In the wake of the most recent shooting tragedy, I've heard a lot of commentary that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. One writer suggested that "greed" had kept university officials from taking proper action, because a student with this kind of emotional problems shouldn't have been allowed to continue to attend. That may or may not be true, but it's difficult for me to understand how taking a mentally and emotionally unstable young man and kicking him out of school might have made him less dangerous. Tell me someone should have taken more action to intervene, to get him mental health services, and maybe I'll agree. Frankly, I don't know enough about the specifics of his behavior (and neither do you) to know what was reasonable under the circumstances, but those sorts of reactions seem natural. There are plenty of people after the fact to talk about how "off" his behavior was in various ways, and it seems like that's always the case.
And then, of course, everyone says, "We never thought he'd do anything like THIS!"
Oh.
Well.
That's okay then. If you have a guy in your class or your dorm suite or working alongside you every day who seems entirely isolated ("he had no friends"), who seems immersed in violent fantasies (as suggested by fellow writing students and instructors), etc., etc., etc., then that's okay so long as you don't expect him to kill other people, right? I mean, surely someone would have stepped in if...um...they'd known they were at risk themselves.
But the idea that the administration should have gotten him out of the way smacks of so much more avoidance in my mind. It seems to suggest that they should have ensured that if he was going to blow up, he wouldn't kill their students.
The one thing that can't be ignored, though, is that after the fact people are always saying, "he was always a loner". So much so that it's become a kind of sick joke. Someone suggested to me this week that rather than background checks and permits and fingerprints and all that, it might make sense simply to require anyone buying a gun to bring four friends. It made me laugh in the way that unfortunate truths sometimes do, but it also made me think that maybe we're all too focused on the gun.
It's a horrible tragedy when someone implodes to the point of killing dozens of innocent people, and it makes living in our world very scary. But the sad fact is that a lot of people are living on that edge in our society, and maybe whether or not they're a threat to the rest of us isn't the biggest issue. Maybe the biggest issue is that people are living in this kind of anger and confusion and instability and desperation all around us, and we're content to observe those things about them and let them go as long as they don't present a threat to us, or to "innocent people". As if it's okay if they only hurt themselves, or only those close to them, and not something we need concern ourselves with.
As if when people tell us after the fact "he ate by himself at every meal", that's only an issue because it might have been a sign that one day he'd be a threat to the rest of us. Today, a lot of people might be thinking that they should have done or said something because this tragedy could have been averted. But would those same people ever have had the same thoughts if the only tragedy were that a young man passed through his school years having no friends, trapped in violent fantasies he spilled out in stories that scared his classmates, and eating alone every day? Would anyone even remember him?
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