Our Son, The Silly Little Assassin

As the old adage goes, “To the man with a hammer, every problem is a nail.”

Nowadays, though, the revised saying should be, “To the man with a gun, every problem is a bullet.”

But to the young, suicidal shooter with an AR-15, every round fired provides both relief and solution to a violent madness — even if innocent people have to die.

Nearly all of the assassins involved in America’s bloody shooting tragedies these days have been young, suicidal men with easy access to weapons of war. Despite the new gun regulations from Congress with red flags aflutter and provisions for psychological/emotional treatments for these shooters, this bloody carnage isn’t going to subside anytime soon.

Unfortunately, such massacres will continue. Why? Two words: THEIR PARENTS. To say the parenting of these mass-shooters is sadly lacking would be an understatement. Spiders know more about the activities of their young than these Moms and Dads do.

I don’t know what went on in other households, but when I was growing up, I couldn’t put anything past my mother. If I farted in the next room, she’d show up to open a window. Then she’d interrogate me about the gassy contents of my secret snacks. For years, I actually believed she did have eyes in the back of her head. It was scary. She was not only aware of what I was doing but also what I wanted to do and what I probably would do before I could even think of it myself.

Her awareness of what my sisters and I were up to seemed so weirdly superhuman that it was like having a psychic nanny. But I wasn’t the only kid with such a mother. There were a lot of other moms like her when I was growing up. It didn’t matter if they were working in or outside the home, either. They always seemed to know what was going on with their kids. They just knew.

Remember that old Public Service Advertisement that ran on TV with the tagline, “It’s 10 PM. Do you know where your children are?” Those mothers hated it because it suggested they were not doing their all-important job of mothering. Whenever the moms got together and started talking about it, I got an earful:

Of course, I know where my children are! And I don’t have to wait until 10 o’clock to figure out where they are, either, because they’re in bed before nine. I know because I’m their mother. Who comes up with those stupid TV things anyway?! What kind of a mother do they think I am?!

Those were the days, all right. (Sigh)

Now we’re in the 21st Century. Not only do a lot of parents NOT know where their kids are or what they’re doing, they also have no idea that junior is hoarding an arsenal of AR-15’s and body armor under his bed. Or that he’s obsessed with viewing suicidal videos and mass shootings online. It’s almost as if they don’t want to bother their problem child with any questions because then it might upset him. Then Mom and Dad might have to admit that the child they conceived and brought into this world has a lot of serious psychological problems…And they don’t want to admit that because it would make them look bad. It would hurt their parental vanity.

They don’t want to even admit they might have made some mistakes in raising their child. They also don’t want to believe that their offspring’s obsession with suicide and mass killings might have come from some genetic mutation that they themselves carried into the next generation. They don’t want to admit their damaged son might be their fault.

After all, conceiving a difficult, rebellious, AND mentally/emotionally disturbed child isn’t just a time-consuming bother, it’s also considered a poor reflection on them as parents. Mental illness, along with other genetic shortcomings, still carries an embarrassing and humiliating stigma in our society. That’s bad enough for parents to contend with and navigate. But imagine how heartbreaking it must feel when the other parents are all aglow about how their sons got accepted into Ivy League colleges and won the State swim meets and debate competitions…and all they’ve got to show is a moody loner who hates school and never brushes his teeth and can’t stop obsessing with death.

How could anyone be proud of a son who’s every parent’s nightmare? Well, no one could. That’s why so many parents of these shooters downplay, excuse, and otherwise ignore the madness their sons exhibit. That’s why the parents of The Highland Park, Illinois Assassin dismissed their son’s threats to “kill everyone” with “he didn’t really mean that.”

Uh-huh. We all say things in anger that we regret. But we all don’t act out on our anger, thank God. We all don’t have access to a cadre of sharp knives and guns that are automatic killing machines. We all don’t have computer access to morbid scenes of destruction. More importantly, we all don’t have enabling parents who would have given written permission for us to legally own guns when we were only 19.

Although it never came up in any conversation with me and my mother or father, I know they never would have allowed me to get any guns or knives if I’d announced I wanted to “kill everybody.” That’s just Parenting 101 at work. That’s just common sense. No moody, suicidal, emotionally disturbed youth who exhibited the behavior that the Highland Park shooter did before his killings deserved to get rewarded with firearms.

If parents can’t figure that out, they need to abandon their foolish pride and get some help for their disturbed children before another tragedy strikes. They have to start showing some tough love. If they can’t deliver that basic care, then they should be charged with crimes of reckless endangerment when their troubled offspring shoots to kill.