’m a lot more shaken by this shooting than by some others. I don’t know why. I think it may be because my own child is an adolescent now. Adrienne will be 13 later this month. I have teenagers coming in and out of the house to visit all the time. I can’t imagine one of them committing a shooting. What induces American boys to commit mass shootings?

Who are we?

I completely agree that America has a severe gun control problem. To me, that goes without saying. The NRA has the blood of thousands on its hands. The constitution is not a divinely inspired document like the Bible. Americans should not have our lives constantly endangered because of a paragraph written hundreds of years ago when an expert gunman could perhaps shoot three musket balls per minute. This is no way to exist as a society.

But I mean, besides that. Who are we?

What is America, and why are we the way that we are?

What is wrong with America that every so often a teenager, almost always a male, most often a white male, decides he’s going to solve his problems by shooting up a school? Are all teenage boys that likely to be murderers, all over the world? In places where there isn’t so much access to guns, do teenage boys fantasize about murder and just decide to do something else? Or is this kind of violence an American trait?

What is wrong with America that parents, like the Crumbley family in 2021 and Colin Gray now, see that their child is seriously disturbed, and just go ahead and let him have access to weapons? Are there so many neglectful parents in other places, who hurt their children by some other means? Or are parents only like that here?

It’s the guns, but it can’t be merely the guns. I live in Appalachia. I know plenty of people with guns. They take their children hunting like Colin Gray apparently did. They don’t do things like this. They would never think to do anything like this. But 419 times in just under twenty-five years, some American boy has picked up a gun and gone to commit mass murder at a school. This is something we do. It’s part of our culture. We’re used to it.

We must be a violent and terrible people

God grant that we someday become something else.

That’s all I have for you today.