Wednesday, December 01, 2021
Oxford, Michigan
Yesterday there was yet another school shooting, this time at Oxford High School outside of Detroit. A 14-year-old girl, a 16-year-old boy and a 17-year-old girl were killed, and eight others injured. It is believed that a 15-year-old male student was the shooter.
This is a place I know-- Oxford is northwest of Detroit, an exurb, where people have horse farms and a remove from the city out past Pine Knob. It's the kind of place where people say things like this don't happen. Until they do.
There is a lot we don't know yet, of course. Like the "motivation" for the killing-- but do we ever really get a coherent explanation of that? Do we know what the motivation was for the Newtown shootings in Connecticut? Or the... well, for any of the others?
And maybe that is what we are doing wrong.
There are a few commonalities in all of these:
1) The killers are young white males.
2) The killers have access to guns, usually multiple guns.
Young white males with guns. Like Kyle Rittenhouse. Or Travis McMichael. Just to name two.
In a nutshell, this is it: Too many young white men in our country think they will become significant, important, if they kill people with guns. It is a fantasy of power that comes true, whether it is Rittenhouse, McMichael, or the shooter in Oxford. Or, of course, any number of young white males with guns on television shows and in movies. We have a cultural problem; other cultures do not have this happen, so it is something different about us.
What are we going to do about that? And when?
