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Nearly everything about the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, is so depressingly familiar. The grieving parents. The stone-faced cops. The overwhelming feeling of senselessness. The fear.
The killer is also familiar to the point of stereotype. Once again we are looking at a lost young man alienated from purpose and meaning, an 18-year-old overly immersed in video games and the online world who was advertising his evil to anyone who paid attention.
Rage rises in me when I think about him and his massacre of 19 elementary-schoolers and two teachers. What a misanthropic loser he was. What a waste of space. How dare he take out his frustrations, his weakness, on innocent children. Unable or unwilling to build a life of his own, he chose the lazy path of destruction. How pathetic.
Because of him, there were 19 empty beds this morning where children should have been sleeping. There were flowers left unpicked and balls left unkicked. There were holes in the hearts of parents and grandparents who would give anything for one last hug, for one last chance to offer their love.
There's no making sense of this. I can't even try.
But we should try to acknowledge the bigger picture, including the terrible sickness out there. While it's easy to paint with too broad a brush at moments like this, it's undeniable that this country is leaving too many teenagers behind and producing too many young men willing to carry out heinous massacres. It feels like a spiritual decay.
Despite 2,000 miles between them, the alienated, disconnected killer in Uvalde is not all that different than the alienated, disconnected 18-year-old accused of the racist massacre in Buffalo — or the teenager who killed 14 in Parkland, the 20-year-old responsible for the horror at Sandy Hook, or even the young men responsible for much of the routine violence on the streets of many American cities.
In so many cases, for so many young men, the world of connection and humanity, of family, faith and community, has been displaced by consumerist alienation and fatherless homes that can leave young men adrift. (I speak from personal experience on that last one.)
So many teenage boys are looking for meaning and finding it in exactly the wrong places.
Yes, easy access to high-powered weapons and large magazines is part of the problem. But they aren't the whole of it. We shouldn't focus only on how these massacres are committed. We should consider why they happen.
Has something important and elemental changed? I'm not the only one who thinks it may have.
"The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts," wrote Malcolm Gladwell in a New Yorker magazine analysis of mass shootings since the massacre at Columbine High School. "It's worse. It's that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts."
There is, as has been widely acknowledged, a crisis of mental health and isolation happening among young adults, with social media a significant culprit. Kids are spending more time alone, on their phones, and less time hanging out with friends, being social and sleeping. Suicide rates are up sharply. During the pandemic, more than 40% of teens reported feeling "persistently sad or hopeless."
By some measures, the situation is particularly grim among young men, who are at least three times more likely to die by suicide than are teenage girls, twice as likely to suffer from drug addiction and significantly less likely to enroll in college.
Meanwhile, labor participation rates among young men have been steadily dropping in recent decades, as jobs in traditionally male fields disappear. The trend has been dubbed "the failure to launch."
It might be a mistake to draw too straight a line between such statistics and the atrocities committed in Buffalo and Uvalde. But it's likely also a mistake to assume these trends have nothing to do with the killings — or to assume that a debate on gun policy is the only discussion we should have.
When something as awful as what happened in Uvalde feels familiar, even routine, something is terribly wrong in America. Worse, we seem powerless to fix it.
Chris Churchill is a columnist for the Albany Times Union in New York.
