We have created these monsters

The impulse, or the urge, or the need, or the idea to shoot up a school or a parade or a supermarket doesn’t come from nowhere.  As we learn more about Robert E. “Bobby” Crimo, the 22 year old man who killed six and wounded more than 30 yesterday in Highland Park, Illinois, we are looking at a human pile of what passes for Americana at this sad point in our history. 

Crimo apparently played violent online video games.  Those games were designed and produced in this country by Americans, by us.

He posted rap videos online, calling himself “Awake the Rapper,” including videos that portrayed “depictions of mass murder,” according to NBC News, exploiting a wholly American musical form that emerged several decades ago from American culture, from us.

He posted frequently on 4chan and Discord message boards “that discussed graphic depictions of murder, suicide and death,” according to NBC.  “His most recent post to that message board came last week, when he posted a video of a beheading.” Those message boards didn’t spring up from nowhere.  They are an organic outgrowth of the free-for-all world of the internet that was invented and created and has been made possible by Americans and American companies, by us.

He posted frequent videos containing violent imagery on YouTube.  According to NBC, his most recent video “showed him in the aftermath of a school shooting…[and] ends with Crimo draping himself in an American flag.”  YouTube is another wholly American creation that has been exploited by other mass killers to spread hateful messages and imagery.  Not all of us post those videos and images, but the place where it happens is American, and we use it.  It’s ours.

NBC News also reports that another YouTube video posted by Crimo shows him in a throng of Trump supporters outside an airport cheering as the presidential motorcade passes.  At the end of the video, he turns the camera on himself to show his face.  A Twitter post by the shooter shows him draped in a Trump flag in 2021.  I hardly think it bears pointing out that millions of Americans, 74 million of us in fact, voted for Trump in 2020.  Crimo apparently worshiped a man worshipped by millions of us as well.

And now behind me as I write this, I can hear the voice of a resident of Highland Park asking how did someone become so angry, so bent on violence.  “He was just a little boy,” the woman told MSNBC.  So was Salvador Ramos, the killer of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas.  The Texas Tribune reported at the time of the shooting, “Young people who met the alleged gunman online said he had threatened to kidnap, rape or kill. But they said their reports were ignored and that his kind of angry misogyny was just ‘how online is.’”

Just how online is.

Payton S. Gendron was just a boy before he became the shooter in Buffalo who killed 10 at a Tops Supermarket.  He has been charged with first degree murder and second degree murder as a hate crime.  His hate of Black people didn’t spring in full flower from the ground or descend like rain from the sky.  His hate came from this country, from America, and it is shared by millions of American citizens, millions of us.

Earlier, I saw the mayor of Highland Park on the news.  Looking stricken, she said, "At some point this nation needs to have a conversation about these weekly events involving the murder of dozens of people with legally obtained guns."

The guns that have been used in every mass shooting this year, more than 300 shootings according to the Gun Violence Archive, are American guns.  They’re made in this country, sold in this country, the profits go into the bank accounts of Americans.  They are our guns.  They don’t belong to Germany, or Great Britain, or Japan.  They belong to us.  They are American guns.

As the mayor said, we need to have a conversation about the easily availability of these guns, all of which were legally purchased.

But we need to have another conversation that is just as important.  We need to have a conversation about ourselves, because these killers come from us, they are ours.  They are, as the saying goes, as American as apple pie.