Back when I was in school, we had fire drills and tornado drills so that in the event of such an emergency we would have a fairly good idea as to what we should do.
Tornadoes never hit, though. Fires never happened. Kind of disappointing, if you ask me.
The most exciting, potentially catastrophic scenario I ever experienced while in school was an earthquake we had in the late 80s. It was during second grade, I think, and we were all sitting on the floor — that’s how I remember it, anyway — as the teacher spoke to us. Suddenly I heard something strange, and I turned my head towards the hallway just in time to see an Exit sign fall off the ceiling and hit the floor. I jumped. It was frightening for a moment, then mysterious, then kind of funny.
Shortly thereafter, chaos ensued.
The ground moved like an angry ocean, like violent fluid. Vision was akin to the shakey cameras in those horrible “found footage” movies. Everyone was fumbling around like drunken monkeys. When it was all over, we all laughed, as if to relieve the tension.
Nowadays, kids like my niece and nephew have to go through active shooter drills. Not a potential catastrophe brought about by nature or a faceless arsonist or electrical fire but potentially by a gun-towing classmate who desires to pump as many people full of lead that they can manage before they’re either shot dead by a police officer or gather the courage to turn the barrel of their own gun on themselves and spray-paint the floor and walls with their blood and brains.
As all old fucks tend to say: well, kids, I guess I just lived in a different world.
Columbine happened two years after I graduated high school. My friend and I decided to walk up to the old high school one day to visit our art teacher when we noticed a cop following us into the building, then into the school office. We noted it and expressed our confusion to one another.
The reason, as we later discovered? My non-chalont friend was wearing a trench coat.
Once we got in the office, we found another kid there, sitting where kids always sat when they were sent to the office, awaiting a meeting with the principal. This kid, we soon learned, was sent to the principals office because he was wearing a trench coat much like my friend — and he refused to take it off.
My friend and this kid were suspected members of the Trench Coat Mafia.
Me? I was just some backwards-hat, flannel-wearing, coffee-shop-going, nincompoop bystander with poor hygeine caught in the mix, yet as innocent as the other two. I was confused and irritated nonetheless. Hell, I thought it was stupid when our Vietnam Vet shop teacher would send kids to the office for wearing ballcaps or sneaking into the music room to smoke cigarettes during high school, and that wasn’t even distantly related to events involving mass homicide.
That’s when I got my first suspicion that shit had changed.
Since then, that shit has hit the fan and spread far and wide. School shootings happen with such a frequency in the good ol’ US of A that its hardly newsworthy anymore. It’s too common now. Too boring. Only during a recent, global pandemic in which all but “essential workers” — a group which I, a fast food worker, was strangely a part — were isolated did the flying bullets amidst the hallways and classrooms of schools here in ‘Murica experience a commercial break.
Worry not, though: we’re back on our game. It happened again, this time in Texas, and the ‘Murican masses remained faithful to their well-rehearsed script.
Does it piss me off?
Does it piss me off how every time yet another school shooting gets widespread media attention that all that Republicans seem to scream about is fucking gun rights?
Yes.
But does it also piss me off how every time another school shooting gets widespread media attention that all that the Democrats seem to scream about is gun regulation?
Also yes.
What pisses me off the most, however, is that since as far back as Columbine, neither side ever seems interested in talking about much of anything beyond the issue of guns.
On the blue end of the spectrum, people often speak of guns as if they’re haunted objects out of a Stephen King novel that telepathically summon the weak to purchase them and subsequently possess them into committing acts of violence. As a natural consequence, Team Blue adopts the position that stricter gun regulation is The Answer.
And don’t get me wrong: common sense gun laws should be a no-brainer, and I personally know sensible Republicans who agree. This is something that would certainly help, of course, but Team Blue is so hyperfocused on it that all thought stops there. In their mind, this is The Answer. If only access to guns were a far more complex labyrinth, they assert, such atrocities could be effectively circumvented.
Personally, I think they’re full of shit.
On the red end of the spectrum, however, things get similarly ludicrous. They don’t react to the gun violence so much as they react to the reaction of Team Blue to the gun violence. In other words, theyre hyperfocused on immediately going on the defensive:
“Don’t take our rights away. We have a right to own guns.”
To their credit, I do think it’s a right. I’ve never trusted my government less than I do now, nor the insanity of the herd, and that’s saying a lot. I’ve been waiting for the shit to hit the fan on a global scale since high school. As comedic genius Bill Burr put it in one of his bits — and yes, I’m paraphrasing here — you can have a library of books containing all the clever ways of living off the grid available, you can grow your own food, have a bomb shelter, and have your bug-out bag filled to the brim and ready to go, but unless you’ve also got sufficient firepower, all you’re really doing is collecting supplies for the most powerful, morally-flexible motherfucker on the block.
Yes, guns terrify me, but I support our right to have them.
Having said all that, I’ve never heard a sensible person on the left ever propose that all guns should be taken away, anyway.
So is Team Red crazier? Team Blue? Pick and choose and rate them by matter of degree, but when all is said and done, when you get down to it — assuming you’re interested in doing so at all — by and large, it becomes abundantly clear that both uber-troops of color-coded, groupthinking apes are bloody fucking idiots. Red, blue: the colors are bloody irrelevant in that respect.
Rather than travel down those typical avenues of well-established, reactionary thought every time another kid pumps lead into their classmates, why not try to stop yourself, clear it all away, and ask the actual question?
What is it that makes these individuals want to purchase these weapons and then go shoot up a school?
Guns are just tools, after all, and inherently amoral, so its utterly stupid to blame them. So really, take the relentless spotlight away from them for a moment and ask yourself: what is it that drives people to use these tools? What is it that inspires the fingers that pull these triggers? What influences them to have such a disturbing lack of value in human life?
That’s the real question, and this fact should be obvious, but no one spends much time at all looking at it, much less really examining it, and so they forever remain light-years away from exploring potential solutions.
Sure, some members of Team Red talk on how “mental illness” is really the core issue, but sorry, that’s an incredibly vague term, and they never elaborate, at least not in such a way that ever circles back to the real issue at hand.
I mean, look around you. Nowadays, nearly everyone qualifies as mentally ill. BPD. ADHD. Depression. Anxiety. And on and on.
No guesswork is needed, either. Few are shy about sharing the flavors they’ve been diagnosed with. Sometimes it seems like a badge of goddamn honor for people. Some kids almost treat it like a rite of passage. I don’t consider myself a member of either camp, but truth be known, I’ve suffered from anxiety and depression for years. I was always comfortable offering up that I was anxious, as I hoped it might explain to people the bulk of my behavior, but the depression aspect always left me feeling ashamed. I’m not sure why. In either case, despite my “mental illnesses,” not once have I considered shooting up a school. Not in high school, not in college, not fucking now.
So tell me: what specific type of mental illness inspires people to do such a thing? Firearm Spiritual Possession Disorder? Is it really that Stephen King thing?
To my ears, in my mind, to call someone “mentally ill” is just a nicer way of calling someone crazy, and crazy is just a dismissive term, a thought-stopper with respect to understanding the motivations of another. So vague as to be meaningless.
Alone, it means nothing. Fucking nothing.
So what’s truly inside the mind residing behind the trigger finger? In an attempt to get inside their heads, I’ve imagined a few scenarios. I’ve cooked up in my own twisted mind why they might do what they do. Not a Stephen King thing, exactly, but perhaps even more disturbing.
1. A Pathway to Power.
Guns level the playing field. More than that: it gives you the advantage.
Imagine some physically weak and emotionally fragile kid with a home life littered with emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. Imagine he goes to school and is either shunned or beaten up by his peers.
He can’t take it anymore.
He could never hope to defeat them by sheer physical strength alone, so he begins generating revenge fantasies where he manages to get the upper hand. The easiest way to get that upper hand? Have that hand hold a gun.
It doesn’t matter how physically powerful the kid’s abusers are, how physically weak he may be: no amount of muscle is a match for a rain of bullets.
The kid knows it will likely be the last thing he ever does, but as long as he knows they know he’s not such a pussy after all, as long as he turns the tables on them and can see them in the powerless position they always put him in — and by his own hand, no less — he feels he can die with some semblance of dignity.
And if guns are outlawed? This circumstance, it doesn’t go away. He’ll buy one illegally. And if he can’t get a gun, he’ll get a knife to shank somebody, just like they do in prisons, where they can’t have guns, either. If stabbing someone is too intimate in his eyes, or he can’t get the kill-count he’s aiming for, he’ll go for something more impersonal. Maybe he’ll get a copy of the Anarchists Cookbook and build a bomb.
Outlaw the book? He’ll get it online.
2. Route to Celebrity Status.
Imagine a kid who’s lost in the crowd, unable to contribute anything meaningful to the whole, which couldn’t seem less interested in him, anyway. How can he mean something? How on earth could a nobody as utterly insignificant as him ever hope to leave a mark on the collective psyche?
He watches the news. He watches the movies.
After much contemplation, he comes to the conclusion that violence is the easiest way to get people’s attention and immortalize himself in their memory. Violence is the easiest route to celebrity status. Not only would those closest to the violence undoubtedly remember it to their dying day, the media would solidify him in the minds of the greater masses by posting his photo on the news, on the videos you click on YouTube, and talking about him endlessly, and perhaps even provide his manifesto, if he considered it a worthy self-imposed homework assignment before delivering his storm of bullets.
Its just like in the movie Seven, where John Doe, played by a canceled, junk-grabbing actor, says:
“You can’t just tap people on the shoulder anymore. You have to hit them with a sledgehammer. Then you’ll notice you have their strict attention.”
***
Now, we aren’t just products of our environment. We aren’t just empty vessels to be filled by Hollywood, the media, our friends, or how we grew up.
I believe in what I call free will, individual liberty, personal choice. But I also believe in what I call fate, which is the coupling of nature and nurture. Who we are and who we become is found in the tug-o-war between free will and fate.
In the gap betwixt them are a spectrum of choices ranging from the path of least resistance to the path of greatest resistance, and that spectrum is different for each one of us. What is the easiest thing for you to do may be the hardest thing for me, and vice versa.
We need diversity to evolve, to survive as a whole on every concievable level, and this spectrum of choice is it’s inevitable consequence.
We all have different points of departure that, so far as we can tell, we had no choice in. That’s the fate part. Our parents. Their psychology. Their economic status. The society we were born into. Even our own psychology and predisposition may have been entirely random for all we know.
All of this, so far as we can tell, was merely a roll of the dice. But we still have freedom of choice.
A kid born in the slums does not have the same spectrum of choices as a kid born into a rich family whose father gave him “a small loan of a million dollars,” so take that pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps bullshit and aggressively force-feed it to your posterior blow-hole and take a double-shot of empathy and compassion.
My point is that while fate — one’s environment and circumstances — don’t necessarily make an individual, they undoubtedly serve as vital ingredients in the process of development, so we should stop an ask ourselves what it is about the conditions of our society that make this choice for kids to shoot up a school such an easy and alluring one.
We are a divided country, now more than ever. There is the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor. The increasing distance between The People and our not-much-of-a-choice of out-of-touch, corrupt, so-called representatives. The ever-intensifying political polarization, of course. The gap between men and women continually reinforced by modern Feminism. The systemic racism.
The cracks in our collective consciousness are stretching further, the chasms between us are widening. Our culture is literally tearing apart at the seams.
Once United, we would now be more appropriately referred to as the Divided States of America, and that’s not only a metaphor: survey says growing numbers on both left and right think we should divide the country into red-run and blue-run states.
We hate each other.
Nobody is listening to anybody else, and everyone’s voice is lost in the crowd unless they sing along in the hate-fueled echo-chambers. Sing out of tune, they label you a member of The Other.
Do so much as communicate with The Other, hear them out, strive to understand them, put some empathy and compassion into practice, and you’re guilty by means of association, and so they label you as a member of The Other.
There’s no tolerance for the gray area, no room for the spectrum between the extremes, no ability to embrace nuance. You’re only allowed to see in black or white, red or blue. It’s all binary — a rather ironic position for the authoritarian aspects of the left in particular, if you think about it.
But everybody listens to the guy with the gun. Everybody reads the manifesto of the guy who built, placed, and set off the bomb.
You can’t just tap people on the shoulder anymore, and maybe that cuts close to the core of this problem.
Chronicles of a Madman. 