Yesterday a 15 year old teenager shot 6 people (and then himself) in a suburban neighborhood in Raleigh. Five are dead. The shooter and 1 person are in critical condition in the hospital. He killed his brother in his home, shot neighbors on their porches and then ran to the Greenway trail and shot people who were walking their dogs or strolling through the park. Other than his brother, the rest of the victims seem to have been random targets of opportunity.
This neighborhood is a few miles down the road from me and is just like my neighborhood. The walking trail is the same one I walk Wiggles on twice a day where I encounter many other “regulars”: the Birdwatchers, the Girl in the Floppy Hat, the Speedwalker, the Crossfit Couple and the Lawyer.
This story made the national news. Locally, it is a huge story as well.
I’m not going to follow it anymore. I read about the victims. I learned about their ages, jobs, families and other personal details the news quickly blasted out.
The media will cover this story incessantly, teasing out “possible motives”, pontificating on gun rights vs. gun control, interviewing neighbors and friends to milk the tragedy for all they can.
I’m already at full capacity for tragic stories, sadness and bad news.
I won’t speculate about the shooter. Obviously something is wrong. I’m not going to castigate his parents for (possibly) providing him with a gun, access to one or not recognizing the “signs” that he was dangerous. I have read too much of this commentary online already.
I think about his poor parents. Their 16 old teenage son who was shot is dead. Their toher son, the shooter, is 15 year old. He is a “mass murderer” who tried to kill himself. This family is destroyed. Forever.
Does anyone really believe that any parents would not have tried to prevent this if they foresaw it happening? Really?
People are trying to make sense of this. They want to point to a Facebook post, an unsmiling picture, or some other “pattern” to say this could have been prevented.
They’ve talked about gun control, gun security, therapy and counseling as things that “obviously” should have been done long ago.
I think about the families of the victims. Their lives will never be the same either because their family member happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It makes me really sad.
I’ve written about gun violence, lone wolf shooters, and mass shootings before. I don’t have any proposed solutions that I think we would implement in the US.
I’m stumped.
But I am not afraid. I do my best to minimize my risk to violence and crime. My lifestyle makes that pretty easy. I’m rarely in crowded places, I don’t hang out in bars, I’m rarely out after dark at all.
But random shootings like this, I see no way of avoiding. To me, being shot by a “mass murder” is similar to being in a car accident or getting bombed into nuclear Armageddon. I can’t do anything about it at all except worry and fret. I choose not to live that way.
So I walked on the greenway and through my neighborhood just like I always do. This week, I’ll go to the pool everyday and the grocery store for my weekly shopping.
We have a lot of guns and ammunition in the US.
We have a lot of young men who have access to them.
Young men are hotheaded, full of hormones and impulsive. I know – I was one once.
Our society has accepted all of this as OK.
So if I’m living in this society, living with this is part of the price to be paid.
That’s too bad. It could be better.