The Louisville, Kentucky mass shooting is yet another sobering event that begs the question—what can we do to stop this from happening?
I am tired, sick and tired, of getting an alert on my phone of an active shooter and wondering how bad this one will be.
I find myself torn up about these sorts of things. If this monster—a 23-year-old with a master’s degree in finance who worked at the bank he attacked for the past 2 or 3 years—had not been able to buy the guns, could this have been stopped? Of course, that is the idea behind red flag laws that would be used against too many people to take their guns for no reason at all.
I understand the idea of red flag laws, but I don’t trust them, and I am concerned they would be turned on regular folks doing nothing wrong—and that’s why this argument never gets much traction with me.
I have said this many times—disarming me doesn’t make anyone safer. Disarming me, in fact, makes the world less safe because I would step up to stop a madman if a mass shooting unfolded in front of me.
This monster had no obvious problems. He was a successful young man with a college degree from a great university—his dad is a very successful college and high school basketball coach in nearby Indiana. These are not the hallmarks of mass shooters—this one is a complete rarity insofar as many recent mass shooters came from homes with no strong father figure. They were isolated, and many were on powerful drugs and spent hours playing video games.
I cannot say if the killer was depressed or on drugs, but the rest of his profile makes him an outlier.
However, numerous outlets, including Heavy, outlined his anger and hatred towards Donald Trump, conservatives, and Fox News. On more than one occasion, he posted to Reddit and Instagram ‘Eff the alt-right.’ But many of his posts, including one just a couple of days ago, were about sports—like the Dallas Mavericks not making the playoffs.
He also posted his support for the Black Lives Matter movement and other left-wing ideas.
When my dad died in an accidental fall almost two decades ago, I had a difficult time wrapping my head around it, and I took time to read the entire autopsy report. I thought it would help me—and maybe it did. But in the end, it doesn’t change anything.
What we are doing now with this tragedy and the one in Nashville and Michigan State and the ones before is kind of like an autopsy—we’re digging for answers that won’t change a thing.
You want to understand. You read and ask questions and try to fill in the blanks. But in the end, none of it matters because it doesn’t change what happened.
Five people died on Monday at the bank they worked for following their morning meeting in the conference room. They were killed by a co-worker—someone they knew.
A police officer who graduated from the academy just ten days ago is in critical condition at the University of Louisville Hospital—he had barely started his career.
It is just so senseless—why have people become so callous that killing people is no big deal?