blips on the horror screen

Lost on something here.

BuzzFeed News first reported a YouTube user called “nikolas cruz” wrote “Im going to be a professional school shooter” in a comment posted last September on a video uploaded by a Mississippi bail bondsman.
It was not immediately clear why the FBI would not have been able to identify the author of the post if that username was, in fact, his real name.

The man is butchering the English language.  There is no such thing as “professional” school shooter — professional means that you’re getting paid for it.  Unless the kid has plans for a tell all book, or other means of monetizing his crime (and I imagine if we get that far from precedent, all moneys earned as he wails away in prison would through lawsuit go to the family’s victims), this doesn’t work.

Or maybe we’ve redefined the word?

Interesting to see a graph of school shootings (and term not as defined by the “Anytown club” which apps the number to 18, for as many as they can spot) — over the last two decades — broken up by town population.  I’m not sure what the graph is set out to prove, but I suppose it’s good a statistic of mindless productions as anything.

In other bits and pieces of our damning national psyche… I note this.

As the grandma snooping in on this boy’s journal gets feted by most everyone, the perhaps plausible perhaps not “Defense” is (for good and bad) all but ignored in the AP article and write ups.  An after thought. 
Public Defender Rachel Forde noted the gun and the grenade shells were legal to possess. She said the “musings and ventings” in O’Connor’s journal weren’t enough evidence to support a charge of attempted murder.

The dog won’t hunt, in the court of public opinion, and there appear to be enough thingies beyond this to corroborate horrors anyways.  And yet I pause for a second on it.  I once met someone who was expelled from the Oregon Public school system under a then-recently passed law for, as he said, “i “rumor and innuendo and venting private journal entries”.  And though I do have the thought for him that — well, clearly the public school system wasn’t much working for him and whatever alternate system he had once thrown out of school hopefully proceeded well enough… but I’m still left at that thought where you throw the threat assessment in the “reading his journals” and it doesn’t receive anything of a “wait one second” pause.

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