Can We Stop the Madness?

Another dreadful school shooting. A Christian preschool/elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee. Three children and three adults. The shooter was killed by police.

Will anything ever be done to try to prevent such horrific events? Likely not. The media does not want to make it political, so they will rarely say that the Republicans in Congress and statehouses, will simply not vote to pass any major legislation to try to stop the prevalence of guns, and the ease in which people can get them and use them. So the rest of the comments by people in office do not do much good at all.

Not long ago, a six-year old somehow got a gun, took it to his school, and shot his teacher. She survived. She said that she will never forget the look on his face as he pointed the gun at her and shot her.

What kind of people are we raising, children and adults? I remember children on my street, playing with cap guns, bang bang. I wanted one, just to play like a Western show, but my parents didn’t want me to have one, which was fine. There is a certain appeal for boys, mostly, in practicing marksmanship, even as a fantasy game., but that has to be curtailed by parents.

Now we hear that the shooter was a female, first believed to be a teenager, now identified as a 28-year-old woman, who had two assault weapons and a handgun with her. It was speculated that someone may have supplied her with one or more of them, since a teenager could not easily get so many weapons, but adults can. The poison spreads, it is rarely a female, but we may hear of more. There are disturbed children, teenagers, and adults, of both genders, though of course most of the shooters are male. Of the last 250 mass shootings, 9 of the shooters were female. This shooter, as some of the others, took all those weapons with her, she was intending to kill hundreds of people, perhaps.

The problem, most predominantly, is very easy to know. It is the prevalence of guns. There have always been angry or malicious, vengeful, disturbed people, and society should try to ameliorate some of the mental health problems. But when you make it so easy for any of them to not only have a gun, but an assault weapon, which was designed to be used on the battlefields in war, these events are almost inevitable. It is absolute madness, and absolutely has to be stopped, unless we want America to turn into something out of a graphic horror novel. Maybe it already is.

Jim Kavanaugh, the highly respected retired Special Agent in Charge, who has handled many of these events over the years, said that people have to learn how to tell others if they have any sense that this may happen. Most shooters talk about this before they do it. they give warnings. Yes, that would turn us more in the direction of a culture in which people tell on other people, and maybe unduly so; but the alternative is not do say anything to anybody about someone who is threatening or drawing images or writing on the internet about these ideations.

Much more will be said, unfortunately most of it to no end. Maybe someday, Republicans will stop being owned by the NRA, and fund the humanity and courage to try to stop the spread of firearms, and the creation of highly disturbed and evil people who want to use them to kill other people. If not, the madness will continue unabated.