Wonder if they realize by now the eyes of Americans are studying them up and down. After dozens and dozens of mass school shootings since, say 1994, there’s an obvious profile. White. 18-22. Drop out, unsuccessful in school. Insecure. Loner. Angry. Suicidal. Desirous of military-style assault rifles.
The American people are left carrying on as if living in a war zone because war rifles are the weapons of choice in this bloody Ground Hog Day we just can’t stop. So now everybody must remain on high alert wherever we go, work, play, worship, shop, travel, drive, perhaps for another generation or so. Because the 20 million war assault rifles circulating in this country aren’t going away any time soon as well as their body-blasting bullets.
Texas released a final report on the Uvalde school massacre, blaming a confederacy of dunces among law enforcement agencies who stood back for more than one hour and allowed it to happen. The state’s insult against the community’s law officers makes no sense to the families of the deceased and all the students who survived being shot.
The state report detailed the shooter. He had attended the very school where he carried out his child-killing spree, even walking right into the elementary classroom where he sat for a year long ago and was bullied every day, according to his old teacher. High school classmates called him ‘school shooter,’ he was so dark, creepy and suspicious. The only thing he had never done was handle guns; his family never indulged his fantasy by giving him one as requested for birthdays and Christmas. The report states the day of his murder plan was the first time he shot a gun.
Suicidal depression
With all the school shootings and mass shootings elsewhere by young males, society has focused on security, fencing, armed campus police, metal detectors, active shooter training, key card entry doors, and counseling shell-shocked children and teens—we’ve neglected to focus on prevention. We’ve become that cynical, calling each mass shooting Tuesday in America. But most of the young mass shooters primarily are suicidal … but they don’t wanna die alone. They’re so angry at the world, some shoot their families first then go out to a public place and shoot as many people before turning the gun on themselves or being killed by police. Our country averages one mass shooting a day, according to statistics by Giffords, the nonprofit founded by and named after former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords who bravely survived a gunshot to the head during a mass shooting.
Giffords’ statistics bring to light what we should have been focusing on: preventing suicide by firearm. Every year 41,000 Americans are killed by firearms: EVERY DAY 110 killed with guns. Almost 60 percent of gun deaths are suicides, 38 percent homicides, 1.3 percent police shootings, 1.2 percent unintentional/accidents, and less than one percent undetermined. Giffords goes on to state, “Firearm access triples suicide risk. Waiting periods and extreme risk protection orders offer people in crisis a second chance.” More shockingly, Giffords’ research found: “Three million American children are directly exposed to gun violence each year.”
Along with our national watch to prevent suicides, whether family, friend or neighbor, a new suicide prevention hotline has been rolled out: 988. Easy enough for everyone to remember. Trained staff, even people who once tried to commit suicide, answer phones to help others in emotional crisis, distraught people who want to end their lives right now.
The latest phrase in public schooling these days is SEL: Social and Emotional Learning. This was created in part to help the nation’s students who had to deal with a year or two of online learning away from schools, classmates, teachers and in a way reality. But SEL is geared toward helping any student who’s in crisis.
All the adults spinning over continuous mass shootings have looked at the issue not from the developing brain of an adolescent, the usual suspect in school shootings. The frontal lobe of the human brain, the part in our foreheads that allows us to think before we act, is usually not fully developed until mid 20s, and brain scientists are now discovering for some humans mid 30s. Young people see every issue in extremes: “You always say that!”; “You never do this!” They really think they’ve got life all figured out at age 16. They only see black and white, right and wrong. If they feel wronged, they’ll seek revenge. This is the way of youth, which again can last way into the 20s and 30s for some people, particularly males.
Seeing life in shades of gray [the way life really is, we come to accept] is incomprehensible if not impossible for most adolescents. With their frontal lobe not fully formed, some truly conclude nothing will change in their lives, there’s no hope, no meaning, so what’s the point? We’ve all been there. But you know how young people won’t listen to those of us with more time on the planet. Wish they would. Any one of us could tell a kid how to find the positive in themselves or any situation, how people change and circumstances change and nothing lasts forever. School was not the best time of our lives for many of us. We’re randomly put together in classrooms and expected to deal with assorted personalities, from the bully and the popular to the meek and the rebellious.
‘Keep ’em talking’ is an easy enough first step in suicide prevention. That is where so many families fall apart. Everything ends in an argument. Parents refuse to understand feelings or issues that are very important to a young person. Young people feel left on their own, hearing their parents say time and again, “Life’s tough, kid.” If the family is the fabric of a great nation, well then, America, we have a lot of patch work to do.
Check out the Giffords organization to stop gun violence: