This article was originally posted on Ain't It Cool News.
Here is a link to CBS News' ongoing coverage of this terrible event.
18 children are among the 27 reported dead in an ELEMENTARY SCHOOL shooting in the northern United States this morning. I just saw the President visibly shaken addressing the nation. The Governor of Connecticut has just confirmed that not only the shooter, but "someone he lived with" are now among the dead.
According to the sheriff, there is a secondary crime scene where someone else was found dead. The rumor is that the shooter went to go kill his mother, a schoolteacher. People are creating Facebook hate pages for the name that first filtered out (and apparently isn't the actual shooter).
The anger boiling in me is only matched by how profoundly sad this whole thing has made me.
This isn't "Cool" news, or movie news, or anything fun. I decided this was something we should talk about.
Before we start throwing around the word "politicize", and say "this isn't the time" to talk about all of this... Keep in mind that "politicizing violence" is something incepted into our heads by massively powerful lobbyists on all sides of this issue.
This thing is happening, and we forget to quickly and are all-too-silent and complacent the 364* other days a year that this doesn't happen.
Make that 362. See, I almost didn't count the rest of these things that have happened this same year.
(*I know this is a leap year)
Before we get down to the Talkbacks, which I hope will be constructive and respectful (despite the trend against), I have a story to tell.
This is a story I tried to write about after the shooting in Aurora earlier this year, when it seemed the mainstream media was chalking up Batman, the Joker, and videogames as the culprits of what one compassionless, selfish piece of garbage did.
I was in high school when Columbine happened. I watched it unfold on cable news while my schoolmates were in class. This was before smartphones, iPads, and the ultra-rapid dissemination of information and mis-information across networks like Twitter and Facebook. Only a few kids carried cell phones.
I was on homebound study following a severe back injury I sustained as a gymnast. I talked to a few friends on the phone after school let out. There were conspiracy theories going around. "Weird" kids were already getting sneers and suspicious looks from the popular kids, jocks, and school staff. "Trenchcoat Mafia" was already spreading through whispers before the end of the hour it hit the news.
The story was that there were these evil kids peppered in every school across America, like terrorist sleeper cells ready to activate. One of my friends, who had long hair and wore long coats, would get repeatedly kicked by our animation teacher in the coming weeks and months until he dropped out of school.
Kids who suffered from varying levels of depression were treated like they were brandishing knives when they talked about listening to "dark" music. "Rock music" t-shirts were banned, shirts were ordered to be tucked in (with threat of suspension), and "thoughtcrime" seemed to be something teachers actively looked for.
I finally came back to school a few weeks later, when all of this was the new normal.
I'd always been a nerd, a geek. I studied and read a lot because I liked doing so. I was taking gymnastics to fulfill a P.E. credit when my mom wouldn't let me play football. I'd never really been in shape previously. The injury meant I was done as a gymnast. I was Captain of the team. I was teaching beginner boys classes part-time. My world was radically different from a vertebrae shattering. I was depressed and withdrawn when I came back.
In the wake of Columbine, no one really knew or remembered why I wasn't in class. I didn't have a Facebook page to obsessively update. No Twitter to live-tweet from in class. Various legends grew. I'd been in a fight and threatened to murder someone, I threatened to attack the school, and I'd stabbed someone were all apparently floating around, based on nothing but imagination and my being an MIA "weird kid" who was ranked in the top 10 of my class, read a lot, and liked movies and games.
I came back to school walking on a cane. I got bullied. People kept whispering about me, as friends told me, while at once asking "it isn't true, right?" when relaying a new stupid story.
In the weeks, months, and years that have followed, the focus has been predominantly on "weird" people.
The focus has not moved to what has produced these broad mental health issues found across the USA in young white men, nor has the focus moved to how easy of access we all have as Americans to automatic and semi-automatic weapons, loads of which are completely legal to own. Others of which aren't legal, but still get into people's hands, along with armor-piercing ammo.
Guns scare me.
We simply don't have gun policy that works in the United States. The answer is not keeping what we've got, nor is it to outright ban firearms.
I'm not saying that as an opinion, but a fact borne out by both non-solutions being highly exclusionary, and therefore likely to cause more problems than they solve.
That's how people have created "sides" out of an issue where I'd say outside of the truly psychotic, no one really wants people mass-murdered. The only majority side, which nearly every single person is on, is in preventing godawful shit like this from happening again. The argument is over how to wave a magic wand to solve it.
I know that people who've only ever lived in suburbs and cities (like myself) often think an outright firearm ban is the answer. They don't care or understand the perspective of people in rural areas who hunt for food (really) and functionally need weapons to protect against coyotes, pumas, bears, and other things.
The United States is an EXTREMELY topographically and socioculturally diverse country. I'm not saying people have a right to own guns as an entitlement, but there are parts of the country we've all only seen on TV or in movies through the eyes of similarly un-experienced artists.
At the same time, the only dude living in a trailer who needs to worry about mercenaries or government agents gone bad shooting him up is Martin Riggs.
My personal feeling is that we need a great deal more regulation on the quantity and type of these weapons that can be owned OR manufactured in this country.
How to best do that? You've got me.
I had a college roommate who actively collected automatic and semi-automatic weapons. He comes from affluence. He'd never be considered unbalanced, and I'd never expect he'd go on a killing spree.
To put it metaphorically, there are hundreds of gallons of fuel at his disposal, but there's no match to ignite the explosion...yet, or that I know of from looking at him. If something did go wrong in his brain, he's a one-man force fo death and destruction.
He pulled an unloaded gun on me in front of his girlfriend once, after telling me very directly that it wasn't loaded. He had asked if I'd ever shot a gun. I hadn't.
He told me with a grin, down the barrel of the gun, that he wanted to see how scared I got.
He got bullied as a kid. He liked reading comics and all sorts of movies that only movie geeks like or see at that age. He grew up a geek, and was more of a nerd than he would later outwardly show. He projected alpha male gorilla, but he was really just a gangly beta chimp. My completely un-clinical, semi-informed read was that he constantly felt threatened as a "different" skinny little kid, and he didn't want anyone to ever push him around again.
He's a lifelong liberal Democrat.
Owning that massive arsenal of stuff made him feel safer. I've known other people who are comforted by the same. They are people who identify as Republican and Democrat in equal numbers.
This should not be something that should take the place of peace of mind and purpose in our lives.
A couple of years after Columbine, when I was off at college, a friend told me she had gone to Columbine.
She had dated one of the shooters.
She said that he had started out misunderstood, bullied, and weird, but no weirder than other "weird kids". Something had changed. She didn't know if it was drugs, domestic violence, or what. I got the impression that had he been asking for help, and instead was ignored and further antagonized.
To be honest, there's no way to know. This is a multi-faceted, impossibly complex issue that doesn't have one single, magical solution.
Something is very broken in America, and it has been broken for a long time.
Write to your representatives in the House and Senate. Run for office. Hold your leaders responsible for the progressive, COLLABORATIVE changes that we need, and don't waste time arguing into an extremist void on EITHER "side" of the political spectrum.
Let's all have a better tomorrow.
Moisés Chiullan / "Monty Cristo"
@moiseschiu
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