The most recent mass school shooting—in the gun-toting state of Michigan—ended with four students shot to death, several other young people injured and hospitalized, the 15-year-old male alleged assailant charged with murder and terrorism, but also charged the alleged shooter’s parents who supplied their son the gun as a Christmas gift.
Finally, parents of minors accused of mass school shootings may be drawn into the criminal justice system and face prison and fines. For several reasons, this school shooting places blame squarely on the alleged shooter’s parents. The gun was not out of the minor’s reach and clearly belonged to the youth legal or not. The day of the shooting, the parents were called in by the high school administrator to discuss their son’s emotional distress and bizarre behavior reported by concerned teachers. The parents did not remove their son from school. Texts between mother and son were disconcerting and related to reckless use of the new firearm. Moments later the deadly shooting rampage occurred.
School shootings are a loop of horror. It’s been this way for decades especially now that military-style firearms are available for easy purchase. School shootings have become so common in the U.S., we refer to it as ‘Tuesday’ while the world looks on at all of us with disgust because this just does not happen on a weekly and daily basis in other countries. The world looks on at our country for continuing to allow guns all around. We are the nation with more guns than people, hundreds of millions more guns than our 360 million population.
Since the 1990s’ Columbine High School massacre, which ended in the two student assailants turning their weapons on themselves, our nation has studied the myriad reasons why a student would bring a high-powered gun to school and commence to shooting. By now we know all the reasons: mental illness, bullying, easy access to guns, Hollywood movies, the mass media, shooter video games, now the internet and smart phones, raging rock music and violent videos like Jeremy—the theory is all of it has desensitized us and more so young developing minds. But the rest of the world does all this, too, without frequent mass shootings, hardly any.
It seems in America, adults have forgotten … who calls the shots, to use an unfortunate yet accurate phrase. We’re the ones in control, not adolescent boys. We’re not acting like authority figures, however. Few laws have been passed to address and stop kids from shooting kids at schools, and instead we as legislators and voters have sat back and allowed more high-powered guns everywhere to be owned and operated by anyone.
With news of yet another school shooting, all that kids see us do … is shed a tear if even that, then every few years in big cities march for gun control. Boys with guns think they’re in control. They think a gun and shooting it at peers is the only way to take charge … the only way to deal with what’s really bothering them (which is not feeling in control of their lives). Adults can at least agree that something along this line is what’s wrong with someone young or old who would get a gun and shoot everybody.
The good, the bad and the ugly
The reason for all the school shootings has always been parenting or lack of it. Sometimes the young shooter kills his parents and family at home before heading off to school to shoot classmates and teachers. After Columbine, Oprah Winfrey remarked that the parents owe this nation an explanation; they’re obligated to tell us ‘why.’ But they weren’t about to share their dirty laundry on Oprah, except in recent years, maybe 20 years after Columbine, one of the assailant’s mothers wrote a book about dealing with her personal grief. Too little, too late.
The ever-growing list of American parents whose sons are convicted of deadly school shootings rarely tell their side of the story. They would have to face a nation who would call them failures as parents. Oh, the sting of it, as if that’s the worst thing in the world. No, much worse is a deadly school shooting.
‘Indulged’ is the word that came to mind as we learned the lives of the two teen-age boys accused of the Columbine tragedy. Their parents never walked into their sons’ bedrooms, had no idea of all the weaponry and bombs in the closets, their hand-written cryptic notes, the time they spent outdoors shooting their military firearms. There are so many incarcerated school shooters now, men who now can articulate what drove them to mass murder, surely they can be studied, scrutinized, analyzed. Perhaps some were raised by an exhausted single parent, usually the mother, or their old grandma. But this is not the back story of the latest accused youth. What would all these men, now serving time for mass shootings they committed as teen-agers, tell us about why they did it?
Do we really want to know? Do we have the guts to learn their truth, we the nation who weeps a moment after each school shooting then does nothing? What school shooters say won’t be easy for us to hear or understand, but their parents will play a prominent role in their childish actions that today leave them with remorse and all the other emotions they could not express as adolescents. And here’s the kicker: They won’t blame their parents. As society wants to hear, they’ll blame themselves for choosing to take a high-powered gun to school and intentionally shooting people to death, as many as their super-duper gun and ammunition would allow.
Parenting is a very hard job, more so during the offspring’s adolescence. Add undiagnosed and untreated mental illness then special conditions like Asperger’s syndrome, the job of parent is a million times more difficult—but not impossible. When the fights come—and there’s going to be fighting between an adolescent male and a parental authority—how many parents would do anything to stop their child’s loud, obnoxious, angry, violent, profanity-laced rants peppered with the one-two punch ‘I hate you!!!?’ Takes a mighty tough parent to put up with all that and resist the urge to return to the bygone days of a slap across the mouth or a belt across the butt. In studying young males who turned into school shooters, the most common clue is their homes had guns. That’s the place to start, the rest of the world would tell us.