Another Preventable Tragedy
This past week, the US experienced another mass school shooting.
Ho hum. Old news.
You might even be asking, “Which one?” or “Again?”
We’re the sick joke of the world when it comes to gun violence, whether mass-shootings, school-shootings, regular shootings, general firearm-tomfoolery and a culture of gun-fetishization that is beyond embarrassing. That a fourteen year old boy murdered four people and wounded nine more with a reportedly “AR-15-style” rifle in a US school is barely news. There’s little different between it and myriad other shootings.
What is somewhat different is that the shooter’s father is being prosecuted, as well. It’s not the first time this has happened, but the charges (amounting to a 180 year prison sentence) are more severe than in past incidents. And it’s good that he’s being charged and harshly sentenced. The jackass gifted an assault rifle to a child. No decent, normal person does that. Let alone for a kid who obviously has issues and who was under investigation that same year for purportedly making threats to shoot up a school. That’s also an extravagant fucking Christmas present. I’m no expert, but a tiny bit of research found that those guns start at over $400 for the basic-bitch models and the higher end masculinity-compensation-devices can cost thousands.
Did your parents ever buy you a Christmas present that expensive?
Mine damn sure didn’t.
And they for damn sure wouldn’t have bought me an assault rifle, which is a significant factor in why I’m, and they’re, not in prison, or dead.
But, punishing the father for the crime of enabling his son to commit crimes is unlikely to do much to prevent future tragedies. It’s performatively punitive, like arresting and charging street-level drug dealers. It gives the appearance of doing something productive, but which is not actually preventative, and does nothing to address the root cause of the problem.
There will be more preventable massacres, because there were many massacres before that were preventable. This one was preventable. None were prevented, because nothing fundamental has been done to change the ease with which anyone, including children, can acquire guns. Unless we change, legislatively and culturally, these preventable tragedies will persist.