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We killed a couple more kids this week, and two of their teachers, in a high school in Georgia.
Someone made him angry, I suppose, so he — and it’s nearly always a white male who does the shooting — grabbed a gun. It’s the American Way.
At the beginning of the pandemic, when the news was full of a toilet paper shortage, I went to the local hardware and gun store to buy a washer needed for a project I don’t remember. I stood waiting to pay, next to a gentleman buying cases of bullets.
“You expecting a party,” I asked.
“I’ll be ready for one,” he replied.
Over toilet paper?!
There are some who will argue against calling this “The American Way.” I would direct their attention to a country music song of that name sung by Toby Keith. And though I like the song, in context, I’m pretty sure the context is lost on most 14-year-olds, to whom high school may well feel like a battlefield.
As a dad who really was paying more attention than sometimes seemed when Junior was growing up, I’m also fully aware that adult hyperbole often is far too literally understood by youthful listeners.
I would also point to the protests on a few college campuses this spring, when young college students — and some staff — marched against the slaughter of Palestinian civilians. Our national response was to call out the SWAT team to deal with the protesters.
I am struck by the similarities between the most recent protests and those in the 1960s, when young Americans protested the murders of their classmates in a country called Vietnam. Our parents called out the National Guard, which resulted in a few dead protesters — that settled them ’em right down.
In the same era, Muhammad Ali, was banned from professional boxing because he objected to his country telling him to kill citizens of another country halfway around the world — citizens who had never done him harm. I joined the military during that era and I remember being struck, as I watched and read the news, that a few companies seemed to be making tons of money building weapons to be used to kill people and I did not know why.
Some of our leaders said, if we didn’t kill them there, we would have to kill them here.
Alas, here we are, killing us here at home.
We talk about limiting ownership of AR-15-style assault rifles. The problem with them, we are told, is that they can empty large clips of ammunition and kill large numbers of people in a short space of time.
Apparently, we can accept a few people here and there being killed, but we object to our minds being assaulted with big numbers — or with children. The 14-year-old in Appalachee High School, in Georgia, killed four people this week.
More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. Generally speaking, and barring a small plane crashing somewhere, they rate a minute or two on the evening news.
Four children, especially in high school, makes way better television. A few days ago, someone killed four people on a Chicago Transit Authority train. I don’t recall seeing it mentioned as a news item, but that’s not surprising. After all, the dead people were adults, and it was Chicago.
When I was young, movie gunslingers were made to “check their iron” when they entered town. Occasionally, some malcontent would assert his right to belly up to the bar, pistol on his hip, and challenge the hero of the story to a duel. The two would move to the street, where the guy in the black hat would receive his reward from the fellow with the white.
Now the bad guy feels insulted, he hauls out the heavy weapons.
Is it really any wonder kids think the way to settle insult is with a bigger weapon. We even have a presidential candidate who professes that the way to deal with shoplifters is to kill them! Maybe he means it, maybe he doesn’t; it’s all the same to a 14-year-old.
Performer Kid Rock expressed his displeasure with Busch beer’s advertising by shooting up a few cases with an assault-style rifle. Georgia Rep. Mike Collins, while running for Congress in 2022, made the point that the election system needed fixing. He used an assault-style rifle to blow up a ballot machine. (The videos still are on YouTube.)
Proving his point that if you want to stop someone disagreeing with you, grab a gun, preferably a big one.
To drive the message home, the 14-year-old shooter has been charged and will be tried as an adult. Imagine being 14, facing a life sentence.
Payment for doing what he’d been taught.
Thursday evening the New York Times reported: The shooter’s father, Colin Gray, was arrested and charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, the authorities said.
Text & images ©2024 John Messeder. John is an award-winning environmental storyteller, nemophilist and social anthropologist, and lives in Gettysburg, PA. He may be contacted at john@johnmesseder.com