How to Build a Cluster Bomb in 18 Years
RALPH E. ENLOW JR.
Our cultural consciousness has been saturated of late with reports of mass shootings. One after another, these atrocities cascade across our media landscape eliciting an epidemic mixture of desperation, outrage, and frantic demands for legislative intervention. In particular, the killing of 21 and wounding of 18, the vast majority of them children, at Robb Elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, has been accompanied by revelations of astonishing and exasperating institutional leadership failures among local school and law enforcement authorities. Ironically, as polls inform us that public confidence in American political and civic institutions craters to all-time lows, those very institutions seem more and more to be what the public has fixed its frantic hopes upon.
Both conventional and social media outlets have erupted anew as an 80-page investigative report issued by a Texas legislative commission was first leaked and then officially published. Concurrently, video footage and photo compilations portraying protracted confusion and infuriating paralysis among a massive assemblage of 376 local, state, and federal law enforcement officers became available for viewing. The report’s findings have been summarized in lurid headlines and breathless sound bites almost exclusively focused on personal and institutional failures on the part of law enforcement and school personnel.
Tired and suspicious of the tawdriness, I took the time to read the investigative report. I found it to be exemplary in its diligent pursuit of the facts through extensive interviews and meticulous documentation. The report seeks diligently to avoid scapegoating and sensationalism. It is careful to emphasize that although there were indeed egregious failures by various institutional authorities, “there is no one to whom we can attribute malice or ill motives.” Interestingly—tellingly—however, the report’s executive summary (unlike the body of the report) lends itself to the prevailing cultural narrative that a tragedy such as the Uvalde massacre could have been prevented—or at least substantially mitigated—primarily through more effective public institutions. The gist of the common narrative invariably goes like this: “If only our laws, our schools, and our law enforcement professionals worked properly, this would not have happened.”
But a careful reading of the legislative committee’s investigative report tells a much more sobering story—one that has been, at best, largely ignored and, at worst, suppressed in most analyses. Truthfully, the Uvalde massacre was at least 18 years in the making.
The report asserts that the Robb Elementary School massacre has a single villain—the 18-year-old young man they designate as “the attacker” in order to deny the perpetrator the notoriety he desperately sought. I appreciate and agree with the committee’s refusal to identify “the attacker” by name. But as the report makes abundantly clear, while there was a single attacker, there are many persons who share culpability for the Uvalde massacre. Failure to reckon with the culpability of those who inexorably influenced the attacker over the course of his 18-year life, in my opinion, distorts the nature of the atrocity and will defeat attempts to prevent future such incidents. Put simply, this tragedy should call our fellow citizens and those of us who serve in Christian education to a sober spiritual and cultural reckoning.
The legislative committee devotes ten of the 66 pages comprising the body of its report to detailed information about the attacker’s family of origin, early life, schooling, social development and peer interactions, internet gaming immersion, media consumption, and social media posts. The attacker is undeniably a monster, but he is a monster collectively fashioned by a heartbreaking litany of dystopian developmental horrors. Born out of wedlock to an absentee father and chronic drug-using mother, his upbringing was one of dislocation and abuse. Already an at-risk student in his early elementary years, a speech impediment made him the target of relentless peer bullying over the course of his entire turbulent and tortured school career. Apparently, his fourth-grade experience—in the very Robb Elementary School classroom on which he focused the majority of his violent rampage—marked an especially dark embarkation point in his descent into madness.
Parallel and mutually reinforcing patterns of lagging educational and developmental progress, truancy, and merciless peer ridicule persisted unabated throughout middle and high school without effective family or educator intervention. Ultimately, peers cruelly, cravenly and, prophetically it turns out, nicknamed the young man “Active Shooter.” For months, members of his dysfunctional family and social networks failed to recognize, heed, mitigate, and refer to authorities the attacker’s increasingly ominous and explicit disclosures that he was committed to perpetrating mass violence. The interventional delay comprises not a mere 77 minutes following the attacker’s classroom invasion, it extended to months and years of cowardly, dare I say, cruel complacency.
The obsession over institutional failures in connection with the attack itself leaves the impression that we should look primarily or exclusively to the event’s immediate surroundings in order to identify causes, culpabilities, and remedies. The reality is not only far more complex but far more concerning. Simply put, our society has sown to the wind and we are reaping the whirlwind. The attacker’s family pathology was less an aberration than we might think. Not all family breakdown produces such grotesque consequences, but to ignore the contributory impact of the attacker’s tragically broken family is to delude ourselves. In an age where 40% of children are born out of wedlock and less than 60% grow up in stable, two-parent families, is it not a marvel that we experience relatively few mass shootings?
Of equal concern is what the report exposes regarding the craven cruelty of many of the attacker’s fellow students and the depravity of the social media climate in which he was immersed. I cringe to contemplate that some of the very peers who mercilessly tormented that young man not only have failed to reckon with their culpability in this atrocity but also that, arrogant and unrepentant, many may later emerge as Uvalde’s future professional, business, and civic community pillars.
What Peter Berger aptly termed our “sacred canopy” is not merely somewhat threadbare, it is utterly torn and tattered. Is not this rending at least as consequential an explanation for the Uvalde tragedy — and does it not require at least as much of our collective self-examination and correction — as the failure of our educational and law enforcement institutions?
Uvalde and the proliferation of similar events should deepen our resolve that the Christian education we proffer and the gospel-saturated ecclesial and social vision we espouse can help to repair our crumbling institutions, beginning with the family. Accordingly, we must insist — regardless of modality — on delivering education that is marked by its collective, mutually edifying, and formational characteristics that far exceeds the merely individual, isolating, and transactional instructional stock that I fear has become the norm. Otherwise, how will we escape complicity in the 18-year bomb making enterprise?
Ralph P. Enlow Jr. serves as chair of the IACE Board of Directors. He is the former president of the Association for Biblical Higher Education.