An 18-year-old sociopath murdered 19 elementary school children and two adults in the small town of Uvalde, Texas (between San Antonio and the Mexican border).

As a parent and grandparent, my heart breaks for these victims and their families, and the larger community traumatized by such violence. As a former law enforcement officer, the reality of that violence is visceral. I have stopped to pray for these families many times since the attack, as I have for the families of those murdered by another 18-year-old in Buffalo, New York four years ago.

It was almost 80 minutes after the Uvalde sociopathic entered through an unsecured door at the rear of the school – the first line of defense – and started his murderous assault, before the assailant was finally killed. This was a disgraceful timeline – that raises many questions about the failure to engage the assailant. Despite parents pleading with local police to enter the building and stop the attack, and 911 calls from children in the room where the assailant had barricaded himself, 80 minutes elapsed.

Despite reports to the contrary, the assailant not engaged outside the building in the five minutes between exiting his vehicle and entry, and was not wearing body armor. He was killed by a Border Patrol tactical unit officer who was working nearby when the call for help came. As best understood, the BORTAC unit agents treated the situation as a barricaded hostage taker. The officer who shot the assailant was wounded, but is in stable condition.

Governor Greg Abbott observed: “Evil swept across Uvalde yesterday. Anyone who shoots his grandmother in the face has to have evil in his heart. But it is far more evil for someone to gun down little kids.” Texas Department for Public Safety spokesman Chris Olivarez also noted the “evil” exhibited by the assailant, a word repeated across the spectrum.

Evil is the common denominator in every such case, and on the fringes of American culture, there is a sickness, a cancer that manifests as the darkest form of evil. Uvalde is the latest of the rare but horrifying mass murders committed by an assailant among the rising generation of sociopaths. Almost all mass murderers from this generation are suicidal – as psychologist Joel Dvoskin notes: “The best way for us to think about mass shootings is as acts of suicide. With very few exceptions — in fact, almost no exceptions — anybody who does that has given up on their life. They’re going to kill themselves, they’re going to get the police to kill them, or they’re going to go away pretty much forever.”

In this case, the assailant was the product of the social entropy and cultural devolution that has permeated the fabric of our nation. Typical of mass assailants, he was a deeply troubled youth from a badly broken home, with no father to affirm and protect him, no faith context to support him, and caught up in the gender cult. His online posts indicated he wanted to rape and kill women. That raises the question, how did Big Tech platform access contribute to this assault?

These combined factors resulted in “red flag” behavior that should have set off alarms at his high school and local law enforcement agencies, but the school system failed to report his behavior. Those alarms did not result in actionable deterrence – the assailant had no official record of mental health issues. Thus he was not prevented from obtaining firearms.

However, in addition to the irrefutable link between fatherless homes and violence, what I believe is the single most significant contributing factor scripting this particular type of assault, but one that will get the least attention, is the fact that the assailant was steeped in the desensitizing violence of video game “entertainment” — spending countless hours through his formative years in a fantasy first-person killing role. Tens of millions of young people are submersed in these games and don’t emerge as sociopathic killers. But in those rare instances when a young person does become a mass assailant, their pathology, combined with their killing fantasy, results in bloodshed.

For example: The 1999 Columbine High School murderers were immersed in the violent game “Doom,” achieving “berserk mode.” The 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School murderer logged 83,496 kills in one violent video game, including 22,725 headshots.

The leading voice connecting gaming violence to acts of violence is Lt. Col. Dave Grossman (USA Ret.), a former West Point psychology professor whose books on killing in warfare are mandatory warfighter reading.

More than two decades ago, Grossman linked media violence with mass assailants in his 1999 book, Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence. That was a careful study of the connection between fantasy and reality world violence. His 2016 book, Assassination Generation: Video Games, Aggression, and the Psychology of Killing, irrefutably makes this link.

According to Grossman: “There is a generation out there that has been fed violence from its youngest days and has been systematically taught to associate pleasure and reward with vivid depictions of inflicting human death and suffering. These young people are coming to our old folks’ homes, our movie theaters … our kindergarten classes, our little league games, our hospitals, and day care centers.”

To that end, a joint statement from the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry declares, “At this time, well over 1,000 studies … point overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children.”

But that statement was issued 20 years ago, and violent video games and media are far more realistic now than then – and will get no mention in connection to the Highland Park assailant. The commercial and media forces aligned against making that connection and taking any action against those media platforms are staggering.

Additionally, many of the most noted mass shooting assailants were, or had been using, psycho-active prescription drugs, particularly selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, including Prozac similar drugs. It was only after the introduction and widespread distribution of these drugs (now an epidemic of overprescription in the US) that mass shootings began.

Now, the FBI reports that the number of active shooter incidents, while rare, increased from 40 in 2020 to 61 last year. Among the 21,000 murders last year, 243 people were killed in mass assaults.

Predictably, the leftist politicos, including Joe Biden, paused their advocacy for the killing the most innocent among us, roughly 2,200 children before birth every day, and did what they always do, politicized the incident.

In his remarks on the assault, Biden complained, “When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?”

Answer: When Democrats focus on the actual problem rather than reflexively regurgitating political talking points about “gun control.”

It was no small irony that after the Uvalde assault, Biden invited actor Matthew McConaughey, a native of Uvalde, to the White House to plead Biden’s case with Congress to “do something” and “make the loss of these lives matter.” Ironic because this is the same actor who has amassed a fortune making films which feature unmitigated violence. As I wrote in “Violence is a Culture Problem,” “Remarkably, some of the celebs who owe their fame and fortune to their ultra-violent ‘entertainment’ roles are among the most outspoken gun control advocates — a demonstration of unmitigated hypocrisy that falls squarely into the ‘BIG Lie’ category.”

Biden will head to Texas where he and his “do something” chorus will reflexively insist this assault was the result of “gun violence” while avoiding any suggestion that, first and foremost, as mentioned above, violence is a cultural problem.

For the record, recall that in 1990, then Sen. Joe Biden was a primary backer of the Gun-Free School Zones Act. Today, 94% of mass assaults occur in so-called gun-free zones.“

For the record, violent crimes are almost exclusively committed by sociopathic thug, drug and gang-bangers battling on city streets. Furthermore, it is also clear that 96% of all mass shootings since records first began being kept in 1950 occurred in so-called ”gun-free zones.“ In other words, people were killed in places where the victims were most likely unable to defend themselves. And 90% of those firearms were obtained illegally.

Of course, only law-abiding citizens abide by laws, and making lawful citizens helpless clearly does not make outlaws harmless. Remember: The vast majority of mass assaults occur in "gun-free zones.”

Sidebar: Anyone who asserts the public or private space they manage is safe by posting signs and/or establishing regulations prohibiting (gun-free zones), should thus be liable for any assault that occurs in that public or private space, because in effect they advertised it was safe from any firearm assault – and advertised to criminals that the space is full of people who are unable to defend them selves.

And, Biden wants more gun laws? Start by enforcing current gun laws, and prosecute Hunter Biden for his weapons violation.

Passing more laws, when existing laws are not enforced (despite the fact that criminals and sociopaths don’t obey laws), is much more convenient and politically expedient than formulating meaningful social solutions. We must address the core cultural issues that produce violent offenders because no amount of firearm regulation will resolve that problem.

(Updated)

(Footnote: As he promised Donald Trump showed up and delivered remarks at the NRA annual meeting in Houston Friday, amid the organizations internal strife.)

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776