of guns and fathers...

Okay, it’s happened again.  Another disaffected college youth from a good and loving family has murdered in the name of his YouTube’d angst.  In the coming days we can look forward to a bevy of suppositional theses to float our way like brown torpedoes in a punch-bowl. 

The anti-gun crowd, as usual, will blame the easy and legal access to firearms as the culprit.  The usual pundits will be called upon to regurgitate their takes on the toxic concoction of disaffected youth and easy access to firearms.  The young man will be vilified as confused, deranged, antisocial, sick in the head, bent, misunderstood, in-crisis, spoiled rotten, and/or just plain crazy while the victims will be canonized as exemplars of the species whose lives were shorn short of their normal expiration dates. 

All our hearts are broken. But let’s hold off on the crazy moniker for a sec.  At times in my own life, I might have been thought of as crazy; the crazy artist, crazy in love or crazy from the heat.  So let’s not settle on crazy just yet.  Instead, let’s agree to THINK about the causality and reasons for the recent mayhem in south Cali.  That’s what sane people do.

One commonality is, few of the victims saw it coming.  Even though the parents had warned the police, the man-child reasoned with the police and dissuaded them from further action.  In the words of the local police spokesman, “the officers cleared the call.”  Then the young man went and murdered friends and peers.  As always, the hue and cry from the emotionally governed is, “It’s the guns!” 

Que crazy.  Crazy is blaming the inanimate object.  Blaming the tool for being misused.  Of course we all want to blame something; the sick mind of the murderer, the gun and bullet manufacturers, the NRA, right-wing politicians, my third grade teacher, the parish priest who touched my peepee, or the reclusive neighbor down the lane.  Anyone and everything is suspect.  Especially those who, as our forefathers did, cling to their guns. 

Instead, what is needed is a conversation about what it means to be safe in an otherwise unsafe world.  Armed with that knowledge, and ultimate responsibility, we can only sling so much blame without soiling ourselves in the process.  Yes, yes, t’is a sad commentary on our civilization that we cannot prevent such incidents.  Or is it?  I believe it to be the price of freedom.  If I were the parent of a slain child, I might think otherwise.  But I hope not.  It’s how he lives that matters, not how he dies.

When my first child was born, I realized that he would be subjected to all that life has to offer.  That he could be laid low even unto death by disease, war, accident, the short sighted chicanery of friends, lightning, too much alcohol and possibly at the hand of some deranged individual.  In that moment, I found it humbling to have had him in the first place.  That this small being would be in my care and keeping only for a short time, and that I would endeavor not to fail him.  He’s grown and gone now and thriving on his own with a brand new bride.  Still, I worry.

It’s not a stretch by any sane reasoning person to conjure that we cannot remain free if we seek only to make life a safe and easy process.  One that GOD herself has deigned otherwise.  How else can we truly cherish what we have until it is threatened, or we lose it outright?  How else can we feel the emptiness of the dark without having felt the warmth of the sun?  How else can we truly celebrate life without knowing full well that death waits for no one?

At the news conference, the grieving father’s lament sounded reasonable enough, blaming craven politicians and the NRA as if they’d done the deed themselves.  I don’t blame him for faulty logic, the man lost his boy and I can only thank heavens that I do not know that pain.  In time, he and his family will move on but they will always have a hole in their heart where once was a good and able son. 

Without evidence to the contrary, I can only surmise that the killer was once a good son too and that his father is just as heartbroken, if not more so.  My heart goes out to all the fathers who lost someone that weekend in California, but especially to him.  His burden will forever be membership in an exclusive club for fathers who have born sons who commit murders in multiple.  A club no one wants to belong to.  A club whose membership grows by the year.

He might have to move from his home, suffer the looks of neighbors who conjure that he did something or didn’t do something to his son and that he is somehow responsible for his child murdering other children.  He might have to change his last name and leave his profession.  The one that fed, clothed and supported his family, and sent his son to college.  God forbid he bought those weapons for him.  Again, my heart aches for them all, but especially for him.  His horrors have just begun.