WHEN WE GET BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

It was bound to happen sooner or later.  As the school year winds down, Texas has given us another school shooting.  Ten dead, ten more wounded, shooter in custody.  As of this writing, the shooter has no known ties to extremist groups, left or right.  He’s a 17-year-old white boy with a Greek name.

Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick has identified the problem – the high school had too many doors.  "Had there been one single entrance possibly for every student, maybe he would have been stopped."  It’s not about the easy availability of guns, or even about mental health.  Schools just have too many doors.

Let’s see if Texas or any other state decides to appropriate money to remodel their schools on a single entrance/exit model.  If they don’t, then Patrick’s analysis is just more NRA bullshit.  That’s the outcome to bet on.

As Josh Marshall points out, the relevant data in this shooting is almost certainly “teenage boy.”  Sometimes alienated high school boys find religious or political ideologies that provide a rationale for their anger.  But those ideologies, pernicious as they may be, increasingly look like flags of convenience. 

What we have in this country are a lot of teenage boys who are angry loners.  That’s probably nothing new.  I was a bit of a loner myself in my high school years, but I was never tempted to shoot my classmates.  But that was long ago and far away.  These are different times.

Malcolm Gladwell, writing in the New Yorker in 2015 (link below) speculates that the Columbine shooting in 1999 was the tipping point.  Shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold established a template that disturbed young men want to emulate.  They had a website, they wrote manifestoes, they made home movies of themselves as killers. 

The more these things happen, Gladwell says, the easier it gets for the next guy.  “The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It’s worse. It’s that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts.”

The image accompanying this post is of one of the split gates (candi bentar) in the Pura Penataran Agung Lempuyang temple on Mt. Lempuyang, Bali, Indonesia.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/thresholds-of-violence