Some Rightists say Cruz (the FL school shooter) was Antifa, or Muslim, or a Dreamer. Some Liberals say he was alt right. People who knew him say he was weird and depressed. His social media says he had a lot of guns and he killed small animals.
I'm going with the last two. I find those sufficient to explain a mass shooter. And they are things that you can actually check for yourself in the world of real things,
I know that this is way too soon, and not enough is known but I will still go out on a limb and say that gun control (which I heavily favor) is not the first place to lay blame or to look for solutions.
We have a 19 year old boy, adopted and an unknown (to the public or at least to me) age. I am guessing he was not adopted as an infant because every news story talks about his adoptive parents. So, I will assume that he was at least a toddler and possibly school age when he was adopted by who seem to have been good, loving, attentive parents. But some people who are adopted as infants have some issues surrounding adoption and if they were adopted as older children, it is often the case that there has been much trauma in a young child's life prior to whatever circumstances lead to the dissolution of a relationship with the biological parents, whatever those circumstances. So, at a minimum, going into the relationship with his adoptive parents, the kid had already suffered some significant trauma.
His adoptive father dies.
His adoptive mother dies, rather recently.
He lost his girlfriend (not sure how long ago).
He was taken in by a friend's family but that wasn't working out so he asked a different friend's family if he could live there.
He gets kicked out of school for behavior problems (ya think?).
This kid--and I'm sorry, a 19 year old is still more kid than adult, no matter what law says--lost every single anchor he possibly could have had, most of them in a relatively short period of time.
Why did no one reach out, encompass him, envelop him in love and caring and yes, get him into as many services as possible?
Why weren't there more services for this kid?
I was 49, long married, with my children grown or mostly grown when I lost both my parents in a relatively short period of time--over the course of a summer, actually.
What did it feel like to this adult, in a long stable relationship, with a good job, economic stability, great health care, a home, family and friends who love me to lose both my parents so quickly?
It felt as though I had been dragged through a field of barbed wire, embedded with shards of glass, then dragged through battery acid. I had a loving husband, children old enough and together enough to be supportive and to share my grief, friends- some decades long friendships, siblings and other family to lean on. But that's what it felt like. I swear every single nerve ending in my body and my mind was raw with pain. For weeks. Eventually the battery acid feeling subsided to just something like alcohol on an open wound, and then to some mild acid like vinegar. But that took weeks and months and I had friends, family, a job: all the support in the world.
This kid lost everything.
People just talk about how weird he was.
Yeah, I know I'm the only person in this world who feels for this kid's pain and wants to know what we are going to do to stop school shootings.
We need to start dealing with this before anyone even thinks that a possible solution to whatever bad things they are feeling and experiencing gets resolved with a gun or twenty.
