Control: Bad Guys…
It’s a simple quote from the movie Kick-Ass but it’s completely true: I, Dalton Lewis, am amazed by a simple fact: superheroes aren’t real but supervillains are. Think about it. No one wears a ridiculous costume and fights countless bad guys. Not one person becomes a celebrity by stopping bad guys and saving the day consistently. Not one. Bad guys, however, are common.
A gunman killed nineteen children and two adults — at least — in Uvalde, Texas, in May of 2022. Salvador Ramos, an eighteen-year-old who had barely finished high school, bought two rifles and posted pictures of them on Facebook. He then posted on the internet that he’s shoot an elementary school. Then he shot his grandmother, with whom he was living, and then he went to an elementary school and killed children between eight and ten years old. I cannot describe a fictional character more evil than this person. He killed twenty-one people in a barrage of firepower.
He barricaded himself inside one classroom. The authorities stopped him after he shot almost everyone in said classroom, and authorities aren’t superheroes. I’m sorry — they’re not. They sometimes do great things but are sometimes racist and inefficient and answer to a government that sometimes has agendas. I know — I’m not expected to say that. Well, it’s true. The government is sometimes corrupt and debased and against some of its citizens.
Texas has had eight mass shootings in thirteen years. This has become a real and prevalent American phenomenon: people shoot up places and kill as many people as possible, not expecting to live through the battle. I remember when I was in Japan and they covered the Columbine massacre in Japan on Japanese news. They don’t really let very many people carry guns in Japan so they don’t have mass shootings — at least they didn’t at the time. I don’t know about now.
He walked into a school classroom and barricaded himself into there with children. These children were between eight and ten years old. They didn’t have any way to defend themselves. This is murder, brutal, uncaring, terrible murder, murder of people who can’t defend themselves. Does this make him feel bigger, stronger? This is sick. Killing children is sick.
Terry, a friend of mine, is a veteran. He knows how to fight. He wouldn’t have any trouble killing this guy. It’s just — listen to me here — the bad guys victimize the rest of us, those of us who don’t fight. Like me — I don’t fight. I don’t believe in committing acts of violence towards other people. I don’t like the idea of hurting someone — and yet I write about stopping bad guys in my fiction all the time. Irony.
Now all the adults argue and have meetings and talk about it and pretend that they’re doing something about it. I don’t know that they are stopping any of this with their talking. The fundamental problem — unhappy men, especially young men — isn’t going away anytime soon. There are so many unhappy men whose lives haven’t gone their way. Until they are being helped to have a better life more of them will turn to crime. Nothing can be solved until this is addressed.
Thanks, and take care, friends.
P.S. My novel, A.R.T.S.: At-Risk Teen Supers, is available for free for the next four days. Free! Check it out.
