Two intriguing shootings happened this week, one in Texas at Joel Osteen’s Houston area Megachurch and the other in the New York Subway. Both shootings are likely to fade from the collective memory for different reasons.
The Bronx
As details began to emerge on the 1 killed 5 injured incident in the NY Subway, a sad old pattern took shape.
Two groups, verbal conflict, gun was flashed, shots fired. Criminals doing crime, territorial groups defending their egos. A tale literally as old as time. In gun control heavy New York it isn’t a thrilling success story for their policies on crime management and gun violence prevention.
On that note, I do have to add, California is still leading the nation in mass shootings with 7 and mass killings with 3.
Get bent, Newsom.
Houston/Lakewood
The Osteen Megachurch incident is also interesting in several respects.
First, I do hope the poor seven year old that the shooter brought as a human shield/cover/dissuasion recovers. No child so young could willingly and knowingly partake in a venture like the attack could have been on the Spanish language service that was about to begin. The boy appears to have been struck in the head during the gun fight and is identified as the woman’s son.
The RumINT around the event though has the corners of the internet ablaze, and we live in such cynical times the theories are… depressing. What we do know is the 36 year old woman, an interesting note as female shooters are rare but not unheard of, brought an AR or similar rifle and the five year old to the church, concealed, and attempted to attack the church service. Two off duty cops saw her raise the rifle and quickly shot and killed her. The boy was struck in the fire, likely unfortunately by the officers but at the fault of the shooter for bringing him.
“Palestine” has been confirmed by the authorities to have been written on the rifle, giving us some insight into motive. This indicates that the shooter had little expectation of survival, wanted to send a message with the recovered evidence, and lends credence to the child human shield tactic as getting a kid killed by hiding behind them is very Hamas brand.
Swift action by the off duty officers protecting the service stopped the shooter from killing many in a packed church where density could produce very high casualties if she had remained unopposed.
The rifle markings harken back to the Christchurch attack in New Zealand, the rumors of the shooter possibly being trans (due mostly to an alleged male alias name from a previous arrest) brings back memories of Nashville Tennessee, and attacks on places of worship call to mind many other events. The cynical nature and goodwill lost by authorities in recent years doesn’t help the discounting and dismissal of rumors any either.
Rumors aside, speculation laid down, and merely considering the facts as we know them… the nation and the world still remain in a state of heightened discontent and the pain points are factional. Many people are mad, many on edge, and they are at odds for different reasons. All of them tend to consider their reasons better than others reasons. This is a recipe for flare ups and those flare ups will be violent. That violence will cause injury and death, it will mostly be unjustified in the grand scale but justifiable to their particular faction and themselves.
Thoughts
Long gone is my personally held hope that the 21st Century would be a truly enlightened time. We’ve let exaggeration and hyperbole get away from us and let misconceptions become “personal truths”, all while pretending that if we pretend hard enough certain core mechanics of the human experience just won’t be.
We are sick of each others nonsense. We are sick of those in powers nonsense to a far greater degree. We are sick of facts being exaggerated into falsehoods to fit a preference. We are just sick and tired of so many things. That generates short tempers and aggressive, sometimes exaggeratedly so, reactions. Those actions and reactions hurt people.
We are already not an entirely rational species it well known. But the absurdity that we can pretend violence doesn’t need to exist in the first worldview while excusing it in certain underprivileged and strained factions where it is a currency is still mind-boggling.
I think the 2020’s are going to be their own brand of hostile. Roaring sure, but largely in anger and frustration.
