To stop school shootings, we need to understand school shooters
Colin Gray, left, and his son Colt Gray, who have been charged in the deadly shootings at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia. Credit: AP
Another school year is barely underway and our nation has already logged another school shooting.
It was sad and shocking but, unfortunately, predictably so. Also sad and predictable was the round of laments and rationalizations that followed the bloodbath.
This one left four dead and nine wounded at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, and a 14-year-old student and his father arrested in connection with the killings. It also left countless people across the country despairing that anything will happen to reduce the regularity with which these traumas visit us.
One source of despair, of course, is the refusal in certain political corners to take any actions that could help. Georgia, for example, has neither a red-flag law to help police confiscate weapons from troubled individuals nor a safe-storage law to require firearms to be kept under lock and key. Both would have helped in this latest incident.
But in its aftermath, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said, "Today is not the day for politics or policy." The shocked and drawn and mourning faces of the kids at Apalachee High said that every day is a day for politics and policy.
The despair also stems from a crippling lack of understanding of the mostly young men who do these shootings, and an unwillingness to do anything even when we do gain a glimmer of insight.
In the case of alleged Apalachee killer Colt Gray, Ohio Sen. JD Vance called him a "psycho." His casual dismissiveness of a 14-year-old was breathtaking.
What, after all, can you do about a psycho? Nothing. Psychos are pure evil, beyond redemption, not quite human, certainly not worth spending any time trying to understand. Psychos are Hannibal Lecter and Norman Bates, and an army of movie slashers and shooters. Lock 'em up and throw away the key.
Former President Donald Trump said Gray was "a sick and deranged monster." Sick, yes, but a monster? At 14?
Labels like these are outlines of a painting we need not fill in. Slapping them on someone like Colt Gray allows us to write him off as a one-dimensional avatar of evil. He's a psycho, turn the page.
We do that to our detriment. The answer to this national sickness of ours is not only to arm ourselves against it, but to identify its roots and treat it so it doesn't keep happening. We have to be proactive, not merely reactive.
That means we need to learn to listen to possible calls for help, like the 2023 probe of Gray in a school shooting threat, and to really listen to people like Charles Polhamus, Colt Gray's grandfather, who told CNN, “He was just a good kid, but he lived in an environment that was hostile.”
That included an abusive father, a drug-troubled mother, a volatile home life and his parents' messy separation, financial difficulties, multiple lawsuits from landlords, at least one eviction, and bullying in school.
"I understand that Colt chose to do what he did, and I understand he has to pay for it," Polhamus told CNN. “But I’m telling you, the environment that he lived in … you put somebody in a situation like that for 10 or 11 years, guess what’s gonna happen? Nothing good.”
Vance called these shootings a sad fact of life. He's right, as far as it goes. They are sad. And at this point, they are part of American life.
But again, the terminology is limiting. To say they are a fact of life is to imply there is nothing that can be done to change that. Facts are facts, after all. Stubborn things, as one former president noted.
But our basic humanity and our eternal desire to make our world better demand that we don't accept this as a fact of life, that we take what actions we can, that we look past labels to see these people for who they are, both tormented and tormentor, and that we start working harder in every way so we don't keep adding to our nation's log of shame.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
