The Fourth of July massacre in Highland Park, Illinois, produced much of the same national angst that these mass killings usually spawn.
There were calls from the left for tighter controls on guns, especially assault-style rifles toward which deranged killers such as Robert E. Crimo III tend to gravitate.
There was the typical counterargument from the right that mental illness, not guns, is the problem.
And neither side likes the social media cesspool that seems to be a trigger for a lot of these mass killings.
This is, though, not an either/or debate. There are too many firearms in this nation, and they’re too easy to acquire. There’s too little done to address the types of mental illness that can tip over to violence. And the Internet is a two-edged sword that is a wonder when it comes to communication but also provides numerous outlets where delusions and societal grievances can find validation.
None of these concerns and arguments stick in our craw as much as the incomprehensible decision of Crimo’s father to sponsor his son’s desire to acquire firearms.
Crimo, based on all of the reporting we’ve seen, was not one of these killers whose actions came as a shock. There weren’t just warning signs that he might kill innocent people. There was the equivalent of air raid sirens and flashing neon lights that no one could believably claimed they missed.
Crimo had been a troubled individual for several years. It got so bad that he threatened to kill himself and a few months later family members. He had collected a stockpile of knives.
Even if his father, Bob Crimo, didn’t know what his son was doing on the internet, he couldn’t have missed these other warnings. He chose to ignore them, or he attributed to them the most naive interpretations. In interviews after the massacre, when he was called to account for enabling his son’s acquisition of what became murder weapons, he described his son’s previous threats as a “childish outburst” and equated the knife collection to nothing more unusual than a collection of coins or baseball cards.
Maybe it’s too easy in hindsight to say that Robert Crimo had all the markings of a mass killer. But there’s no denying that firearms would be one of the last things he needed to have at his disposal, if for no other reason than his expression of suicidal thoughts. An AR-15 is hardly an appropriate way to pacify a disturbed individual.
Bob Crimo may not have broken any laws, but he definitely failed to exercise even the barest of good judgment. He may deny culpability for his son’s murderous actions, but few others will let the father off the hook.
