Why Are They Killing Our Kids?

When I was seven years old I was taken to the Telenews movie theater in Detroit where only newsreels were shown. Some holocaust photographs flashed across the screen. There was a group of young Nazi soldiers, laughing as a baby, glibly tossed in the air, was caught and run through dead on the bayonet of a rifle.Now they're shooting children, machine gunning them down like rueful ducks in a row.Today's shooters, like those Nazi soldiers, seem caught by an expanding contagion of murderous mayhem.Are they all mad, truly mentally ill, surely deranged? At the time of the shooting something had set them off. But there is little evidence that any of them were previously identifiable as prone to mass murder. Rounding up all the schizophrenics would be a fool's errand and a great social misdeed. Schizophrenics are less violent than members of the sane general public.Mowing people down must arouse a sense of exaltation, a genocidal mania that has ensnared people down through all human eras. But today's shooters emerge out of a new and growing brand. They kill alone and with a personal mission of vengeance and anticipated, though only nominal, immortality — welcome to membership among the damned select..

"It will be his last stand. It will be, if only for him, his supreme moment."

.Now they have the preferred weapon ready at hand, the only weapon that will dispatch a considerable number of victims in seconds, well before help could even begin to intervene. That modus has come to inform the base of the entire operation. Holding an AR-15 is brandishing the only appropriate instrument of massed dispatch. It is heavy and hellishly loud and rumbles in one's hands like a ravenous beast. You employ it like you are spraying insecticide.That madness begins sometime in the past, in loneliness and social rejection and personal failure — all coupled with growing persecutory beliefs that others are to blame. With blame comes the idea of retribution. Eventually comes the idea of a glorious demise. There are forebears for this, growing in number. And there is the proven methodology where the weapon of the planned massacre is glamorized, even fetishized. Armaments are collected and stored as worshipful, venerated objects.Announcements of murderous intent may be issued, some veiled as if to tantalize. Military-style outfits are assembled, providing a uniform to dignify the shooter on his unique, horrific mission. It will be his last stand. It will be, if only for him, his supreme moment.Shooters recognize that the AR-15 and similar assault rifles fitted with cartridges for rapidly explosive firing is now a mandate. It's not the lethality of the gun alone. These assault rifles have become the preeminent nucleus in a shooter's private, adored arsenal. That weapon is the central contrivance of the shooter's quest for revenge and outrage and evil renown.A gun, like a missile, puts a comfortable distance between the shooter and his target, unlike killing with bare hands or even with a knife. It is killing without contact. An assault rifle multiplies that distance while extending its breadth of effectiveness, adding to the malevolent joy of multiple, powerful firings.Thus the assault weapon holds a hallowed place in the mind of the mass shooter. It is key to the whole concept of rapid mass murder. It is execution on an accelerated, grand scale.What is the nature of the madness within that concept?First is the slacking away of empathy. Remember the pair of terrorists, parents of a six-month old, who shot up a San Bernardino office party then died Bonnie-and-Clyde style in a fierce gun battle with police. The husband had been colleagues of his victims. And, of course, they abandoned their infant to their certain fate. The crazed zeal of ISIS-style radical Islam supplanted all empathy. This mental deficit is matched in all shooters.Next comes the persecutory delusion which cèdes its passivity to the formula of fanaticism or, in the case of the shooters, the accumulating histories of previous mass shooters. Much like serial killers, shooters study their predecessors, learning their methodology including patterns of trolling for victims or for the designated target site.Schools like churches and work places are often the citadel of the shooters’ nightmare rejection, a structure resonating with lives they felt excluded from and emotionally tortured within.Healing is never offered because the shooter’s pain is guarded, secreted and nurtured in hate. Take away his weapon and the murderous edifice will collapse.Let’s at least start there.