To all the mid-late teen to early-mid twenties male erstwhile and potential mass shooters

Here is a theory (which won’t hurt you any more than life already has). Before the modern psycho-pharmaceutical industry rose from the ashes of upstaged psychiatrists and convinced all light-thinkers and true-believers that psychological problems are “chemical imbalances” and bad genes, researchers and clinicians understood that families produce disorder – such as schizophrenia – in their children. There would be subtle or hidden “crazymaking” influences in the parents’ own craziness or in their contradictory messages and injunctions. All through childhood, these influences would bear down, sending the young person’s mind into anxious, escapist, surreal places. A little girl watched her mother talking to the birds in the trees for hours. A boy would come home from school to see his mother staring in horror at the image of herself in the mirror. A teenager was demeaned for running out of gas when his father had knowingly sent him on an errand in a car with an empty tank. As time sailed on, these children would have slipped out of the stream. They would not grow. Their inner world would twist within itself, further persecuted by isolation, the myriad pressures of teenage life, the dim awareness of future mandatory maturity. It would be quite bad. And then, after years had been frayed and kneaded by mad fingers and his own fearful mentation, the adolescent would suddenly find himself staring, stunned, at the wide doorway of adulthood. This would feel impossible because it would be impossible. And crazy would happen (often after many sleepless nights and days).

I imagine that a parallel version of this is your story, but with desperate rage in place of desperate confusion. You had no escape to insanity, but escape was the only answer.

Picture all the negative and irrational words and other abuses you’ve experienced throughout your years. Or, your parents’ distance and disengagement from your life. Blame them or don’t blame them but still see the truth. Psychological growth and arrival – the journey to content maturity – is possible only when the right characters have been in place. But you’ve had none of these characters. As the doorway of adulthood rushes toward his face, the child sees his utter helplessness. That is, the failure of any help against pain along the way. Hurt, frustration and anger simplify to anger then expand to rage. Everything in the world seems an imposition, an enemy. Walls in your way, money that must be earned, days that are long. And life – the vitality of people or even animals that seems easy and happy – shows you your alien difference from it. You are the child that they don’t see, in an invisible prison the size of the past.

Your agony has been stifled. You can buy a rifle. Or you can rage for a long time to someone who understands you, collapse, cry for a long time. That’s how you deal.

A fusion sublime

is abreaction plus time.