The horrible shooting in Highland Park

I have a few observations/guesses, some about shootings in general, and some about the specific guy currently tagged as the shooter.

First, my sincere condolences to all whose lives were taken or touched by the terrible violence at the Independence Day parade.

Second, a few thoughts relying on the very limited information available. Everything I say is based upon the assumption that the guy arrested, whom I will not name, is the guy who actually committed this heinous crime. The 24-hour rule indicates that at least half of what I’m saying here will be proven wrong, especially if law enforcement ID’d and then arrested the wrong guy.

1. Considering that this guy’s social media was dripping with weirdness and violence, you would think that Illinois’s Red Flag laws would have stopped him…but they didn’t. This is yet another case in which Red Flags were useless, although their uselessness won’t stop them from being abused.

2. I wonder if the guy’s career as a sort-of successful rapper was how he got a pass on his craziness. Gangsta rap is now and has been for decades dripping with weirdness and violence. How do you separate the wheat from the chaff? That is, who can tell if people are rapping those awful things for effect or if they’re genuinely crazy?

3. I don’t think it was a coincidence that this shooting was in a predominantly Jewish community.

4. My first thought when I saw a picture of the alleged shooter was “Uses a lot of marijuana and has been on prescription psychotropic drugs.” That seems to be a consistent feature of these young, skinny, white mass shooters.

5. The shooter seems to come from an intact family, with a father who was there for his youth. That’s very unexpected, so I wonder if there’s more to the man’s relationship with the father than meets the eye.

6. These shootings catch headlines and are terrible. On the other hand, the illegal fentanyl flooding the border and killing over 100,000 Americans per year is ignored. So we get people demanding an end to the Second Amendment, which is used defensively between 500,000 and 2.5 million times per year, based on a statistically small number of deaths, but we never hear from the same people a demand to close the border and crack down on drug smugglers and dealers, although their product confers no benefit on anyone and produces huge numbers of deaths, along with destroyed lives.

Image by Wirestock (edited) on Freepik. Bullet hole from freeiconspng.