Could a little human "kindness" have averted Florida school shooting?

There has been another mass shooting in America, this time at a high school in Parkland, Florida in which 17 people were killed.  It is the 18^th school shooting incident in the first six weeks of 2018; if we just count nine school months in a year, that is on pace for 117 such shootings—compared to 65 all of last year, which is the most since such tallies have been recorded. In this latest incident, a former student, Nikolas Cruz, was arrested for the act. A school official was quoted “We’ve seen the worst of humanity.” I suppose since his name was “Cruz” he is a worse human than the Virginia Tech shooter who killed 32, or the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter who killed 26, or even Hitler or Stalin for that matter. Actually, “Cruz” is his adoptive parents’  name (both deceased), and both the spelling of his first name and the surname of one direct relative who has been contacted by the media are Slavic in origin (meaning “pure” Caucasian); I point this out only because Donald Trump can’t use this incident for his weekly “immigrant crime” roll, which only includes perpetrators with Spanish surnames. Some have pointed out that Trump’s immigrant crime lists are so meager that they actually prove the point of the actual data that immigrants (legal or otherwise) commit fewer crimes than native-born citizens.

Am I being cynical here? Why not? This will be just another mass shooting that will quickly become forgotten before the next one occurs. If the school official said something like “We’ve seen the worst in humanity,” I would have agreed with that, because we’ve seen worse. But my cynicism is also due to the fact that unlike most of these shootings (we still don’t know the motivation of the Las Vegas shooter who killed 58), this tragedy was telegraphed miles ahead, and no one did anything to stop it—both school officials and the students of the school. I’m not talking about reports to the FBI of a YouTube video allegedly posted by Cruz, or notifications to law enforcement, being banned from bringing a backpack to school, or even school suspensions—I’m talking about what was not done on an elemental human level to prevent this incident from even becoming a virus infecting the shooter’s mind.

I’ve read numerous media accounts of the shooter, which leave in or leave out various details. Just before the shooting (having been expelled entirely from the school), Cruz worked at a Dollar Tree store and was said to be “well liked” by his colleagues, but at school it had been a different story. Cruz was “known to be mentally ill” according to an unsympathetic female student, had no friends, was alternately “quiet” and violently aggressive. Female students thought he was “creepy.” He was “super-stressed” and guns and what you could do with them were his favorite topic of conversation. He liked to show off his guns on his Facebook page; he talked about shooting people, and he apparently linked himself to a Florida-based white supremacist group. His adoptive mother had requested that police visit her home in the hopes of “scaring” some “sense” into him. Fellow students “joked” about how if anyone would be a “school shooter,” it would be him.

But there was another story to be told. One should note that no one claimed to actually know Cruz on a personal level; he was just someone who was “talked about.” However, one student said that Cruz frequently complained of "how tired he was of everyone picking on him and the staff doing nothing about it." He apparently even went to the principal with this complaint, and one can conjecture that his complaint was ignored, since he was a “problem” student and presumably brought all his problems on himself. He was frequently “counseled” on his behavior, but apparently nothing was done to stem the dark ideas in his head, Cruz no doubt feeling that his own complaints were not only not being addressed, but he was the real “victim” rather than the problem. We don’t know exactly the nature of his complaints against fellow students because the media hasn’t asked the question, but we can conjecture how semi-“mature” students behave toward students who are “strange,” especially “loners” and “quiet” people whose infrequent exchanges of thought are not exactly “sociable” in nature. We can also speculate that some students egged him on just to see what “crazy” things he would do or say—just for “fun” or pure malice. 

But even if school officials took his complaints “seriously,” it is unlikely that any effort would have been made to curb any “bullying,” especially if Cruz viewed it as general rather than specific to certain individuals.  He was the school’s “village idiot,” and who wants to be treated like that—especially the “wrong” type of person? Do we have a case, unlike so many other school shooting incidents, where the simple act of being “sympathetic” to his concerns from the very beginning—particularly by a school counselor—could have averted what eventually occurred? Did school officials actually think that a student who was already alienated because negative interactions with other students and with unsympathetic school staff wouldn’t become even more alienated by continuously “proving” his point in his own mind? Wouldn’t he think the school was “protecting” the “bullies” and inflicting more damage, in his own version of the world, upon the “victim”? And if students thought he was a “danger,” why did some persist in their own actions, if in fact there was truth in Cruz’s complaints of “bullying” and being “picked on”? I mean, wasn’t he “mentally ill” and fond of guns? Didn’t such students with such “evaluations” have some inkling that continuing to bully on this emotionally unstable person, who frequently talked about guns, might possibly use them in an act of “retaliation”? It isn’t a “joke” now, is it?

This is not to say school officials and students are at “fault,” but this isn’t a case like the Columbine shooters who were “teased” about their “weird” Goth outfits, but did not otherwise draw suspicion upon themselves by talking about guns and maybe even using them for “revenge.” Of the Virginia Tech shooter, an Asian man, he was “set off” because he felt his existence was “ignored” by other students—perhaps like the black protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, who on the very first page of the novel imagines himself beating half to death a white man because as a black man his humanity was “invisible” to him. This was a terrible tragedy—another in a long, endless list of them, all over the world. But it is also a fact that this is a case of a mass shooting where the idea of it could have been prevented from even germinating with just a little bit of civility and common sense. But like in the aftermath of all such shootings, no one feels the “need” to do anything—either from gun control laws or personal interactions—to prevent the next one from occurring.