Blame the Buffalo Shooter’s Parents, Not Fox News
CLAY: Buck, I was saying… I kind of dove in to this shooter, this 18-year-old, and while everybody’s talking a lot about the blame and the blame seems to be almost entirely trying to be foisted upon the Republican Party and to Fox News and probably this radio program and all these other different places, can we talk some for just a sec about parental responsibility?
If your 18-year-old has severe mental health issues such that he is decapitating the family cat, you need to be paying incredible attention to what your kid is doing. And I say that as the father of three boys. I try to get my son’s phone and go through and look at the places that he is visiting online, and he may be smarter than me and be able to hide it, but this kid wrote a how many hundred-page manifesto on a computer? Hundreds of pages —
BUCK: Yeah, 180.
CLAY: — 180 pages. You are a parent and your psychologically unstable kid who’s decapitating the cat is on the internet writing 180-page manifesto and you know nothing about it? You know nothing about the choices that he’s making? And, by the way, he ended up acting out against all these innocent people in Buffalo, but he could have been acting out against your own family.
So, how in the world…? If you want to talk about parental responsibility, let’s talk about parental responsibility. So many of these shootings are directly related to parents looking the other way. These violent acts that are occurring are a perfect example of parental abdication, and this kid had all sorts of mental health issues. In reading, in appears that both his parents are civil engineers.
So, they certainly had the resources to be able to take care of this kid in some way, and instead they’re letting this kid spend all of his time in the cesspool of the internet, polluting what was already a broken mind to the point where he gets here, let’s talk about that. I don’t hardly hear anybody discussing it.
BUCK: He also in the manifesto says that he radicalized — he self-radicalized — during the covid lockdown.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: And there’s another — there’s a part of this. And, by the way, what I am not doing is saying this guy did this thing because of covid lockdowns. What I am saying is the amount of mass psychological damage that was done to society but specifically to young people from these completely inhumane, unnecessary lockdowns, school closures, and all the rest, that hurt tens of millions of people.
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: And in the outlier case of somebody who already clearly has a severe mental health issue, right? We’re not talking… We don’t even have great terminology. Psychopathy is what, any psychologist will tell you: Inability to feel for the pain of other people to care about the pain of other people. This kid’s clearly a true psychopath. No one — we say mental health issues it could be somebody who has a little bit of anxiety, right?
CLAY: Yeah, right.
BUCK: This is a severe mental health issue this kid has. But there was a lot of damage done all across society to a lot of people’s mental health, and in this case, you had somebody where there was already that combustible mix of he’s a psychopath, and now he’s sitting at home all day and just self-radicalizing even further.
CLAY: And I would just say to parents out there — and I know look. A lot of kids are smarter about using the internet and technology than parents are. But we have, for instance, a computer that the kid has to use in a public venue, right, in the house, where anybody could do this by at any point in time. And I’m not saying my kids are perfect by any stretch of the imagination. That’s why we have the computers out in the public here.
You gotta know where your kids are going online. Right? Because especially if your kid has severe mental health issues which this kid did and is even more sufferable to the dark forces, I would say, of the internet that could help to enable and encourage him to make this choice. And if he’s behaving violently like this, maybe don’t allow him to have easy access to weapons, either, if he’s living inside of your home.
Because if he’s willing to do this to someone at a Buffalo grocery store, it could have been easily been your own family, right? I mean, I just… If you want to talk… Everybody whose 18 or older is ultimately responsible for their own actions. That’s point number one. But if you want to say as part of point number two, what else was at play for an 18-year-old who was living at home? I just… (laughs)
Instead of focusing on Fox News and the media environment and the internet, how about we talk about these parents who failed on such an epic level that they allowed their kid to descend to this level of violence and were not able to remotely stop it, despite the fact that based on being civil engineers, Buck, they have to have some resources. It’s not as if they are… This kid was living in a no-parent household with nobody else around. He’s got two brothers, too.
BUCK: He was taken to the emergency room for a psych evaluation when he said he wanted to be a mass shooter, and so that also raises questions. You’re talking about parental responsibility.
CLAY: That came from the school, right? The school turned him in?
BUCK: That’s right. But what about the responsibility of the state here.
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: If you’re gonna discuss prevention or at least limiting the chances that something like this happen again in the future, any kind of mass shooting in the future, you would want to look at there were read flags, people saw them, there was action taken.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: It wasn’t enough. Well, what does that mean we should do going forward? And then you have conversations about involuntary commitment for psychiatric reasons. Those are also tough, thorny discussions. But that’s an… Banning AR-15s in a handful of states going into a midterm election, that’s not gonna do anything. So, Democrats are gonna just return to the same talking points as they always do.
