“Cool.”
That’s what the German girl said to her American friend, whom she would never meet in real life. They connected via social media. Distance was no bar to intimacy between the two, as the 18-year-old told her that he was going to shoot up an elementary school.
He kept his word about the school, but was hyperbolic when claiming he had shot his grandmother in the face. Absolutely no one was surprised.
He was nicknamed “school shooter.” Everybody knew that he was going to do it. His life reads like another chapter in the origin story of Arthur Fleck – more commonly known as “Joker” – only this monster was real.
On Sunday, a damning report was issued by the Investigative Committee on the Robb Elementary Shooting.
Three hundred and seventy-six heavily armed law enforcement personnel sat paralyzed for 75 minutes while 19 children and two teachers were destroyed by an AR-15 purchased on the shooter’s 18th birthday. They were comprised of an alphabet soup of federal, state, Uvalde County and local police. The images of militarized police – armed and armored for combat – utterly failing to protect and serve the children of their community document some of greatest collective acts of cowardice in American history. Their grotesque response constitutes a shocking and collective breach of duty, competence and courage that are peerless. They have crafted a perfect complement of images that create a bizarro and oppositional 2022 version of the once ubiquitous Iwo-Jima photo that told a story of heroism worth millions of words in one miraculous frame.