Kylee Griswold has a piece titled Fixed it for You: Here’s What The Vilest Headlines About The Nashville School Shooting Should Have Said in which she lists some of the most awful media headlines in the wake of the recent tragedy in Nashville, Tennessee and offers corrections that make them more objective and less tendentious.
Here's an example:
Reuters: ‘Former Christian school student kills 3 children, 3 staff in Nashville shooting.’
The headline gives the misleading impression that the killer was a Christian rather than that the victims were.
Griswold suggests this more factual revision: “Transgender Killer Murders 3 Christian School Children, 3 Staff In Possible Hate Crime.”
This emendation would not sit well, however, with those on the left who wish to shape public opinion in favor of the current fashion in gender fluidity, so it's not likely that anything so blatantly factual would ever be considered.
Meanwhile, some in the media have been lucubrating, as they always do after these horrid massacres, over what those who perpetrate such crimes all have in common in order that their motivations might be better understood and such terrors more effectively forestalled in the future.
In the past all sorts of possibilities have been adduced: the shooters heretofore were usually male, often white, loners, disaffected, traumatized, alienated, and, of course, had easy access to weapons.
Some or all of this may be true, but there are two possible commonalities among mass killers I'd like to see researched but which I have little confidence the progressive media would be interested in pursuing.
I suspect, but don't claim to know, that almost all of the mass shooters, especially the younger ones, have, or had, either a terrible relationship with their father or no relationship with him at all.
I also suspect, but don't claim to have statistical evidence, that these deranged individuals have or had a terrible relationship, or no relationship at all, with God.
For someone embittered toward their father, either earthly or heavenly, or both, it's easy to devalue human life. They see no objective reason to think that a life is precious nor to think that there's any ultimate accountability for what they do.
With no hope that their spiritually empty lives have a meaningful future, in this life or the next, and seething with resentment and anger, they vent their hatreds on others, often those who are most vulnerable. Children, after all, make easy targets, and their violent deaths are guaranteed to maximize pain in their families and communities.
I'd love to read the statistics on these commonalities if anyone has done the digging, but I rather doubt anyone has. It's not the sort of thing that most of our betters in elite circles care to think about, much less investigate. The results might be too unsettling for a secular society that has come to accept, and even celebrate, the disintegration of the family and religious faith.
Nevertheless, we reap what we sow.
