Parents, teens, screens and AR-15s
A friend of mine, a mental health professional, tells me she believes that a major factor in the psycho-sociopathy of young men who become mass murderers is parental neglect and the replacement of real live human interaction with laptop and smartphone screens, social media and video games. In the teenage years, such a formative stage of development, the absence of parent-child communication not only deprives the child of a behavioral model and the parent of information about their kid, but leaves a void virtual media rush in to occupy and exploit.
Like all simplistic explanations for complex phenomena and reductive interpretations of perplexing human behaviors, this theory is too neat to be completely convincing, but it's a plausible diagnosis of a deep pathology coursing through American culture. Not that violence is anything new in this country, but technology has outpaced common sense let alone morality, so that the combustible mixture of the internet and easy access to guns has hit critical mass and is exploding in our faces with one massacre after another.
I confess it is sickening to think about this and won't blame you if you stop reading now. But I can't stop thinking about it and being confounded by it and having to write about it in order to make any sense of it. I played with toy guns when I was little and enjoyed make-believeshooting my friends. But when my big brother handed me his .45 revolver, it was so heavy I could barely lift it.
His best friend gave me a pellet pistol for my 16th birthday, but I never shot it more than a few times. After that I was a peace-and-love hippie, and I've been gun shy ever since.
So, when I hear about 18-year-olds who go out and buy assault weapons for their birthday and slaughter children, it's hard for me to fathom — as I imagine it is for a lot of others who grew up in a simpler time when all we had to worry about was being vaporized by a hydrogen bomb. Now we worry less about the apocalypse (though that, too) than about being randomly assassinated at the supermarket.
Is it because digital effects have made virtual mayhem available at kids' fingertips and Instagram and TikTok and other apps and platforms have taken the place of what was once called social life? So, kids who are ill at ease in adolescence (pretty much every kid) must be susceptible to virtual worlds that feel less threatening than the real one and they must be drawn to corners of the internet where other misfits egg one another on to antisocial deeds. I'm sure most boys who hang out on creepy sites don't go on to become murderers, but the ones who do must not believe there's any future for them or any girlfriend to love them or parent they can depend on, so they might as well show the uncaring world that they won't take it anymore. As with the Buddhist climate activists who set themselves on fire, their self-sacrificial assault is an act of self-centered protest.
But to dehumanize other people to the degree you can just blow them apart with a weapon of war is incomprehensible — even in war, as we have witnessed most recently in Ukraine with Russian soldiers gratuitously shooting civilians — at least to soft liberals of the decadent West who don't have a clue how the real world really works, in our gentle, sensitive bubble of illusion that we can be the peace we want in the world. As no less an authority than Wayne La Pierre of the bankrupt NRA has observed, evil is unkillable.
To Second Amendment fundamentalists, it's clear that if liberals knew what was good for them, they would stop whining about protecting children and go out and harden themselves with some unbackground-checked guns and ammo and body armor and be ready to defend their kids because nobody else is going to protect them.