Tucker: Following Texas school shooting and Buffalo tragedy, leaders should ask this question

In the past 10 days, two separate teenage boys have committed horrifying massacres in public places. On May 14th, 18-year-old Payton Gendron murdered ten shoppers in a grocery store in Buffalo and then yesterday, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos killed 19 small children and two teachers at an elementary school in Texas.  

Both Gendron and Ramos were very obviously mentally ill. The people around them knew that. Both killers had told other people they planned to commit a mass shooting and then they did. So, what can we learn from this? Well, the first most obvious answer is that the system in place didn’t work. Gendron’s teacher sent him to a mental hospital for evaluation. They knew he was a threat. They tried their best. He committed a massacre anyway. So, we know for a fact that what we’re doing isn’t working, but we should also be honest enough to acknowledge that it’s very hard to know what to do instead.  

Despite what you may have heard, the problem isn’t that we don’t care enough. There’s not a person in this country who was not horrified by the sight of murdered children. It’s the worst thing, and everybody thinks that. The problem is that the human mind is much more complex and harder to control than we like to admit.  

A person who is intent on committing violence is very hard to stop under any circumstances. An act of Congress isn’t going to do it, neither will gun control. There are more guns in this country than there are people. There always have been. However you feel about that fact, you can acknowledge that we will never get rid of all of those guns. The Constitution prohibits that, and you would set off a civil war if you tried to do it.  

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