The Packers play in the nationally-featured game of tomorrow’s MNF double-header, so today I am going to make a brief comment about the sentencing of 17-year-old Ethan Crumbley to life imprisonment for the Michigan Oxford High School mass-shooting in 2021, when he was 15. While there have been far worse mass-shootings than the 4 dead and seven wounded in that incident, Crumbley was seen as taking diabolical pleasure in shooting people, including shooting one individual multiple times. He also left text and audio messages that suggested a highly disturbed mind.
The focus on the perpetrator’s state of mind seemed to ignore certain realities. We are told that Crumbley’s parents are also facing “involuntary” homicide charges not for the way they “raised” their son, but because they didn’t seek psychological treatment for him, and that they gave him a gun as a “gift” before he was legally qualified to have one; in fact, it was probably the parents who were more in need of "therapy."
But as we can surmise from what he are told in an Associated Press story, white students are often treated with a “lighter” touch by school officials and society in general; after all, also making the news cycle is the story about a black high school student in Texas suspended multiple times for violating its “hair code”:
(Psychiatrist Colin) King disclosed for the first time that the boy believed that a gun was going to be found in his backpack on the day of the shooting when he was sent to the office for drawing violent images in class. “Ethan said for the first time in his life he felt relieved,” King testified. “He said he just knew the sheriffs were going to burst into the office and arrest him because there was no way, after all that they saw, they weren’t going to search that backpack.”But the backpack was never checked, and the boy was allowed to remain in school. He later emerged from a bathroom and started shooting.
King said the shooter was raised in a turbulent home by parents who left him alone for hours, argued in front of him and weren’t discreet when discussing infidelity, divorce and suicide. The boy was even forced to figure out what to do with his beloved dead dog.“He can be considered a feral child,” King said.
A neighbor had noted that Crumbley’s parents had frequently left him alone in the house in the evening while they bar-hopped. She claims to have called Child Protective Services, but did not know if CPS ever did anything. There wasn’t much said about Crumbley’s relationship with fellow students; prosecutors revealed that his only friend had moved away, so presumably he was just regarded as a “freak” by other students.
Of course, we never learn in this country where gun violence is second nature, school shootings among them. The Columbine shooters were regarded as “weird” and ostracized, the Virginia Tech shooter who killed 32 was someone who was unhappy that girls ignored him, and the Parkland shooter was another who was regarded as a “freak” by other students. All these people were called “loners,” although not necessarily by design, or desire.
Not all “loners” are potentially violent people out to take revenge on society of course, but you frequently here mass-shooters described as such. In fact, being a “loner” myself by “nature” who doesn’t actively seek out human companionship and prefers to engage in activities that do not require the need to “please” other people, dislikes “drama,” and has no time for the “games” that women expect you to play, I am perfectly content (especially at this late stage of my life) to leave my “mark” on the world just writing here whatever is on my mind. The whole world is full of full of shit and bigoted people, so what can you do about it? Ignore them, or talk about them here.
I think that these mass-shooters who are accused of being “loners” don’t actually want to be “loners.” They may have certain personality or physical traits that turn off other people, or they are not extroverts, or they don’t have any particular interest that allows them to “fit in” with certain student “factions.” People may look at them as “loners” simply because no one thinks there is anything in it for them to be “friendly” with them.
Of course if you are a “real” loner, this doesn’t actually bother you all that much, because these other people are just assholes and you don’t need them anyways. The real “dangerous” people are the tiny percentage of an already tiny percentage who are made into “loners” by people who actively don’t want anything to do with them, make fun of them and even bully them. As for Ethan Crumbley, we probably haven’t been told the whole story yet, since we haven’t heard after all this time the interactions he had with fellow students before the shooting.
In fact, unlike a real “loner,” Crumbley seemed to be behaving as an attention-seeker, trying to “shock” people into paying attention to him with his drawings as he did on the day of the shooting—except that people didn’t get the “message.”
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