Clarence Page: It’s hard to not lose hope over mass shootings

I’m really getting tired of writing about mass shootings.

I’m not alone in my weariness. Back in the final summer of Barack Obama’s presidency, he sounded the same weary tune in 2015 following the shooting at an Oregon community college.

“Somehow this has become routine,” he said. “The reporting has become routine. My response here, from this podium, has become routine.”

But, alas, it had not become too routine for him to have to do it at least 14 times in his two terms in office.

That same sense of gloom came to my mind Monday after a young man opened fire at the Highland Park Independence Day parade, killing at least seven people and wounding more than 30 others.

Unlike Chicago to the south, where 71 people were shot, at least eight fatally, over the holiday weekend, killings are very rare in Highland Park, the sort of suburb where people move to flee big-city problems — if they can afford it.

As people lamented how “you don’t expect this sort of thing” in Chicago’s affluent north suburbs, I was reminded grimly of the last time I heard those sentiments — back in 1988, when a mentally ill Laurie Dann fatally shot an 8-year-old boy and wounded several other children in a Winnetka elementary school.

On Monday, Robert E. Crimo III used a high-powered rifle he purchased legally in the state and left at the crime scene, authorities said. More firepower than Dann had led to more casualties — less than two weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it must be more difficult for states to place restrictions on guns.

Setbacks like that help explain why I have grown exceedingly weary of writing about mass shootings and the need to develop a sane national gun-safety policy.

Not that we haven’t seen any progress at all. Late last month, President Joe Biden signed into law the first major gun safety legislation to be passed by Congress in nearly 30 years. The measure came just over a month after a mass shooting at a Texas elementary school left 19 children and two adults dead, an attack that came 10 days after a racist mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket led to the deaths of 10 Black people.

“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.

____

(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)