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The shooter in the Uvalde, Texas school massacre, Salvador Ramos, had numerous strikes against him. He came from a broken home, had an elevated interest in firearms–and access to them–and was a loner. Straight Arrow News contributor Ruben Navarrette has been thinking about his personal story in the context of the tragedy and had another thought about what contributed to Ramos’ rampage:
As the father of teenagers, I thought about my own kids and the grotesque and unnatural ritual of a parent bearing a child. As a Mexican-American, I thought about what it meant that Uvalde isn’t a Mexican town, but a Mexican-American one. It’s full of assimilated people like me, whose family like mine, on my mom’s side, has lived on this side of the border since the Southwest belonged to Mexico.
As someone who grew up in a small town–Sanger, California had 10,000 people, even fewer than the 16,000 in Uvalde–I thought about how you can’t hide in a place like that. But also how strong community ties can pull you through hell.
As a son of a retired cop, I thought about the failures of law enforcement and the tragedy of having 10-year-olds use their cell phones to call 911 with police bundling their response. In a recent development, Uvalde school police chief Pete Arredondo who has caught most of the blame, justified or not, has been suspended by the district pending a series of investigations into why it took police more than an hour to get past school doors that weren’t barricaded or even locked.
As someone in the political center, I thought about the extremes in the gun debate. The far left and the far right are worthless and always have been.
And finally, as a journalist and storyteller who lives on critical thinking, I thought about how we need to think not just about the easy things, but more importantly about the hard things like bullying.
Family and friends of the shooter Salvador Ramos say the 18-year-old was tormented for several years by bullying from classmates. Ramos had a stutter, and he was picked on repeatedly because of the speech impediment. It apparently caused anger, fueled social isolation, and destroyed his self esteem. Together with a broken home damaged by drug use, the bullying must also have created a deadly desire to reciprocate, to strike out and inflict pain on others and in fact, on the whole of society. Well, mission accomplished.
My wife, who is about to become a speech therapist, wonders why Ramos attacked a school full of innocent children. Maybe he saw those kids as living the happy childhoods that he never had. And he resented them for it.
Don’t get it twisted. Ramos is not the victim here. He did a monstrous thing. And he’s not the least bit sympathetic. But if Americans want to get past the politics, and understand the “why”, so we can stop replaying these horror films, we need to have zero tolerance for bullying and do everything we can to end it. Our children’s lives could depend on it.
