Though a thousand oversimplified flame wars rage across Facebook, driven by fallacies and recalibrated semi-facts–though a thousand micro-attacks diffuse the adrenaline and cortisol we rightly feel in a world gone all wrong, linear answers like “Arm the teachers!” and “Destroy the guns!” are two sides of the same coin, really–two variants on the core lament of all our hearts, which is “MAKE. THIS. STOP.”

When my dad was a boy, he and his friends would leave their shotguns and rifles on the school bus in the mornings so that the bus driver could drop students off to go hunting in the woods after school.

When I was a kid, student parking lots were full of pickup trucks with rifle racks in the back windows.

These weren’t semi-automatic weapons, of course; but they were weapons capable of killing human beings.

The world felt different back then.

Yeah, there were isolated incidents. Two years after I was born, an honors student shot eleven people and killed three in a school in New York. When I was four, a student shot four in Missouri. Twelve were injured in ’84. Seventy-four were injured in Wyoming in ’86. Between, before, and after these incidents, there were dark stories long and complicated–horrors which unraveled in time pre-web, years when Florida felt far away.

But now we have an Internet that allows us to see it all real time, making the worst of human nature a “thing.” The celebrity of mass murder has become a potential high to the social outlier. It’s an identity. It’s an opportunity to become legendary.

Last night my daughter kept saying, “Students want to kill students now, Mom. It’s not just about weaponry; there’s something really wrong with people. There’s something wrong down in their hearts.”

And she’s right. Though a thousand oversimplified flame wars rage across Facebook, driven by fallacies and recalibrated semi-facts–though a thousand micro-attacks diffuse the adrenaline and cortisol we rightly feel in a world gone all wrong, linear answers like “Arm the teachers!” and “Destroy the guns!” are two sides of the same coin, really–two variants on the core lament of all our hearts, which is “MAKE. THIS. STOP.”

I want some magic wand, some spell to whisper, some “Bibbity-Bobbety-Boo” to make this nightmare end. But I live in a culture where people want to kill people, and when people want to kill, they will find a way to do it.

Teenagers especially. Teenagers always find a way to do what they want to do.

Teenagers find a way to have sex when they are grounded.

They find a way to drink when they are underage.

They find a way to sneak out of their rooms and into strip clubs.

They find a way to smoke pot when it’s illegal.

They drive too fast.

They make fake ID’s.

They hack into databases, and grade banks, and government websites.

The defiant teenage spirit cannot be bridled; it is liquid, and hot, and amphibious.

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