Despite the furor over the mass shooting in Buffalo last week, there has been relatively little information concerning the family of the shooter. This has also been true of most of the mass shootings that have occurred in the US, dating back to Columbine in the early 1990's.
The media treats the shooters as fully formed distillations of evil. They have seemingly been radicalized by online memes and bogus theories like the "Great Replacement" supposedly taking place across the country. Easy access to firearms and voila, a fairly normal teen is turned into a wide-eyed killer who carefully researches targets 200 miles from his home.
But who raises a mass shooter? I'm sure his middle class parents have cute baby pictures followed by little league, youth soccer and many other activities memorialized on Facebook or other social media. I'm reasonably sure they did not direct their son to far right websites where he learned how to modify an assault rifle to shoot even more bullets than it was designed to do. Perhaps, however, Fox News was the default news source at the Gendron household. Like a gateway drug, the toxic mix of right wing propaganda and paranoia masquerading as news can warp young minds. Did his parents explain Tucker Carlson is merely an entertainer whose grip on truth is ephemeral at best?
Who are these people and what are they doing to our country?
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