It is beyond my imagination what the parents of the dead children must be feeling today. You send your children to school in good faith and the last thing you expect is to turn on the TV or have one of the neighbors come pound on your door and tell you what they just heard — and you wonder if your child is one of the victims.
These stories move faster than a hummingbird’s wings. The death toll went from two dead, a dozen injured to fourteen dead in the time it took me to bang out my first paragraph.
Here is what Greg Abbott has to say and here is also a live streaming video feed.
JUST IN: Gov. Greg Abbott gives an update on the school shooting in Uvalde. INFO: https://t.co/rhVwftZh2Y pic.twitter.com/4JSRU5FQlR
— CBS Austin (@cbsaustin) May 24, 2022
It’s known at this time that the shooter was not an immigrant or a Mexican national but an American citizen.
American culture is very sick. We have seen more gun violence in 2021 and 2022 than ever before — yet we had Donald Trump, Jr. do a ha ha funny meme of bunny rabbits with assault rifles at Easter this year.
The unhinged in our culture get their hands on guns and then they go and commit suicide by mass shooting. At least, that is my opinion. The ones who don’t die at the scene, Ethan Crumbley, for example, end up messing up their lives beyond any hope of repair. And at such a young age, too. Crumbley wrecked his life at a time when he should have been looking at college catalogs and checking out girls. His idiot parents put a gun in his hand and now those life choices are tragically foreclosed — not to mention that they, themselves, are incarcerated.
I seriously believe that there is a certain kind of mental illness afoot in America and when a certain unhinged personality has had enough of life, he decides (and it is a “he”) to go out in a blaze of glory and take others with him. Sometimes people with this personality disorder go into law enforcement. All too frequently, as a matter of fact.
What other explanation is there, motive wise, for a high school student to go to an elementary school and kill children? I believe it’s an act of suicide.
Andrew Vachss, one of my favorite writers (just died last year), wrote his first novel A Bomb Built In Hell. Though it contained lots of things publishers called “unrealistic”, one of the biggest was of someone going into a school with the intent of killing everyone. But here’s the punchline: he wrote that book in 1973 and it was based on actual conversations he’d had with troubled youth he’d had in various jobs that had brought him into contact with them.
The point: maybe it’s time we acknowledge that this was a long, long time coming.
You make an incredibly valid point. School can be hell for a lot of people. In my own life experience I had one year, the 7th grade, which I was different enough to become the class scapegoat. I cannot tell you what hell that was. To this day those memories make me cringe and I’m pushing 70. We moved, thank God, and i went to a different school. In high school I was actually popular, and so I have experienced school from both ends. School can literally be a great time or it can be Hell. I may read the book you mention, because if the author talked to enough people for whom school was Hell, I believe him. And we need to look at that as a culture.
Starting at five years old, a Little League teammate who became a classmate I was in a room with from Kindergarten through fifth grade (Jr. High Started at 6th grade) subjected me to sustained taunting that crippled my self-respect and confidence growing up. He was short and came from a family of short people and I was already tall and came from tall people – in fact my dad was at 6’7″ the tallest man in town. His own family situation was no better than mine – lower (and I mean close to the edge of lower and poor) but from the start he was one of the popular kids. His hatred of me was such that since we had such a good team through the years and often won our games by quite a bit he’d intentionally make throws (he played third base and I played first) that would be in the dirt in front of me or just out of reach to one side if I cleanly fielded a ball in the dirt. ANYTHING to make me look bad. It took some years after high school to get over the worst of his belittling of me and to be honest some of it has remained my entire life.
The point though is that at times he made things miserable enough that I didn’t want to go to school. Or even keep playing baseball which would stun people who knew me growing up. For all that, I knew better than to take him on in a fight (and with my reach he’d have been toast) because my friends and I wouldn’t be believed by teachers/the principal and he and his friends would have. Not to mention the combination of pissed and disappointed my mom would have been in me for fighting for any reason other than to protect myself or someone else from physical harm.
My point is that for all the hell this ASSHOLE put me through, it never and I mean not once EVER occurred to me to take my shotgun (or my dad’s) and go start shooting him and other popular kids he led in his taunting of me. I come from a generation and culture where kids (ok – boys) were raised learning to shoot and hunt at an early age. We also had fathers and every other adult that DRILLED responsible & safe gun use into our heads. ALL of us knew a single fuckup or boneheaded careless move with a gun in our hands would result in that being it. Our own shotguns and even BB guns would be taken away and punishment for using anyone else’s would be to awful to think about.
That’s the way things were back then. That’s why no one thought anything of guys have an actual gun in the trunk or gun rack of a pickup truck they drove to school in high school (in the 1970s in my case) so they could head straight to the woods after school in the fall. Shooting up our school if we had a bad day (or week or month) or some other place just wasn’t something anyone did back then. In places like where I grew up even joking about it would come with consequences! So I guess what I’m saying is that even IF someone might have been tempted they feared their father more than the police!
Culture changed. Yes, hard core types even then preached gun rights but even almost all the most extreme of them still believed in and preached (to those around them) responsibility once upon a time. That time is long gone.
The grim, appalling results are there for all to see.
So to the gun fetishists I once again say take your “thoughts and prayers” and shove them up your sharting ass!
My brother had enough stress in 6th grade to develop an ulcer.
I’d had the same teacher two years earlier, and to this day she’s the one I don’t like.
Word of warning: ANY of Vachss’ books are hard reads because they go to some ugly places. But that’s the intention. As the man himself said, “I may not be a good writer but I write for a good reason.” If you’re feeling outraged enough after you’re done to take action, he did his job.