Another Disgruntled Teen, Another Debate

In the coming days, the last note of 19-year-old Robert Dawkins wrote prior to his shooting in an Omaha mall will be scrutinized and discussed ad naseum. There will be experts on TV discussing how there were signs of this tragedy in the making and that his family, friends and teachers ignored them. There'll be discussions on how to prevent becoming a victim of random shootings and violence during this shopping season. And there will be renewed discussions on gun control. From the early reports coming out in the news media, Hawkins had recently been dumped by his girlfriend, he had lost his job and had a long history of emotional, alcohol and drug problems. His family had already kicked him out of their house and now he was living with a friend's family who were trying to help him. Unfortunately their efforts were for naught when Hawkins stole an AK-47 assault rifle and entered a mall in Omaha and began shooting anything he could see. His shooting resulted in 6 deaths and injuries and finally, as with most of these types of incidents, it ended with Hawkins taking his own life.

What I often fail to understand in these situations is why shooters like Hawkins choose to kill others before taking their own life? If you are suicidal that means you're interested in taking your own life, so then why become homicidal before taking the suicidal step? I'm not trying to make light of the situation but I'm trying to understand why that is. Do a bit of research and you'll find that in the majority of the cases (if not all) the killers eventually turn their gun on themselves and kill themselves. No more than two days have passed since this tragedy and already the discussion has been renewed. Groups are calling for increased awareness and treatment of teen depression and substance abuse. Others are calling for an end to assault weapon possession. Still others are calling for increased security at malls during this busy season.

Adding security to a mall is not going to solve much. If you look at it from a practical standpoint, unless you have daily or semi-daily attacks going on or know of customers regularly bringing in firearms and weapons into a mall, why beef up security or have a SWAT team standing by in the mall all the time for rare emergencies? Remember Seong Hui Cho? No? He was the shooter at Virginia Tech (who also took his own life at the end). After his shooting spree people wondered whether campus police and state police needed to be beefed up. They already had armed police forces on campus but when you have an unexpected or sudden shooting breakout like Hawkins or Cho, an entire army isn't going to help unless they can prevent someone in this sort of mental state from even getting close to hurting someone. Unfortunately, it's not a practical reality.

So how can we prevent something like this from happening? Well this brings up the next big debate that is all over the airwaves and that's the banning of assault weapons and guns. Now this is something that has been discussed probably since the passage of the Constitution way back when. The gun lobby won't let this type of ban take place simply because they argue that by allowing people the right to bear arms, they can then defend themselves. Others argue that if guns were banned completely then they wouldn't be able to keep guns for recreational purposes. I can understand wanting to keep a gun in order to defend yourself or for hunting season but do people really need assault rifles to defend their home or hunt geese? I mean it isn't as if we're living in a war zone despite what some rhetoric would have you believe. If you're interested in defending yourself, a handgun should suffice shouldn't it? They have simpler hunting rifles too don't they? Do we really need people out there with rifles designed by the Soviet army for their soldiers when hunting geese? Last I heard they don't carry weapons other than their droppings.

Still, people will argue that it's their 'God-given right' to have a gun and all while others will argue the opposite. In the end, the debate comes full circle when the gun lobby will declare that had it been legal to carry firearms, no one but Hawkins would have been killed because someone would have shot him first because in a gun lobbyists world, we all would be packing heat. People interested in carrying or possessing guns like AK-47 or similar weapons should join up with the military and head over to Iraq or Afghanistan. There are plenty of other AK-47 owners over there and they are more than willing to join you in shooting them. You'll probably just have to check what direction they're firing in before jumping for joy.

What about helping the person? I am not a psychologist so I can't speak intelligently about what could or should have been done to detect and possibly prevent Hawkins from reaching this boiling point. Perhaps his depression over his losing his girlfriend was more than he could bear. But why was that? Was he so starved for affection due to the loss of his family that he felt that the loss of his girlfriend was the last straw? It wasn't as if he was completely on his own. He was staying with a friend's family who attempted to cheer him up and keep him on the proper path but it seems that perhaps it wasn't enough. It is so subjective a topic as to whether or not medicine or any other form of treatment could have prevented this. I guess it basically boils down to the fact that someone who is so determined to carry out a course of action will go to any and all extremes to achieve it. If not? Then it will be a small victory for the rest of us.

I don't know how future tragedies of this sort could be prevented. Unfortunately with so much going against us in the fight to prevent it, we are not making much ground in the right direction. For a time this topic will be front and center. People will be looking to put the blame whether it's on the gun lobby, mall security firms or video game developers. Whatever the case, it will only be there for a little while. For those of us not directly affected by the shooting at the mall, we'll listen to the stories on the news and then forget about it when the next big news item comes along. We'll argue about it for sometime and then forget about it again until the next time someone takes a gun and decides to shoot up others before turning on himself. That's the real tragedy.