I wrote this SIX years ago and I feel like I could have written it today. Very little has changed and this morning's school shooting in Minnesota is only a reminder of that fact. This shooter targeted a Catholic School, as it seems others have in recent memory (the shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville in 2023 comes to mind). It is becoming increasingly obvious that the demonic is at work - we label it "mental illness" here in modern times, but when you read the manifestos and watch the videos that these shooters create, 'mental illness' doesn't quite seem to fully explain it.
One thing that has changed is how quickly our society picks up on the same old tired arguments after these tragedies. It used to be that it took a week for those arguments to start, now they start immediately. Ban guns! This is the NRAs fault! Blah. Blah. Blah. According to Everytown for Gun Safety's 2024 report, Minnesota ranks 14th in the nation for the strength of it's gun laws. They have red flag laws, they require background checks for all gun sales, then even have laws requiring the guns be safely stored and kept away from children, and also laws that ban possession for those who have been involuntarily committed and/or have been found to be a danger to themselves or others. In other words, common sense legislation exists in Minnesota, and yet this still happened.
Banning guns is not a feasible solution. There are too many guns and the legal fight you would get if someone were to try and ban guns would last decades. So there has to be other things we could do, and that's what I spent some time talking about in this post from six years ago. It's counter-intuitive, but we need to stop covering these crimes on TV and social media. It is infamy that most of these school-shooters are after, and if there's no infamy to be had, we remove one of the primary motivators of these crimes. It may be too late even for this approach - but one thing is clear: what we've been doing, isn't working.
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