Fish Like a GIRL

This column may be a bit more controversial than my columns usually are. But honestly, I don’t think it should be. Recently, Lakeland Union High School in Minocqua was locked down with a report of an armed intruder. Thankfully, it turned out to be a false alarm, thankfully. But other high schools have not been as lucky already this year. 

Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia experienced something no school should have to: an armed student who killed and injured others in the school. At the end of the attack, two students and two teachers lay dead, and nine others were injured.  

One of a number of things that I find disturbing is that this is not the first time anyone has had an idea that this individual could be dangerous to themselves or to others. In fact, the FBI investigated him in 2023 for some threats involving school shootings. 

I will not mention the child’s name, and that is what he is — a child. He is 14 years old. I will not mention his name because in almost all these instances of school shootings and active shooter situations in general, the person is looking for the “fame” of being the shooter.  

“The whole world will know my name!” is the idea behind it. That said, I will not be one of those people with his name on my tongue.  

Some may wonder why I would say that, and what evidence I have of that. Many may not know that I am an instructor for the United States Concealed Carry Association (USCCA). I not only teach concealed carry and home defense classes as well as emergency first aid fundamentals, but also a class entitled Countering the Mass Shooter Threat. 

Michael Martin of USCCA has put together a great deal of research to allow instructors such as me to get the information out to people that they need to make a plan in the event of an active shooter and, perhaps even more importantly, learn to identify those threats before they happen. Identifying those threats early is key. And, as I said, in almost every instance, someone, at least one person, knew that there was a possibility of a heinous crime, but chose to do nothing, chose to not believe it could happen. It is easier to think that life will continue to go on normally, and that nothing horrible will ever happen. The odds are low, right? But they are not zero, and that is what we should learn from all of this. 

“…while active shooting events have been on the rise since 2000, violent crime as a whole has dropped year over year,” according to the USCCA text that comes with the Countering the Mass Shooter Threat class. “Some new factor is at play when compared to the traditional factors that motivate the average criminal to commit a violent crime.” That factor is the wish of these individuals to become famous, to be notorious. It is a mindset that has changed in youth who do not feel as though they are important. They feel overlooked and pushed aside.

It is easier to blame an inanimate object: 

“Let’s ban guns.” 

“Let’s ban 30-round magazines.” 

“Let’s ban semi-automatic weapons.” 

“Let’s ban violent video games.” 

All of these things must be the problem, right? Timothy McVeigh used fertilizer. Closer to home, a man drove his SUV through the Christmas Parade in Waukesha. It is not about the “weapon,” as we would normally not characterize either of these everyday things as weapons.     

 Neither of these people, as far as I have researched, was a “gamer.” Certainly, McVeigh was not, as he lived without most of the basic comforts of modern life for quite a time. 

It is about the person. It is about their mental health — which is something we tend to ignore. 

But it is still easier to blame an inanimate object, or some new technology, and attempt to find a way to keep it away from people than it is to talk about the mental health crisis we have in this country. It is easier than admitting that we failed this youth, and so many others like him. We failed him, as a country. People failed to take him seriously, perhaps because he is “just a kid,” or because it was easier and more convenient to not want to believe he would ever actually carry out a plan to hurt people. But he, and others like him, have been failed, plain and simple.

Knowing this 14-year-old child in Georgia could have been prone to acts such as this, his father bought an AR-15 for him as a gift for, I believe it was Christmas, last year. His father is now being charged with multiple things due to the actions of his son. He is not being charged with failing his son, however, and I wish there was a way to do that. 

Before I move any further in this, some want to banter around the AR-15 as an all-powerful, horrible “assault” rifle, etc. However, it bears a comment here. First, let me say that “AR” does not stand for “assault rifle,” but “Armalite Rifle,” with Armalite being the company who originally designed the rifle. An AR-15 is chambered for a Remington .233. Comparing this to the most popular deer rifle, a 30.06 (pronounced 30 ought six), the AR has less than half of the kinetic energy of that deer rifle. But back to this child’s fragile mental health: 

“I’m sorry,” the child texted his mother before the shooting started. That said, I am obviously not privy to anything else that happened in this family’s life any more than anyone else who has researched what has already come out.  

I was not a fly on the wall nor inside his head when he decided to carry out this plan. But I do know that it should not have been a complete surprise, and that is the case in almost all of the mass shootings that have happened in this country since Columbine. 

It is easier to blame that AR-15, though, than it is to talk about the mental health crisis we have in this country, especially in our youth. That is messy. It is ugly. It is more comfortable to sweep that under the rug. If we do not want to look at it, we can just lock it away in a closet somewhere — until we cannot. 

The rise in these types of violent acts has come along as social media has been on the rise. As science has taught us, correlation does not equal causation, so we need to be careful with that. But how many of us, as adults, have been attacked on social media for a simple opinion or statement with which another person does not agree? Further, when adults do that, it teaches our youth that this is an acceptable behavior. They are watching, whether we want them to or not, whether we want to be accountable or not. When we play the role of “keyboard warrior,” as is the popular term now, we teach kids that they can, too.  

The thing that is often missed is that kids are not simply small adults. They are kids. They do not often have the coping mechanisms we have built.  

I was a bullied kid. I was picked on relentlessly for many years. I was a “geeky” kid and loved school, but many days hated going there. I built up emotional walls to keep at bay the pain of not fitting in. No, I did not resort to that type of violence, but that was a different time in the world in general. In that time, many of us had hunting rifles hanging in the back windows of our trucks in the school parking lot. Again, guns were not the problem. But it was a different time.

One thing of interest, when I interviewed Lynn Feldman in regard to her induction into the 4-H Hall of Fame, she mentioned how kids have changed, especially since the pandemic. They are not as social, she told me. 

She said they are more isolated and tend to have more anxiety. There is no easy fix for this, for sure. But the first step, in my humble opinion, is to at least be aware, to understand that many youth are struggling in some way, just as some adults struggle, but with even fewer coping mechanisms available to them.

I would not profess to have all of the answers to the issues we are experiencing in our country. But I would offer that it is not the means by which these acts are being carried out that should be at the core of the debate. What should be at the core of the debate is that there are children in our country who see these acts as the answer. They see this as their ticket to fame, to getting someone to see them and to acknowledge them.

Yet we continue to turn a blind eye to helping our youth. We give them participation trophies instead of helping them find the areas where they shine so they can receive accolades in those areas, so they can feel seen and acknowledges as important. We continue to ignore their mental health, and just hope everything will work out. 

One of the things I stress in every USCCA class I teach, whether it is a Countering the Mass Shooter Threat class or a concealed carry class is that we just need to pay more attention to each other. In a time when we tend to pay less attention to each other, we really need to be paying more attention. We need to take things seriously. 

I had to call a friend just a month ago to tell him what I was seeing on his son’s social media account. He followed his son on much of his social channels, but was not on one particular platform. I noticed his feed getting darker and darker. It may have been nothing, but what if it was not? What if he was seriously thinking about the things he was talking about? I had to say something. They have a good relationship, and I could tell by this young man’s social media feed, that talk helped him.

In doing that, I followed the Sandy Hook Promise: See something, say something. Maybe it was nothing, but maybe it was something, and his Dad talking to him helped.

I believe in that Sandy Hook Promise to the core of my being. See something, say something. I hope we all can commit to that.

Beckie Gaskill may be reached at [email protected]