The Patriot Post® · Is Your Child Safer on a School Campus?
In a morning editors call this week, we discussed the media publication of journals maintained by the Covenant School assailant. In that conversation, we discussed the fact that there had not been a so-called “mass shooting” on a campus in more than a year. We were concerned that rekindling publicity around the Nashville assault could well trigger some “copycat” sociopath to commit another school shooting.
Two hours after our conversation, a 14-year-old assailant walked into Apalachee High School in Georgia and killed two students and two teachers, who appear to be random victims, before surrendering to a school resource officer.
There are several primary aspects of any murder, particularly a high-profile murder on a campus, which should have been secured against such an attack.
The most important concern is for the victims and their families. The two deceased students were 14-year-old Mason Schermerhorn and 14-year-old Christian Angulo, and the adult victims were Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53. There were also others with injuries that were not life-threatening. The immediate trauma and long-term suffering endured by the families and friends of murder victims is incomprehensible. These victims left their respective families and homes Wednesday morning for a routine day at school with colleagues and friends and will never return home.
The second concern includes all the questions about why this happened, who the assailant was, what pathology triggered this violence, and how he got a rifle into a secured school building. The answers to those questions should inform us how to better identify assailants and secure campuses.
In this case, the young assailant’s prototypical profile matches that of a rising generation of sociopaths.
Predictably, the deeply disturbed teenager came from a badly dysfunctional family, and consequently, had serious depressive issues. His mother, Marcee Gray, has a lengthy arrest record for drugs and domestic violence. Police had been called to the house multiple times to investigate parental abuse of the assailant and his sister. His parents were preparing to divorce.
We know that the assailant had already been red-flagged by the FBI a year earlier, and local law enforcement officials interrogated him with his father present. The alert came through the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center and related to threatening comments and images the assailant posted online at gaming platforms in May 2023 regarding a possible school shooting. According to the FBI: “The Jackson County Sheriffs’ Office located a possible subject, a 13-year-old male, and interviewed him and his father. The father stated he had hunting guns in the house, but the subject did not have unsupervised access to them. At that time, there was no probable cause for arrest or to take any additional law enforcement action on the local, state, or federal levels.”
Notably, the family resided in another county at the time, which may have also broken the chain of information about the threat posed by the then-13-year-old.
Thus, as I have noted previously regarding rare school shootings, in almost every case, the pathology profile of the assailants is similar. Moreover, in most cases, they were immersed in violent “gaming” media and platforms. Violence is big business, but at what point will the multibillion-dollar “entertainment” industry that produces and promotes such violence be held accountable for how it desensitizes these individuals to the extent that they carry out such violence in person?
We do not know yet if other common factors were attributable in this case, particularly was the assailant using psychotropic medications or did he manifest gender confusion pathology as a factor in his sociopathy.
As for his access to a semiautomatic rifle?
Astoundingly, seven months after being profiled by the FBI and interviewed by law enforcement officials concerning threats made by his son, the assailant’s father, Colin Gray, purchased the rifle for his 13-year old son for Christmas. Consequently and deservedly, Gray has been charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children. Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said, “His charges are directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon.”
It remains unclear how he was able to carry it into a school building that should have had secured entrances.
Given the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, it seems apparent that, despite no probable cause to take action last year, this individual should have had an established threat profile that was passed to the next county and school system where his family relocated, but it is not known whether that was the case. But the fact is, there are many such individuals who do things that result in their being identified as a potential threat every day, and only in extremely rare cases does one of those individuals attack a school.
Fortunately, we do know that the quick action of teachers and other students likely prevented additional bloodshed.
The third concern is what to do to stop such attacks.
In answer to that question, the first consideration should be a reality check regarding priorities. The high profile of a school attack and the resulting commercial media churn of related news result in a lot of parental and student fear and anxiety across the nation. All of us as parents can empathize with the parents and families of those whose loved ones perished.
This will not ease the unimaginable pain and loss of those families and friends, but for parental consideration, this year there have been a total of 23 people shot and killed on grade 6-12 and college campuses. Most of these deaths did not involve high-profile assaults within a school but rather other altercations on campus.
A single murder on any campus or anywhere else, is a murder too many, but but here is something parents should know: Young people between the ages of 6 and 22 are far safer on a campus than they are off campus. In 2023, there were about 19,000 murders in the United States, a grossly disproportionate number of which involve black assailants and black victims.
Consider this: About 20% of the U.S. population is between ages 6 and 22, and a majority in that age group are on school campuses 6-8 hours a day, five days a week, 9-10 months per year. In a typical year, there are between 4-5,000 murders in that age group, again, almost all but a small percentage in the upper third of that age bracket, and most drug thug or gang related. Only a split fraction of those victims are on a school campus or in a school building, despite the fact that a very large percentage of young people in that age bracket spend much of the year on a school campus.
Again, statistically, young people are much safer on campus than off campus.
Of course, those on the Left promoting knee-jerk political agenda soundbites avoid any mention of the most obvious data on violence like the plague. According to Joe Biden, the nation’s prevaricator-in-chief: “Republicans in Congress must finally say ‘enough is enough’ and work with Democrats to pass common-sense gun safety legislation. We must ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines once again.” Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, Kamala Harris condemned the school shooting but made no mention of bans and background checks.
Of course, the gun-control opportunists will also seize the moment to promote their agendas.
What Biden, Harris, and the opportunists will not mention is the fact that there have been far more police officers killed in the line of duty this year than people killed on campuses. Leftists never take a knee for those officers.
Update: We originally reported our sources investigating the Apalachee High School attack said the school received a call from the mother of the assailant 30 minutes before the attack, warning that the school might be targeted. We corrected that assertion after police insisted there was no call before the attack. However, there is now confirmation that the information from our original investigative sources was factual, confirming evidence that the assailant’s mother made a frantic call warning the school.
The school administration now says they searched for the wrong student. That raises serious concerns about why immediate actions were not taken by the school to lock the facility down regardless of which student was involved. And the question stands, how was a student able to transport a rifle into the building without anyone noticing.
(Updated)
NOTES:
The First Civil Right is To Keep and Bear Arms. It is, as James Madison’s Supreme Court Justice, Joseph Story, rightly defined it, “the palladium of the liberties of the republic,” the ultimate assurance of all other rights.
What follows are a few key notes that all defenders of American Liberty and its foundational guarantor, the Second Amendment, should be prepared to articulate, in order to refute the rhetorical gun control agenda disinformation propagated by Democrats and their Leftmedia publicists.
While some of this data is based on annual findings, most of that data does not vary significantly year over year.
FOOTNOTE 1: Regarding so-called “gun violence,” there were approximately 19,600 homicides involving firearms in the U.S. in the latest year of record, which you can view state by state. Fortunately, there are indications that homicides may be declining after the significant surge of violence unleashed by Biden and his Democrat agitators in 2020. The 2022 homicide rate was 30% higher than in 2019.
The Demos ubiquitously and falsely label the generational murderous contagion they have seeded as “gun violence,” and they focus exclusively on the infrequent high-profile “mass shootings,” which account for only a tiny fraction of all homicides. More than 99% of murders in the U.S. are not the result of mass attacks. (Notably, guns don’t commit violence, thugs and sociopaths commit violence.) The oft-cited Gun Violence Archive defines a “mass shooting” as any incident that involves a “minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed.” The vast majority of those violent attacks are the result of drug and gang violence committed in Democrat-controlled urban centers.
In a country and culture that ignores the rising generation of sociopathic murderers — mostly thugs in violent urban centers who are saturated with cultural violence and indoctrinated with mass-media glorification of violence — it is fortunate that the incidence of mass murder is not 10 times higher. Arguably, the only thing keeping that number from being higher is that 125 million Americans are legal and responsible gun owners.
Democrats don’t focus on the vast majority of murders, particularly the epidemic of black-on-black murders on their decaying urban poverty plantations, because they want to avoid the “inconvenient truth” about race and violence, which is the direct result of failed Democrat social programs. In fact, black people (13% of the population), are 12 times more likely to be murdered, per capita, than white people (62% of the population).
That gross racial disparity in murder rates isn’t useful for the gun control narrative Democrats invoke to evoke emotional reaction from mostly wealthy white suburban women, who form the Demos’ largest voter constituency.
FOOTNOTE 2: Regarding so-called “mass shootings,” for the record, murders of multiple people by one assailant are very rare in our nation of 335 million people. Less than 1% of all murders nationwide are classified as “mass shootings” and high-profile attacks, such as the 2017 mass murder in Las Vegas, are extremely rare.
The FBI defines “active shooter incidents” as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” In 2022, the FBI reported 50 incidents resulting in 313 casualties (100 killed and 213 wounded). That number was up significantly from 2020 when the FBI reported 40 incidents resulting in 164 casualties (38 killed and 126 wounded).
A broader record of “mass shooting” data is maintained by the Associated Press and Northeastern University, which uses the Department of Justice definition of mass public shooting: “A multiple homicide incident in which four or more victims are murdered with firearms.” These numbers fluctuate significantly year over year, and they range between 20 and 40 incidents. But notably, over the last 30 years, the number of black mass assailants is almost as high as the number of white assailants.
Democrats focus on these rare instances of multiple murders because these high-profile tragedies are political fodder to foment fear — most notably when they can toss out their oft-repeated but erroneous claim that “gun violence is the leading cause of death for children.” If by “children” they mean gang and drug-associated murders of those primarily between the ages of 16 and 21, then yes. Democrats are experts at fomenting fear and division.
The fear and angst Demos intentionally propagate are taking a toll on Americans’ mental health. Psychological researcher Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson observes: “Watching it time and time again on your phone or on the headlines can really impact you in ways that I don’t think we knew before to be as impactful. It’s so ‘in our face’ all the time and we have access to so much footage, so many pictures, so many videos, so many accounts that we’re ingesting it in ways that’s really unhealthy for us.” The result for many mothers, in particular, is an irrational fear that their children will be shot. That is precisely the fabricated fear Democrats want to perpetuate, especially among their female constituents, in order to advance their gun control agenda.
(Notably, the deadliest school assault in American history did not involve a firearm. A sociopathic school board member in Bath, Michigan detonated a bomb outside an elementary school, murdering 38 children and six adults.)
FOOTNOTE 3: Regarding what Democrats and their Leftmedia propagandists ubiquitously and falsely label “assault weapons,” an actual assault weapon, commonly known as a “machine gun,” is select-fire and can rapidly cycle rounds in fully automatic sequence. Very few select-fire weapons are in civilian hands, and only then subject to stringent licensing requirements.
In fact, civilian firearms in common use, like the AR-15 and other semiautomatic sporting and hunting rifles, are not “assault rifles.”
For much the same reason the Demo/Media talkingheads focus only on rare high-profile “mass shootings” to generate fear and angst, they also call semi-automatic rifles sometimes used in those attacks, “assault weapons.” Predictably, Demos then call for what Hillary Clinton framed decades ago as “common sense gun laws,” inevitably followed by calls for an “assault weapons ban.”
In 1994, Bill Clinton banned the sale of “military-style assault weapons,” but that ban was not renewed 10 years later because it was determined the ban had no effect on crime reduction. According to Rand Research, “We found no qualifying studies showing that bans on the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines decreased any of the eight outcomes we investigated.”
The fact is, rifles and shotguns combined are used in less than 3% of all homicides, but Democrats never let facts get in the way of their “assault weapon ban” political agenda.
Both the Clintons were prolific prevaricators, masterful obfuscators of the truth. And Joe Biden has followed their template, establishing himself as the standard bearer of the “lying dog-faced pony soldier” cavalry.
FOOTNOTE 4: Regarding firearms and violent crime, researcher John Lott reports, “Over 92% of violent crimes in America do not involve firearms.” Again, the only thing keeping that number from being much higher is that 125 million Americans are legal and responsible gun owners.
FOOTNOTE 5: Regarding firearms and suicide, almost 60% of all deaths involving firearms are suicide, most also involving drug or alcohol abuse. But the big numbers promoted in “gun violence” reports do not distinguish between murder and suicide, thus implying that homicide rates are much higher. And does this mean that Demo support for assisted suicide is in conflict with their support for gun control?
FOOTNOTE 6: Regarding alcohol versus firearm deaths, if Democrats are serious about protecting Americans, they should outlaw alcohol. Alcohol abuse is far more deadly than firearm abuse. More than 178,000 people died from alcohol abuse last year — that’s NINE times the number of homicides associated with firearms. Drunk drivers are responsible for 37 deaths per day. And notably, it is estimated that alcohol is a key factor in at least 30% of homicides where the assailant uses a firearm. (Include drug dealing or use as a factor and that number jumps to about 60%.)
Of course, the vast majority of alcohol users possess and use it legally and responsibly. Likewise, the vast majority of firearm owners possess and use them legally and responsibly. Enacting a prohibition on firearms is tantamount to enacting a prohibition on alcohol. In both cases, only law-abiding users obey the laws.
BOTTOM LINE: Let me restate this point — only law-abiding citizens abide by the law. Only outlaws perpetrate acts of violence. Making good people helpless won’t make bad people harmless.
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776