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Even ignoring how disgustingly immoral it is, I don't understand school shooters. Even if they don't CW themselves at the end of it, they have to know going in that doing this means their lives are effectively over. What do they get out of blowing away a bunch of kids that makes that worth it to them?
They get to hurt a lot of people who (usually) can't fight back
It's an expression of nihilistic rage
CW for the whole thing.
The news says it was a teenage perpetrator this time. I'll try to discuss the phenomenon in the abstract. I have no expertise in the subject, just a lifelong Amerikkkan.
The confluence of white liberal parenting(the worst parents in the world), crypto-white supremacist communities, cities, and towns run by fascist death-worshipers, the market forces acting on them, and America itself produce mass killers like this intentionally. Every single time, and it has never happened by complete accident, a context is created by America that allows this to happen. A terrible, horrible gun culture, laws, information, and access. Instead of raising a kid with any direction or care the parents will allow market forces to pull and influence their child in a billion different directions. Now they are going to talk about mental illness, which at this point has been created by all the other external factors, but the community doesn't see it that way and cannot do self-reflection. All that is left is a lonely individual, with no direction, constant precarity*, piloting a body producing a variety of different hormones linked to aggression and bad decision-making(we've all been there too.) Does it matter at this point how much this person was bullied or was a bully? That their motivation was revenge or just rage? I don't believe so.
There is immorality involved here, but it's not in the perpetrator. The immorality is from their parents, from their communities, and America, The Great Satan, of course.
*Children and teens are an oppressed underclass in America. They have no power, influence, or representation. With all the bad parents we have in America children are basically prey to the market.
I agree with 90% of your post, but I have to disagree with this part specifically. You can't ignore material conditions, and the greatest portion of blame belongs at the top, but that don't absolve someone of any possible responsibility for their actions. There's a reason the Nuremberg Defense doesn't fly.
I've always had a problem with them making exceptions to try young persons as adults in court. Either there is a reason to consider young persons less competent than fully grown people or there isn't. What responsibility are we talking about? The shooter has no more responsibility to take. They are dead.
What I want to know is what did America get out of killing those young persons? Why does America love killing young people and puts up no barriers to entry when it comes to annihilating a classroom full of elementary school students? It's practically impossible to make a living as an artist or to create something worthwhile in this country. But if you want to kill a bunch of children, boy, America is the place for you.
Perhaps as the guns that make it so easy will never be controlled and the social care will not be funded, there must instead exist a constant baseline terror of other people. So the people need to be controlled instead. They need to be kept in line. And the more they need help, the less they deserve - the victim is the threat.
Not that I think there's any actual conscious intention there, per-se. More of a general structural disinterest in making healthy people (capitalism being antithetical to the health of the masses) that has various specific manifestations.
Nowhere did I advocate trying them as adults. Were they to be captured alive and tried, their age should have been considered along with every other relevant factor as part of the proceedings. I am all for understanding the larger societal causes of why these things happen, but I and the vast majority of other Americans grew up in the same shitty society yet never committed mass murder of children.
In my school day fantasies, I was the one taking down the mass shooter and saving the school. That was almost 20 years ago now. What a theft of our imagination living in this country has been, to have even spent time considering the possibility. It's right to mourn the loss.
bIG CW for this one folks
Back in my school days i was so unbeliavably angrily suicidal i had a plan to "take down as many of them (the folks who esoecially hurt me and made life hell) as possible." And there were other kids there too who felt similarly.
But i had no access to fast-firing weaponry and at least 1 actual friend i didn't wanna leave behind, and that was all it took to keep me from, yaknow, going Postal on teenagers. I know i shouldnt feel sympathy for a litwral school shooter bur jeez. I've been there. Dark places.
Thank you for sharing your experience. We aren't valued enough, I mean everyone. That feeling of not being appreciated, and others are more can really bring us low after a while. It does to all of us, it seems like.
You are appreciated.
White conservative parents are objectively the worst in the world. At least liberal parents don't hit their kids, and they are stereotyped as being permissive instead of strict and abusive.
I'm talking about the parents who let the market dictate what their child becomes. Not as a left/right thing. When I was young the joke was made about "free-range" children and that's not it, it's closer to when parents do not present their children with direction or model character in their lives. The market wants your kid to be addicted to video games and Andrew Tate videos and it is incredibly easy to surrender your child's entire life to that.
There is no meaningful dinstiction between "liberal" or "conservative." Theyre both libs