I saw a lot of social media posts last night about how “every parent has to go to sleep tonight wondering if their children will be the victims of the next school shooter”. What a lot of parents should go to bed at night wondering is if their child is going to BE the next school shooter.
After every incident like this we act like the perpetrator emerged from some bubble, where nobody had any idea they were thinking about mass violence, weren’t accumulating the weapons necessary for a large-scale attack, and lived quiet, normal lives until the day they decided to walk into a building and shoot a bunch of people. It’s only afterwards that we learn about the shooter’s on-line activities, social media posts, comments to friends and family, and shopping habits.
Let’s go back to the incident that provided the inspiration for nearly all of today’s school shooters: Columbine. Dylan Kliebold and Eric Harris left obvious clues that they were psychotic and a threat for violence for nearly a year before their attack. They made a video called “Hitmen For Hire” FOR A SCHOOL PROJECT that dramatized them shooting their fellow students. Harris wrote an especially violent creative writing assignment that got the following critique from the teacher: “Yours is a unique approach and your writing works in a gruesome way — good details and mood setting.”
Both Kliebold and Harris were underage to buy the weapons they used, so they enlisted an 18-year old friend to make straw purchases for them. She never told anyone and was never charged in exchange for her cooperation with the investigation–after the shooting. And no one ever asked where the 17-year olds got guns. They made videos of themselves shooting up the countryside outside of Columbine–along with step by step plans for their eventual attack, and kept the videos in their homes–along with highly detailed journals. No one else in those homes took a look at what was on the tapes or in those books. And judges have ruled they are never to be released to the public. The Columbine shooters also told friends to stay away from school that day–and those friends basically laughed off those warnings.
This month’s Buffalo shooter (also 18-years old and living at home) made videos too. But unlike the Columbine shooters, he had an actual public platform to post them–YouTube. He also started a Twitch video stream before launching his attack. People watched those videos. No one said anything. And let’s not forget about him posting his “manifesto” for the entire world to read beforehand.
The first thing the Texas shooter did on his 18th birthday was to go and buy guns. And now we are finding out that he was sending pictures of his new purchases to strangers on Instagram asking to repost them. Along with sending them messages about how he’s “about to…..”. I don’t fault the recipients of those messages, as they knew absolutely nothing about the guy and appeared to have been selected at random.
These are not the 9/11 hijackers operating as isolated cells, moving quietly amongst us, communicating via secret code to coordinate their attack. These are people leaving us hints and clues almost every day–but we choose not to see them. Or if we do, we try to convince ourselves “There’s no way my child/friend/co-worker would ever do that”. Well, the shooters in Columbine, Sandy Hook, Buffalo, Uvalde, and every other incident like those was someone’s child/friend/co-worker–and they did do it.
