I’m not a student of school shootings, except to take note of the shooters, many of whom, from Virginia Tech to Sandy Hook in Connecticut to even Dylan Roof in South Carolina, were mentally ill but able to get a gun anyway, only not so much because of their easy availability as to fatal flaws in the bureaucratic system that were designed to prevent the mentally unstable to get weapons. Bureaucracies do that, which is why there can never be any kind of gun “control”.
A decade has gone by since Virginia Tech and most of the gaps in mental health awareness from that event remain unfilled because the Left’s anti-gun lobby continue to keep their eyes fixed on solving a problem of their ethereal Utopian world of World Order, totally disarming a constitutionally-protected armed populace.
As long as fractures in mental health protections fail, they can continue to keep their eye on the larger prize.
So it will be with the shooting in Broward County, Florida, at Margery Stoneman Douglas High School near Ft Lauderdale. We know where the media and the Left will take this; 1) denying access to guns, and 2) a failure of due diligence by local officials at the school and local police to identify several hundreds of thousands 18-20 year old kids of looking and dressing scary, talking big on social media, making broad statements about shooting and mayhem, but falling short of “legal threats” (as the FBI found with Cruz), and in some way interdict them.
Leftists believe anyone who disagrees with them, much less picks up a gun, is mentally deficient or mentally disturbed. This in turn justifies some sort of physical constraints and invasion of privacy.
I’m not sure how long it will take for public pressure to cause the Parkland school and police to kneel at the foot of political correctness and admit that they should implement new programs to more quickly identify angry young kids, white males at least, so as to give the rest of the community a heads-up every-time that kid walks down the street.
I’m sure that’s what the political Left would like to see happen, which is how they see mass shootings; an opportunity for some small victory.
In hindsight we’re told he should have been identified, tagged and written up, with BOLO posters at least, spread around where anti-socials might frequent, including, if circumstances dictated, all the gun stores. Only this had already been tried and failed in Tucson, where a young mental case-killer was lucky enough to have a mom work for the county sheriff, who was also the local Democratic Party boss. His name was Jared Lee Loughner and he killed a federal judge and severely wounded Rep Gabby Giffords, and everyone pretty much knew he was certifiable for a long time. Much worse than Viktor Cruz in Florida.
What we learned from that episode is that the Democrats only view prevention and public safety for “we” and not “thee”.
George Carlin, in a semi-serious comedy routine in the 60s, remarked that the Texas Tower sniper, Charles Whitman (a little before your time) may have snapped because someone put a bottle of Scope in his mailbox (also a little before your time). Whitman killed 13 on the spot, and wounded 31. Clearly mentally ill at the time, there was no sign of any illness before he went on his rampage. No clues or heads-up about what was to come. He just snapped. No one knows why.
In 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold did essentially the same thing at Columbine High School in Aurora, Colorado. Only they didn’t snap. The planned the attack, down to great detail, killing 13 and wounding 21, before killing themselves.
Columbine was much like the Parkland school in Florida, a very affluent neighborhood. Harris and Klebold had left diaries revealing a romance with the Oklahoma City bombing, only not to the political motive, just the manner of killing. They were huge video war gamers. It was cool. And no one at home ever noticed. The modern up-scale family.
As Wikipedia put it:
“The massacre sparked debate over gun control laws, high school cliques, subcultures and bullying. It resulted in an increased emphasis on school security with zero tolerance with policies, (about what?) and a moral panic over goth culture, gun culture, social outcasts, the use of pharmaceutical anti-depressants by teenagers, teenage Internet use, and violence in video games.”
It might be a good time to go back and dig up some of the papers on the various underlying causes of Columbine, for I’m certain most are valid…and try to extend those to a youth culture today wrapped even more deeply in social media as well as video game violence. Extend some of those sights and sounds to what we in fact see regularly in college venues populated by, if not the best and brightest, at least the most affluent of America’s high school grads, largely from liberal communities such as Parkland. They are breeding grounds for popular violent gangs such as Antifa, (such a sweet looking boy) where the degree of violence seems to be ticking up weekly.
Oh, Parkland is represented in Congress by Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, THE Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, one of the most blue districts in the South.
If you’ll note Wikipedia did not mention as a cause for concern an absence of active, involved parenting and a general moral training, you know, church, Sunday School. And Bill Clinton made a special trip to Aurora to absolve the parents of that community of any sin for having raised their children so rottenly.
That common thread
If you want to find a common thread on many if not all the school shootings in the past dozen years, look no further than affluent surroundings, absentee parenting, if not absentee parents, indulged, purposeless lives, no moral teaching, no sense of the value of life, an immersion into being taught to hate everything that is opposite of what they are taught to believe, a complete immersing in liberal cultural as practiced at home and taught in schools.
America is filled with communities such as these and that common thread is that they are all staunchly liberal-to-Left Democratic. Liberals aren’t stupid, at least that kind of stupid. How can you create communities like these and not expect a few mutations to arise, a Klebold, a Harris, a Loughner, a Cruz? How can you teach children to sate themselves with self-love then teach them to hate dissent, and not expect a few to go solo and go rogue? Raising godless, sullen children will someday produce godless, sullen adults.
Today, it’s lone wolf killers as in South Florida, but soon it will be legions of Antifa soldiers, from that same common thread, filing out to slay old men in wheelchairs instead of windmills.
And they will not call them mentally-ill. They will call them gangs.
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