What is it about this photo that, in your interpretation, suggests the likelihood of the scenario you've presented?
My objective perception is that of a happy, healthy-looking boy holding a rifle in an appropriately safe, un-intimidating manner. The only impression it conveys to me is the boy probably will serve this Nation as a good soldier someday. I have no cause to expect that he might use that rifle to "shoot up a bunch of his classmates" and I have no legal right to make any such assumption without some specific reason.
Your impression is purely subjective and is predicated on some level of social hysteria resulting from a tragic incident in the recent past. But there is absolutely no reason to believe this boy might do something like that.
You know, maybe the government should hire you to walk the malls and parking lots to spot who the next mass murdering gunman will be.
Painful Memories for the Moms of Mass Killers "He did not give me any hint of what he would do"
This past week, it was the shooting at the Azana Spa in Brookfield, Wis., that triggered those flashbacks. There, Radcliffe Haughton Jr. reportedly shot seven women, three of them fatally, including his wife, before turning the gun on himself.
It didn’t take television crews long to reach the man’s distraught father, Radcliffe Haughton Sr., the following day. “All I can say is, I want to apologize to the people of Milwaukee who have been hurt,” Haughton Sr. told a reporter on Monday. “He did not give me any hint of what he would do.”
He did not give me any hint of what he would do.
Haughton Sr. appeared to be answering an implied question, one that’s asked either directly or indirectly of parents and other relatives every time such a tragedy unfolds—“Did you see this coming? Why didn’t you stop it?” It’s why, when Arlene Holmes told a reporter “You have the right person,” after her son allegedly went on a shooting rampage in Aurora, Colo., last summer, many assumed she was saying, “I knew it was him.” Holmes later clarified she was talking about herself, not her son.
Susan Klebold, mother of Columbine shooter Dylan Klebold, took 3,800 words to answer the question in a 2009 piece she penned for O Magazine titled, fittingly, “I will never know why.” The stepmother of Wade Michael Page, the shooter in the August killings at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis., told The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that she had “no idea” why the child who grew up “precious” became a mass murderer.
“He was the most peace-loving person in the world,” she said. So when she first heard the news, “I thought, ‘Surely he couldn’t do that. He’s too good-hearted. Too kind.’”