What the Hell is Wrong with Us?
On Sunday in Shreveport, a father killed eight children ranging from ages three to 11. Seven of these children were his own. He also shot two women, one his wife and mother of five of his children. The other woman was the mother of his other two children who had placed the father on child support. The police said he killed his children in an “execution style” shooting
It started as an argument between the married couple at around 5:00 am that Sunday morning. They were due in Court the next day regarding their pending divorce. Somehow, that quickly careened into a killing spree with eight little children dead.
How the hell could this father do this? What was his state of mind that he could shoot his children. He wasted his whole family.
Relatives say he was struggling with mental health problems. Several days before, after he had been served with divorce papers, the father told his step-father that he wanted to kill himself, that he was dealing with “dark thoughts.” He had already been hospitalized for mental health issues just three months before. Still, neighbors said that just the night before, on Saturday night he was out in the yard with his children while they played. The neighbors waved at the father. The father waived back. Everything seemed normal.
Every minute in the United States, 32 people experience intimate partner violence also known as domestic abuse. That’s more than an average of one every other second. Count ten seconds. In just that briefest of time, six people have been attacked by a partner or former partner. Epidemic doesn’t begin to describe the problem.
What kind of a monster does it take to kill off your family, to kill off your children?
This father suffered from mental illness. No surprise there. There’s an argument that if you are willing to kill your children you are necessarily mentally ill. If A then B.
So what is normal in a situation like this? How are we to parse the homicidal fathers, willing to kill off their children, from the normal fathers who aren’t? In the Shreveport killings there were three, well known red flags: 1) the father was involved in a contentious divorce, 2) he expressed depressive thoughts and 3) he owned a gun. If you have those three conditions together, you should anticipate a much greater chance of a very bad result.
Actions speak louder than words. Always. Look to behaviors. Look to conduct. Make predictions based upon past performance.
A study found that people who live with a handgun owner, but don’t themselves own a gun, are nearly twice as likely to die by homicide. (https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M21-3762). Some studies say the non-gun owner is five times more likely to die by homicide. (https://giffords.org/lawcenter/gun-laws/policy-areas/who-can-have-a-gun/domestic-violence-firearms/ )
So, a significant tell would be whether there is a handgun in the house. It isn’t absolute but it is statistically significant. It seems to me that there is a logical argument that if you feel you have to have a gun to be safe but you know that having a gun makes your family members actually two to five times less safe, you would decide to not have a gun. That means that if you choose to have a gun with this statistic in mind, you just might be crazy.
I think everyone has a breaking point. At some point, with sufficient pressure, every last one of us would crack. The outside world burdens us with its sickening offering of constant pressures.
The economy right now is a friend to very few. Rising gas prices are the obvious challenge but the cost of groceries, clothing, and housing are too. If it is something that you need, odds are it is costing more. I read that the average first time home buyer is now around 40. If you started your family in your early 20’s (the norm when I was that age) the kids would almost be out of the house before you had a house to call your own. And then there’s the daily grind just to keep it!
Climate catastrophe is becoming an ever-present worry in more and more peoples’ awareness and considered consternation. Droughts, fires and floods, tornadoes and hurricanes, savage heat and bitter cold are increasingly bearing down on the planet and our species. Just last week scientists reported a higher than not likelihood that the North Atlantic Current (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, AMOC) would shut down by 2100. That sounds like a long way off except that the last few years we have available to stop this are passing right now. They run out by 2050. That our leaders are largely ignoring the cataclysm and that we are blithely participating and contributing to it only means that the sharp teeth of denial will bite us all the more deeply.
Political insanity brings a daily onslaught of pressure. From Federal occupation of U.S. cities to threats of genocidal annihilation of whole civilizations, there is no shortage of nearly apocalyptic threats. War today. Cease fire tomorrow.
Uncertainty and chaos wreaks havoc on everyone’s psyche. Everyone except for those who have figured out how to profit from it. The rest of us just suffer.
The pressures on us all are building and show no signs of retreating. This means that as time passes and pressures continue to build, more and more of us will break, will crack, will go off the deep end.
So add it all up. Contentious divorce, existing mental health issues, owning a gun, ever increasing economic, environmental and political pressures and the Shreveport massacre seems like just another day in the US of A. We should expect to see more, probably much more of extreme, once off the charts kind of conduct. We will get to the point where we think, “so, what else is new?”
Just like the gun enthusiast when confronted with the statistic that owning his gun makes his family far less safe, we have to confront ourselves with the critical question of why do we let this happen? And, if we don’t want this scenario to increasingly play out in our lives, what can we do, what should we be doing, to stop it?
The Shreveport children are dead. The red flags were all there. This father wasted his whole family. Our red flags are madly flapping in an increasingly violent wind every day. Just as certainly, we are wasting our whole family. What the hell is wrong with us?
Michael Manely
