Whenever there is an active shooter situation, especially when it involves younger people (whether teens or children), the question of who or what is to blame will inevitably come up.
And it’s a completely understandable question to hear. After all, when people are hurting, when they are aching because a young person died, they’re looking for answers. They’re looking to try to make sense of what happened.
Unfortunately, too often, all people hear are the cries of anti-2A zealots that “guns are to blame!” instead of the truth which is that people (the shooter, specifically) are to blame.
Having said that, though, people are helped along with doing terrible deeds by technology.
But it’s not firearms technology that is helping that along. It’s technology that most of us hold in our hands every day. Arika Herron writes,
As 17-year-old Oswin Ortiz Jr. lay outside his home in 2019, his father approached him and asked who had shot him.
– “All he could say was ‘Snapchat’ and pointed to his phone,” police wrote in charging documents for Joshua Grow, who eventually pleaded guilty in connection with Ortiz Jr.’s shooting and was sentenced to 40 years in prison.
– After Ortiz Jr. died, police officers went through his Snapchat account, where they found videos he took showing the THC he was trying to sell and messages setting up a sale with Grow, who was 18 at the time.
Why it matters: Deaths like Ortiz Jr.’s are far from rare. Since 2018, over one-third of the gun homicides involving Indianapolis youth for which prosecutors have brought charges have involved social media use, according to Marion County court documents.
Now, you may be wondering what, exactly, social media has to do with so much of the violence that youth are experiencing today. After all, if a clear answer about that can be found, then, maybe, we can find a way to reduce that violence (something that I think that we can all agree would be good). Again, from Herron:
Teenagers have used social media to set up drug deals that turned into robberies gone wrong. Trash talking has started online and ended in gunfire. Messages and videos have become clues for police to follow after the fact.
And that tells us the answer, if we’re willing to look for it.
The reason for violence in the first place is that too many people don’t value life, either their own or other people’s. And modern communication technology helps them to, basically, get into fights that much quicker and for those fights to escalate much more rapidly. To the point that they’re deadly.
But the problem isn’t guns.
The problem is that too many people aren’t being taught to respect others even if they disagree. They aren’t being taught that you can disagree without a physical altercation needing to happen. They aren’t being told that walking away from someone being a jerk is the better part of valor.
And that kind of teaching of character is what we need again if we want to see youth violence go down.
