Clarence Page: It’s hard to not lose hope over mass shootings
“At a time when it seems impossible to get anything done in Washington,” Biden said, putting the best face on the measure, “we are doing something consequential.”
Sure, let’s be grateful for even small progress. The measure includes incentives for states to pass so-called red flag laws that allow groups to petition courts to remove weapons from people deemed a threat to themselves or others. That might have helped a lot in the Dann and Crimo cases, if someone could have — and would have — taken the necessary steps to remove the guns.
But on a deeper level, I am weary of the politics that have led the cause of sane gun policies to what looks increasingly like a losing fight, particularly with conservatives holding a 6-3 majority in the Supreme Court and Republicans, always friends of the gun lobby, expected to score big midterm election gains.
And, as we learn more about what led Highland Park shooting suspect Crimo, an amateur rapper who called himself “Awake” and reportedly left a trail of violent imagery on YouTube and Discord, the more we see storm clouds on the horizon for a troubling sector of disenchanted young men.
As much as I support free speech, which is a lot, it’s not hard to see how certain websites and message boards have become a cesspool of hate speech and “doomerism,” a popular label for nihilists who are extremely pessimistic or fatalistic about the state of the world as they try to find their place in it — or against it.
Think of a generation of Holden Caulfields out of J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye,” a long-running favorite among young readers, as I was once.
Whether Crimo belongs in that category or not, his allegedly murderous misadventures show how important it is for parents and others to keep an eye on the internet content that absorbs so much of their lives.
And as an old saying goes, when you see something, say something.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
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