“Enough is enough!” “This can’t go on!” “This has to stop!”
These were among the comments that came through the blizzard of commentary after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County. We have heard these words before.
Unfortunately, such atrocities are not going to stop. For the ingredients that produce such slaughters are present and abundant in American society.
And what can stop a man full of hate, who has ceased to care about his life and is willing to end it, from getting a weapon in a country of 300 million guns and killing as many as he can in a public place before the police arrive?
An act of “absolute pure evil,” said Gov. Rick Scott, of the atrocity that took 17 lives and left a dozen more wounded. And evil is the right word.
While this massacre may be a product of mental illness, it is surely a product of moral depravity. For this was premeditated and plotted, done in copycat style to the mass killings to which this country has become all too accustomed.
Nikolas Cruz thought this through. He knew it was Valentine’s Day. He brought his fully loaded AR-15 with extra magazines and smoke grenades to the school that had expelled him. He set off a fire alarm, knowing it would bring students rushing into crowded halls where they would be easy to kill. He then escaped by mixing in with fleeing students.
The first ingredient then was an icy indifference toward human life and a willingness to slaughter former fellow students to deliver payback for whatever it was Cruz believed had been done to him at Douglas High.
In his case, the conscience was dead, or was buried beneath hatred, rage or resentment at those succeeding where he had failed. He had been rejected, cast aside, expelled. This would be his revenge, and it would be something for Douglas High and the nation to see — and never forget.
Indeed, it seems a common denominator of the atrocities to which we have been witness in recent years is that the perpetrators are nobodies who wish to die as somebodies.
If a sense of grievance against those perceived to have injured them is the goad that drives misfits like Cruz to mass murder, the magnet that draws them to it is infamy. Infamy is their shortcut to immortality.
From the killings in Columbine to Dylann Roof’s murder of black parishioners at the Charleston Church, from the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando to the slaughter of first-graders in Newtown, to Las Vegas last October where Stephen Paddock, firing from an upper floor of the Mandalay Bay, shot dead 58 people and wounded hundreds at a country music festival — these atrocities enter the social and cultural history of the nation. And those who carry them out achieve a recognition few Americans ever know. Charles Whitman, shooting 47 people from that Texas tower in 1966, is the original model.
Evil has its own hierarchy of rewards. Perhaps the most famous man of the 20th century was Hitler, with Stalin and Mao among his leading rivals.
Liberals will blame the gun maker or the NRA for this because liberals are all mouth and no mind while ignoring the violent video games and violent lyrics in music because liberals base everything on emotion and mindless whining
I don’t doubt that this or some degree of it is the case here. However, what is the solution? Cruz seems to have been bounced around from one household to another and no doubt developed bitter feelings. We don’t yet know how his parents or his adoptive parents treated him, but eventually lost them all.
It shouldn’t be too difficult for a community to discover persons like this and it would behoove them, as we have seen, to try and help them adapt to society.
I know people who have taken children from troubled and broken homes and raised them. Sometimes, it seems the child is simply from bad stock; the greatest care, love and affection possible fails to keep the child out of trouble. I have also known kids who, at a very young age, have lost both parents. In the case I am most familiar with, one became a military officer and the other an attorney… all from families of very limited means.
In short, who the hell knows what to do? There is not general formula, but one thing is for sure; blaming an inanimate object will entirely miss the point and assure the further propagation of these tragedies.
Not insisting people read this, but, https://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-quantum-state-of-consent.html explains why people raised with no moral, ethical compass will always bring their shiftlessness to society.
Modern secular ethics can’t hold a candle to the ethics based on a belief in God, or even in god, as jihadis constantly show us.
That sound like our shooter?
The lefty media is already painting their fellow traveler as a victim!
It’s been said that the shooter was upset about a girl who broke up with him.
@Nanny G:
So they believe rape would prevent further mass shootings? That makes about as much sense as blaming the weapon he picked up to carry out his deed.
The left denigrate prayer and worship as a reaction to such tragedies yet these could most likely be part of the cure.
BINGO!