"He was a very good shot," said Aaron Diener, co-member of the Army Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) marksmanship team supported by a grant from the National Rifle Association Foundation. "He had an AR-15 he talked about, and pistols he had shot... He would tell us, 'Oh, it was so fun to shoot this rifle' or 'It was so fun to shoot that.' It seemed almost therapeutic to him, the way he spoke about it."
Cruz was wearing a shirt with the JROTC logo when he was arrested Wednesday. Facebook blogger Eric Sapp suggests a "thought experiment":
..consider what the response would be if he had worn or displayed a pro-ISIS emblem or if he had been a former member of a jihad-oriented militia. Obviously, in this hypothetical scenario, he would be labeled a "radical Islamic terrorist." So, IF that sort of ascription of motivation would be sensible, and given that a part of his inspiration was, it appears, in fact the U.S. military, should he not be described as a U.S. Army-inspired terrorist?
"Mental illness" is a dubious explanation for anything. "Militarism" however is very much a factor in the mass killing of children, whether committed by hateful loners wielding assault rifles or by Presidents wielding drones.
It will take more than "thoughts and prayers" to reduce senseless gun violence. "We'll do that in church, but politicians must do their jobs," tweeted Richard Painter. But to really understand mass shootings in America, you can't just look at the question of guns; "you have to look more deeply at the character of the society that is shaping the people who are turning those guns on each other," writes a reader of Revolution Newspaper. We cannot, and should not, rely on gun control to solve the problem...
"What's needed--and what's possible--is a profound struggle to bring into being a society where the destructive social antagonisms between people are eliminated and in which there is an ethos of cooperation, of mutual recognition of people's humanity, an open-mindedness and curiosity proceeding from the world out."
In short, we need a revolution.
