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Shooter kills four and injures at least nine at a high school outside Atlanta
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- Title
- Police swarm Apalachee High School after students evacuated
- Published
- Sep 4 2024
- Word count
- 178 words
‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens. It's the 37th repeat of this article.
I was just working on a personal paper about the confluence of factors that we see manifesting in so many different deteriorations in society. And I was going to write, regular shootings of children as one of the symptoms. And it actually gave me pause. I am usually affected by the stuff. I really haven’t been numb to it, but I am also usually pretty matter-of-fact about the problem. And for a moment I wanted to second-guess myself.
Think about the proliferation of guns and their role in the issues. I haven’t been entirely convinced that guns are the key to mitigating the issue. One data point that stuck out to me was the relative stability of the percentage of Americans that own at least one gun.
I thought about how this statistic (which I have felt was important to consider) is used let’s go in defense of guns, which I would never want to do — I would only ever want to be advocating or voting for the most effective strategies. I thought about how it’s a dishonest argument, because it doesn’t consider the populations with these guns, the social context that they exist in, and the sheer amount, because the statistic, of course, purposefully ignores that aspect
Just visualizing the difference of a bunch of pistols and double barrels versus an orgy of semi autos and military aesthetic pieces advertised like fetish products, it pretty much ended my interest in that argument.
And that was like 30 minutes ago before I saw this. I’m so sorry for those kids. And I really hate and am sorry for the effect that That Republicans have on the country.
"The violent murder of school children is a debatable topic in the US."
The suspect is fourteen... Unless he skipped a year, he'd be a freshman. I checked and the school year started on August 1, so school has only been in session for a month. There's always a sense of "why?" when this happens, but this time the question feels stronger. Mass shootings are always senseless, but presumably this kid was only at the school for a month. I feel like they usually happen a bit later in the year for some reason. This might be the earliest one has happened in the school year.
It's also just disturbing I'm even able to think that. That's it common enough I can notice a pattern, and think about whether I could compare all the start dates. I actually looked up lists on Wikipedia of school shootings to check, and this seems to be the only one in September. And, well... I hate I even thought to check that.
I just hate how desensitized and numb I am to this...
I think that a desire for sense-making is our implicit response after a crisis like this. Our empathetic minds are reeling. A comfortable-looking port in that storm is the idea that, say, someone was pushed to their breaking point. It makes sense. It feels right.
On the other hand, when that isn’t necessarily the case — such as this one so close to the start of the school year — it can throw us for a loop and leave us even more disoriented. On top of the original tragedy, there’s a layer of confusion — an absence of meaning.
In Dave Cullen’s Columbine, he talks about how our national perception of school shootings was shaped for years to come by the narratives that took hold immediately afterwards.
One of these was that the two shooters were relentlessly bullied outcasts, and their killing was a response to that. It made sense. It even gave their horrific actions a thin veneer of respectability — the sense that their murders might have had a righteous element, rather than simply being inhuman.
The problem, though, is that this narrative isn’t true (archive link).
Even though the story that they were bullied until they snapped wasn’t true, it felt really true at the time. And for many years after that. For many people. I’d actually wager that it’s still commonly believed today. It became a sort of blueprint for shootings, where we could use meaning-making as a coping mechanism.
I think it is genuinely hard for us to sit with the idea that senseless acts don’t have comfortable explanations. That dissonance only adds to the discomfort and disillusionment of an already terrible situation. It makes an awful feeling worse.
So, in the wake of a horrible tragedy we look for meaning as an anchor and feel adrift if we can’t find it.
It is possible that this child had something that we might consider a “reason” for his actions, but I think we have to honestly consider the likelihood that he didn’t as well. Mass violence is a primarily senseless act.
I think you hit the nail on the head.
Logically, I know that most mass shootings don't have a true reason. I know that bullying barely ever contributes despite that narrative often being pushed. I know that many times, there really isn't a reason or motive that can be nailed down in such simple words, that it's often a combination of factors and that the school is just a small part of it.
I know all of that logically. Yet on a subconscious level, I still want there to be something. I don’t even have to know the motive on a conscious level; as long as there are multiple potential explanations, my subconscious will be satisfied and I won't feel a need to pry further. We want to assign some sort of understanding to it because it's such a horrific crime, because it's scary to think that there really ISN'T one. So just having options is enough to "satisfy" that subconscious need enough to go on with our daily lives.
The simplest potential motives are all based around having time to build stress and grudges. Not against anyone at the school in specific, but just having time for everything to build up until the person snaps. That provides a myriad of motives and reasons to "satisfy" my subconscious and allow me to ignore the latest massive tragedy.
So the shooting happening right at the start of the year broke that. My subconscious had picked up on the pattern of school shootings typically being later, and this just shatters that and brought that trend to my conscious attention. And as a result, it's making me more conscious about school shootings than I usually am.
I want to emphasize that at this point, what frustrates me the most is how desensitized I am to it all. I think I come across as disturbed by the shootings when I post here, but I am actually more bothered by my numbness than the actual event. The sheer frequency has made this a "normal" part of life, and realizing I'd noticed this pattern with dates is just reminding me of that. I know I should be horrified, but instead I'm able to just calmly analyze my own reaction and acknowledge how my subconscious has tried to rationalize these frequent mass murders so that I can function normally.
And worst of all, I think most Americans are in the same boat until it impacts them personally. Which just makes stopping it even harder. There's already a disconnect between most politicians and regular day-to-day life and concerns of the average American. I keep wondering which politicians need to see their own kids and grandkids suffer or die to make this stop, because the only way they'll care is if they get impacted personally.
I feel like the academic calendar side of school is probably not a common trigger for this kind of thing?
I knew a kid who was bullied for a whole school year. The parents were involved and the school promised up and down they would move the bully to a different class the next year. School year starts and the school has the bully in the same homeroom plus other classes.
I agree it isn't really the trigger. Still, school shootings (at least when committed by a student and not an outsider) seem to happen later in the year for whatever reason. I think I once heard an observation that they often occur near the end of semesters, like around finals, though I don't want to really look into the statistics and dates to check. Maybe it's just because there's more time for negative feelings and stress to really build up, and develop a grudge against the school or specific individuals.
So I guess that's why the date is sticking out to me. He's a first year student at what's technically a new school. He likely has a lot of the same classmates, but there would be different teachers and a new environment. It just feels almost out of nowhere despite logically knowing that the school itself likely had nothing to do with his decision. Somehow, part of me thinks it would feel more "reasonable" if he was a second year student or older, despite the fact that the circumstances really wouldn't be that different. I think there's just a natural, subconscious compulsion to assign motives to these sorts of things so they're not as senseless and random, to make reality a little less scary, and in this case there's not an obvious one right off the bat.
I guess it's also just that my subconscious figured this early in the school year was "safe" due to that pattern of shootings later in the year. So hearing about one in September shattered that, and brought it to my conscious attention. Which makes me realize that there's never a time that's "safe" since some of the worst shootings of all were committed by outsiders. Which... Yeah, not a pleasant thing to think about.
The reports also said he's been making statements like this before, but they didn't rise to a high enough level of threat/evidence to do more than talk with his family. So this isn't something that started this year, it's just something that ended here.
Suicides go up as spring starts when the suicidal person who's been holding through the winter doesn't feel any better while everyone else starts getting perkier. April/May overlap with those peak school shooter periods too, so this sort of tracks.
I wonder though if he started a new school and if he didn't feel like things improved, he might have been hopeless about any change happening to his perceived situation. His thoughts were already homicidal based on these reports so it's not surprising in a lot of ways.
That's all just supposition and doesn't get at the why he might have been homicidal and I'm not his therapist so it'd be unethical for me to try to do that with zero information. But the pattern of behavior tracks and I'm not up on the research of homicidal ideation in youth.
Police actually interviewed him after the FBI received reports about threats he made last year.
Yeah I wasn't specific, it seemed like most of the info released was The conversation with his father. I don't know if they did a true interview with a 13 year old or a full threat assessment vs a "stern talking to." It sounds like he denied it but little info was shared and the police didn't think they had enough to move on.
I've seen our campus police talk with students after the FBI notified them of things shared on Snapchat. Thankfully it was not a true threat but, yeah. I did threat assessment training this year, and it doesn't make me feel safer either.
I think I see what you mean, a sort of calendar version of "I thought this neighborhood would've been safe from X crime". And that's a terrible shock, I'm sure, and I'm sorry that this is happening in a previously perceived safe mental compartment.
Middle school is a really rough time for a lot of kids. I can imagine someone getting to high school, imagining how "it'll be different now" and finding it to be the same as before. 4 more years can feel like forever at that age.
Why does an 18 year old need to know how to barricade his classroom door?
Why do fifth graders have to learn Run Hide Fight?
Why do teachers have to be prepared to lock students in danger out of their rooms, and to throw themselves in front of their students?
Why do we have to teach our children how to throw everything you can at a shooter in a last ditch effort to either survive or make your their own deaths take longer so others can get to safety?
Why are so many people ok with this reality?
For over a decade now, I’ve been required to teach kids that they might get shot at school.
It fucking sucks.
I have to teach/watch them teach the same in college. And have students too anxious to go to class because they're not sure what they'd do if they were walking across the quad, but they know what they'd do if they were in the residence hall.
If it ever happens, I die by opening my door to let in a student when we shouldn't. I just sort of know that in advance. I've had a lot of time to think about it. We didn't have active shooter trainings when I was in school. Columbine happened when I was in high school. So I'm sort of in that last group that didn't have them.
I don't know what world we've made since then, but I don't like it much
If you're holding a door, don't you also have to think about the other people in the room with you though? If it's just you that makes sense for sure, but if there are 25 kids with you...?
I don't teach high school or teach a regular class at the college. It's me and maybe one student in my office at a time. But yes. A duty to protect kids in my charge would absolutely change those numbers in my head.
I have pretty vivid and somewhat intrusive thoughts about things like school shootings when the topic comes up and I've thought really hard about it. Obviously though, who knows what you'll do until you do it.
There's obviously no guarantee someone bangs on my door to be let in. But I don't think I could leave someone outside of my office to be killed. My previous office had no other exits, my current one has a second story window.
I'm far less traumatized about it all than any number of my students...
And I opened social media this evening to see a video on CNN of students being evacuated safely with their hands up being told to keep their heads/eyes up because they very much appear to be walking past a dead body on their way out. And once again, this is the world we've made. And I don't know why it's ok to so many people.
A world in which news needs to make money. Shocking things make people pay attention, attention means money. Kids want to be famous.
I don't think fame is the primary motivator
It is the primary motivation in a subset of mass killings, but I have no idea if this is one of them. It's at least a common enough motive that the FBI have backed a campaign to minimize news coverage of the killer - their name, face, manifesto, etc., because heavy coverage of mass killers seems to have a tendency to increase the likelihood of more events.
Yeah I personally think this is part of the problem. A lot of kids are feeling lost and like their lives won't amount to anything these days, I was one of them. A small subset of those kids then see how the news won't stop talking about school shootings, or how the names are remembered on a Wikipedia page, or how a far right poster online will glorify it. I can see the pipeline where they think they will leave their mark in a sick and twisted way.
I think in general we have to lessen medias reporting on crime. I think showing a suspects photo on tv can ruin a persons life for a crime they have not been proven to commit. And it scares the hell out of a bunch of people who worry it could happen to them. Occasionally, they shoot someone who is not committing a crime purely out of fear.
Oh I'm aware of that campaign, but first this one doesn't seem to track that way, and second, I'm not sure "primary" is accurate or at least that it's accurate in a large subset. It's absolutely a motivation but is it the primary one? The contagion effect exists as well which is another reason for being thoughtful about media coverage.
All of which to say, in today's day and age, there are many ways to become instantly "famous", few people would need to choose mass murder as the only route to get there.
Hell I know about Bernard from Portland and I don't think he wanted the notoriety either, he was just having a bad day with a machete. (To my knowledge no one was injured and he was talked down by a social worker/negotiator) Seems like he has a lot of issues.
If this person has done more to express a desire for notoriety/fame I'd certainly buy it as a partial motivating factor in this case. Right now I don't have enough info
Sorry, I wasn't necessarily trying to say that I thought notoriety was the motivation for this particular shooting, just that it seems to be a motivation for some.
You might also be right about whether it's the primary motivation or just a secondary motivation as well, I'm not sure.
I am convinced that we need to change the way we cover these types of events, though, and probably crime in general. Anecdotally, I live in a small city that has been named one of the safest cities in the country and has generally lower violent crime rates than many; but at the same time I have multiple friends who are absolutely convinced that they are in imminent danger because of a handful of high profile shootings that were the topic of social media conversation and news broadcasts incessantly for months.
I understand that, I think that it's hard to talk someone down from a possibility that is unlikely but ever present. We can't promise it won't happen, no matter how unlikely it is at any particular spot.
Illinois just had a whole thing last night that I'm convinced was elevated due to the Georgia shooting. But two officers were shot adjacent to Western Illinois University's (WIU) campus because they were issuing a warrant. That happened on Normal Street.
Normal, IL is home of Illinois State University (ISU), and is a twin city to Bloomington, IL which has Illinois Wesleyan University (IWU). The incident at Western was reported by rumor and social media and finally calls to police at both IWU and ISU for alleged active shooters on both campuses. The people that made the calls were genuinely believing that there had been a shooting on their respective campuses but only because they heard someone else say it and so on.
Maybe this circles back to media literacy and people not questioning what they hear or doing real research. Instead of looking up a local news site or campus emergency alerts they ask on social media, and the ask becomes a rumor becomes a truth. And thus "clowns" are stalking students on campus and this random picture of a white vehicle is a van trying to sex traffic people.
I'm not sure it is just the reporting but there's something on their receiving end that's an issue too.
Its crazy from the outside looking in because this situation has escalated so far beyond just guns. You're on the second generation of kids who learn from first grade that being gunned down is a possibility and their lives are not with saving. I can't help but feel like it's primeing this nihilism in a lot of them. I went to a school that had a gang fight behind the library and i was mugged multiple times; but crazed indiscriminate murder was never a possibility.
My biggest fear is that it's already too far gone for the easy, common sense solutions. That window closed after first few dozen mass shootings (god, that is a disgusting reality). Because firearms are just the most effective means to the end of acting out so much internalized hate. Mass murder to put all that pain into the world and suicide by cop as a way out.
Every control will limit damage and needed to happen a decade ago, but doesn't change the fact that there is a mental plague driving kids to insanity. If they can't get a gun, it might just buy time for an intervention. Or they just go to the next option like poison or pool acid or home made explosives or just turning a knife at the nearest person or just being an abuser to the easiest victim.
As a dad, the idea of being in that situation is infuriating. How can you look at a line of kids in body bags and think nothing should be done. And it's the same fucks yelling pro life and burning a picture book with two dads as their way of keeping kids safe. Cowards.
Posting a second reply because it's topically different than my first.
While, as I said elsewhere, I feel for this frustration, I grew up in both the gun culture and the antiabortion culture. I think the thing that people fail to understand from the outside is how much of people's sense of security is rooted in gun ownership. When I was growing up, the pervading sense for many people was that they could not count on anyone else, and a gun made them powerful enough not to have to count on anyone else.
Aside: God and Guns
The essential hypocrisy of the conservative, religious God and Guns folks (remember, this is my childhood, where people have their "church gun"), is that if they really believed God was all powerful, had a plan for their life, and wanted good things for them, they wouldn't need those guns.
But that flavor of religion (and many others) are really about power, not belief. The echo chamber that creates feeds into the idea that those guns are God's will. So they pay lip service to God's plan, but they still concealed carry because
Godthey damn anyone who stands in the way of getting what they want.This is an ideology that it rooted in ideas like self-determinism and Manifest Destiny (can't tell you how many times we were taught this in school as a thinly veiled justification for pushing the native people off their land, destroying their culture, and outright murdering them).
So when someone talks about getting rid of guns, it's seen as an essential attack on these people's ability to feel safe, on their heritage, on their identity. It's hard for me to describe in words how strongly it feels like an attack. Maybe imagine that someone was going to take your home and make you homeless because house fires hurt people. Just to be clear, those things are not equivalent, but I'm looking for a relatable way to describe the feeling of someone steeped in this culture.
I'm not trying to defend gun culture. I'd be thrilled if we could have a reset and get rid of them. I am trying to get people to see that most of these people want what we all want – a good enough life, security, better things for our children.
I think it's hard to hold the idea from the previous paragraph when you see a line of children's and teachers bodies on the news, when you see the "thoughts and prayers but don't use this tragedy to talk about gun control" rhetoric. But we are all a product of our environment, our upbringing, our bubble. Othering them by seeing them as monsters only increases the divide and makes it harder to reach into that bubble and help them see a different way.
This is a whole other post, but I think who we should absolutely see as monsters are the politicians, media companies, and even church leaders who weaponize those fears around these issues as a way of expanding their own power.
This is one of the reasons I am grateful that Walz is on the Harris ticket. He can be credible distinguishing between shotguns and assault rifles.
In my ideal world, they would also build a limited exception to an assault rifle ban for people dealing with wild hogs, possibly with a specific license or mandatory insurance or special storage requirements or whatever reasonable limits make sense.
So much solidarity with what you said. I am also a dad, also terrified of the world I am sending my daughter out into.
But there are so many things we can't control. The statistic I think about every time I put her on the bus or leave her at a birthday party is that in the US, one in four women will have been raped by he time they are 25.
But I can't lock her away. The long term consequences of that would be so much worse. So all I can do is try to put reasonable safeguards around where she goes and what she does and prepare her to protect herself as best she can and to know who she can rely on if there's trouble.
By the way, deciding what safeguards are reasonable is the cause of many a sleepless night.
Considering that women are most at risk from people they know and trust, there is very little that you can do in terms of safeguards to protect her, just as there is little that women can choose to do without parental guidance. Speaking as one of those one in four, the best thing that you can do is to make sure she knows that you are a safe person to turn to if something like that ever happens, and to actually be that safe person for her. I don't mean this to cause you further anxiety. There's no sense losing sleep over trying to figure out how to handle something that you ultimately have very little control over. You do have control over your relationship with her, and how you (outwardly) react when she brings you bad news.
I hope your daughter never experiences sexual violence in her life. If she does, though, you can let her know that it's not her fault, and that her worth is not changed by it. You can let her decide if she wants to report it, when she's ready to start therapy, and how she wants it handled socially if it's someone that you both know.
I wish it wasn't the case, and that there was more that you could do to protect her, but aside from keeping her in a glass box or being in the room with her at all times, there's really nothing. But you can help her and be there for her, no matter what happens.
First I want to say, I'm sorry that that happened to you. I wish we lived in a world where we weren't having this conversation. I have people close to me who have been abused, and I've been alongside them as they recover. I know how hard that is.
Thank you for your thoughts. It's hard to know what's best, but it's reassuring to hear from you that stifling is not what you would want.
One of the things we do with my daughter is to teach her that she has absolute autonomy over her own body. When she was little that meant no kisses or hugs if she didn't feel like giving out kisses or hugs. As she gets older it means letting her make a lot of choices about herself that I feel like weren't as common when I was a kid.
Sometimes we argue about something, like "You need to eat breakfast before the bus comes." "I don't want any of those things!" "You need to eat something for you'll be hungry and cranky all morning." And then she'll come back with "It's my body! You can't make me eat anything." So sometimes she goes to school hungry, and while that's not ideal, I am internally grateful that she's got that idea so strongly ingrained in her and the words to express it.
Just wanted you to know that you're doing good at the whole parenting thing. The world is scary and it can be easy to overreact or to underreact when it's things we haven't experienced ourselves.
I just wanted you to hear you're doing good, difficult things
Thank you! That really means a lot to me!
Update to the story is that the shooter is a 14 year old student at the school.
I assume the only way to improve the situation is to vote in democrats. But even if democrats had full control of the federal government, what would they actually do? What could they do?
An easy change that doesn't even touch on second amendment issues would be to mandate that anyone who purchases a gun to prove they have an appropriate gun safe, or to purchase one with the gun.
Then, a law that makes any adult gun owner liable (civilly and criminally) if a minor shoots someone with that gun. A lesser crime if they discharge the gun without hitting a person (exclude supervised target shooting and hunting), and a misdemeanor if they're seen holding the gun without being in the owner's sight.
Two very simple changes to keep guns out of the hands of minors, and that would also hopefully reduce the number of kids who die because there was a gun in the glove box or under a pillow.
It wouldn't be enough, but it would at least be a start.
And enforce that how, exactly?
Juries of peers in those parts of the nation will not convict; any elected law enforcement who attempts to enforce such laws will promptly be recalled by the popular will of the people within their jurisdiction.
Criminalizing gun ownership isn't the easy solution that would fix all of this here. In fact, I predict a LOT of violence if they tried to do that from current gun owners. The NRA has been pushing a culture of fear for years now. There was a discussion on Tildes a while back about an article called "Death of a Gun-Rights Warrior", and some of my key takeaways from it were this:
Basically, gun culture in its current state is built around encouraging people to fear imaginary enemies—and to them, losing their guns is one of the worst things because then they'll be defenseless. So if we criminalize gun ownership... Well, I don't imagine they'd be willing to hand over their guns peacefully. We'd basically be confirming all their worst fears, and turning this imaginary enemy into a real one.
This is a delicate situation because one side has crazy people with guns, who are afraid to lose said guns. So, instead of criminalizing it, right now the best option really is to put policies into place that can limit these sorts of tragedies. They'll fight back against common sense measures like Interesting proposed because of fucking course they will, but it will be easier and more realistic to get those measures to pass than outright criminalizing gun ownership. We need to take baby steps.
If you actually want to criminalize gun ownership, step 1 would be to have a sufficient supermajority to amend the constitution to nullify the 2nd amendment. No amount of court packing will change the fact that any outright criminalization of guns directly contradicts the 2nd amendment.
What if a future composition of the Supreme Court overturned District of Columbia v. Heller from 2008? Before that ruling, only two (of twelve) circuits recognized the Individual-Right interpretation of the Second Amendment. Nine others supported a Collective interpretation that the right "to keep and bear arms" was limited in context to state militia.
So wouldn't it be possible, via another Supreme Court ruling, to at least reopen the door on the criminalization of gun ownership? Like I could imagine then at least it would put the matter back into Congress' hands, without requiring another amendment, wouldn't it?
Or is there something else I'm missing? (There very much might be, I'm not a lawyer.)
(Just to be clear, I'm not an advocate for the total criminalization of gun ownership, and the comment yours is replying to was deleted, so I can't see the context. I'm just theorizing here.)
Not that they would but quite simply they could investigate the causes of this sort of crime. The CDC is not allowed to study gun violence.
After studying it we could find some causes like… parents are stretched too thin and can’t support their children - more afterschool programs and preschool/daycare, higher minimum wage, more mandatory days off, paid family leave and sick time, etc.
Could be mental health support in schools.
Could be more community engagement- investments in parks and community centers, etc.
Maybe it’s health and we need to ban a certain type of plastic that affects certain folks.
Lead poisoning in populations with high gun ownership numbers probably isn’t insignificant .
We just don’t have data based effective strategies. That seems like step one.
You very carefully avoided the elephant in the room here. There are certainly a myriad of causes that together drive someone to shoot up a school, but there's one that's as unique as school shootings in the U.S...
Edit: I was not thinking at gun ownership specifically, but gun culture. What kind of modern country has school shootings once a month and just do literally nothing about it?
There are certainly other countries with high rates of gun ownership and strong gun culture that do not have the same problem with school shootings as the US -- Switzerland comes to mind. Studying the effects of specific types of gun legislation would be extremely useful to determine which parts contribute the most to reducing school shootings and other gun violence in the US. Knowing which factors contribute most directly could be incredibly useful here, especially given how legally difficult it is to pass sweeping restrictions on gun ownership in the US.
The US has always had high firearm ownership rate, yet school shootings only became “popular” within my lifetime. Why?
And in many ways, firearms ownership was more widely accepted 50+ years ago: hunting was more popular, you could buy guns in department stores, guns were openly advertised in general circulation publications, kids could bring guns (and either leave them out on their truck’s gun rack or in their locker with the bolt given to the principal) to school to go hunting afterward. Hell, the Houston Astros were initially named the Houston Colt 45s (and not because of malt liquor).
Not wrong, but I would genuinely be curious about other factors that are also common in the US....
....wow. Just, I'm actually treating it like an interesting phenomenon. That's... Something. It feels like brutal dictatorships in Africa. Something that we treat as normal but absolutely shouldn't be.
Household gun ownership is generally down - https://www.norc.org/content/dam/norc-org/pdfs/GSS_Trends%20in%20Gun%20Ownership_US_1972-2014.pdf
So there were, generally, more guns available to households before Columbine. So, in the last 25 years, something has changed. It would be a shocking finding that "more guns" was the cause when there have been -lots- of guns around for decades.
Regarding the fathers charges:
States have such different standards for laws, so this was helpful for me. I'm still not sure if this means that 8 of the 9 injured were students or if 6 of the 9 were.
I’ve been thinking on this one for about, and I keep coming back to the point that this kid was 14. It’s a stark reminder that school shootings are kids shooting kids. We know that gun violence comes in many forms, and gun control solutions are usually trying to be more holistic*. But I wonder if we could narrow in on kids shooting kids.
A popular solution I’ve heard recently is holding parents accountable. These kids are shooting kids with their parents’ guns. If the parents took responsibility and thought “it’s not safe to have a gun in this house with my kid”, they’d prevent these incidents.** Maybe the counter argument is “isn’t the guilt deterrence enough?” but the prosecutions would keep this concept fresh in people’s mind.
There’s also a lot of broad gestures about mental health. But what if we focused in and ask why the perpetrator wasn’t in regular contact with the school psychologist. Maybe we should increase the number of councilors in schools and make sure every kid is regularly meeting someone.
* rightfully so as school shootings are a tiny minority of gun deaths
** at least with the shooting at the Trump rally, the shooter could’ve bought a gun by himself, yet he used his fathers gun!
I'm wary of getting too deep into holding parents responsible without some really clear connections - I think I'm more likely to support gun owners/purchasers being held responsible for what happens with their guns. In part because as satisfying as it may feel for wealthy parents who clearly neglected their child's homicidal ideation and who fled for from the police to be held accountable, I don't love the precedent when it can very easily IMO be misused on poor single parents that "didnt do enough" to stop their kid from being in a gang or selling drugs and firing a gun as part of that. Generally there's an adult responsible for that behavior but it isn't as often the parent. And those poor parents will lack the legal representation and have all the incentive to take a plea deal that poor folks do now.
Mandatory counseling, especially in a school setting is rarely effective and not ideal. Communities and schools do need increased mental health funding but school social workers are already mandatory reporters, and if parents don't support it, there's only so much you can do. Ultimately it'd probably do more harm than good to require it. I have a lot of students whose counselors betrayed their confidence (for non mandated reporting reasons) when they were minors. But access is important. So is administrators doing something when the threatening behaviors start. Something about this 14 year old spooked his classmate so she didn't let him back in the room, he was spoken to by police before. People knew something was going on.
Related, disabled students being omitted from drills and emergency response consideration remains a huge problem. It's all too common to remove those students before a drill, so as not to distress or disregulate them. Which means they're not prepared for the real thing nor are their teachers. Which means there's no plan to help them be able to stay quiet, recognize and run from danger, etc. Disabled people are so often left out of those plans. Hopefully they'll get rescued. At least one autistic student was killed in GA.
As others have said, the father has since been charged:
There's some cruel irony at work here. The state previously declared its intention to charge the shooter as an adult -- essentially, to say that he is fully responsible for his actions, unable to hide behind his youth as a mitigating factor. But the state now simultaneously argues that the father hasn't done enough to parent his child. So now we live in this bizarre world where the shooter is both a child and not a child, but only insofar as it serves the state.
These charges strike me as a distraction, a way to change the narrative. Instead of trying to address the root cause of gun violence -- guns -- some people would rather shift the blame to the mental health of particular individuals. But apparently it isn't enough to blame the shooter; we also need to fault the adults, not for merely being bad parents, but for being criminally bad at it, as if there were some legally-sanctioned guide on how to raise children.
I don't buy it.
I don't think a 14 year old should be charged as an adult, but our system also doesn't have the ability, afaik, to retain an 18 year old aging out of juvenile detention or evaluate rehabilitation effectively. So because the system is bad, we'll process him through the bad system so he'll stay in it, because we won't know if it's ok to return him to society.
Because he's not an adult, and couldn't have bought the gun on his own, and there are some legal standards for parenting. Whether this is going to stick as one of them, I don't know.
I think the twisted logic here is that if we can ostracize individuals, the entire community culture of rampant gun ownership can be spared. A sort of "do it to Julia!" attempt to put rats on the faces of individual shooters and their parents, in order to have no meaningful discussion/progress on gun control
They just arrested the father of the Georgia shooter
From the GBI
The 4 dead (unsure what 2nd degree murder standards are in GA vs Involuntary manslaughter)
And 8 of the 9 injured? (Assuming that's the breakdown of kids to teachers among the injured, it's my best guess, or 6 of the surviving 9 injured being children?)
Or did something else come out in the press conference?
This article provides details
It does not provide those details. But they didn't share any at the conference either.
Yeah, I was on the app and didn't see what had already been posted in comments.
No worries! Was just clarifying in case someone else clicked too! They're not sharing much which I get.
Georgia has arrested the father of the shooter:
Link to Georgia's Bureau of Investigation's press release if you want the raw info.
In a CNN article it's alleged that the father bought the firearm as a gift for his son.
https://www.youtube.com/live/pPtvXrIazvA?si=UizO72NKSIvdNGF6
Press conference, minimal additional detail to the charges.