It really hit me like a ton of bricks after reading this article about Why Mass Shootings Keep Happening and as far back as I can remember mass shootings or school shootings have been a thing in my life. In 1999, I was a sophomore in High School when 2 kids also in high school walked into their school and murdered 13 people in cold blood. Columbine was the first time I can remember feeling that kind of fear, the kind of fear that no one is “safe” not in a school or a church.
Being a diehard Criminal Minds fan, I have always been fascinated with serial killers and understanding what drove them to their “Pathway to violence”. So reading about the actual BAU (Behavioral Analysis Unit) of the FBI and understanding how they work in real life had me on the edge of my seat. To see inside the mind of “Trunk” and how the BAU2 uses him to gain a deeper understanding into the minds of someone who was on “The Pathway to Violence”, it really makes me think how easy it is with the right set of circumstance for mentally fragile people to commit these horrible acts.
But then we look at something like what happened in Charleston on Wednesday, it saddens me to think of this racially motivated attack. Here we have an impressionable, mentally fragile kid who has been fed racial ignorance, probably from an early age and then followed “The Path to Violence”. I just read an article saying that the kid, Roof almost didn’t do it because everyone was so nice to him. It has an eerie similarity to what “Trunk” said about wishing he could have spoken to Elliot Rodger before Elliot Rodger went out and shot innocent people. Also saying…
“I wanted attention. If someone would have come up to me and said, ‘You don’t have to do this, you don’t have to have this strange strength, we accept you,’ I would have broken down and given up.”
Makes me wonder if this could have been prevented in some way, was Roof even on the BAU’s radar? Could someone who noticed something strange have said something to him? Would it be possible for Roof to backtrack on “The Pathway to Violence” and learn acceptance? I don’t know and maybe I will never know. But there is a deep seated hatred in South Carolina and I think Jon Stewart hit it on the head on last night episode of The Daily Show (See Here) when he said:
“In South Carolina, the roads that black people drive on are named for Confederate generals who fought to keep black people from being able to drive freely on that road,” he said. “The Confederate flag flies over South Carolina, and the roads are named for Confederate generals.”
All I can say, is it is time to wake up! If this is the path we are headed down, I would never want to bring a child into this world knowing that we can’t be better than that, we can’t be the bigger people and do the right thing. I will now leave you with this quote from Winston Churchill:
“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.”