What Made Ramos Kill?
WHAT MADE RAMOS KILL?
The public discussion of the Uvalde school shooting has devolved into the predictable. Beto O’Rourke, arguably the most amoral politician in America today, has done his obligatory grandstanding. The Democrats have trotted out their “ban guns” slogans. Conservatives have countered with calls for arming teachers and fortifying schools.
No one is discussing the real issue. What made Salvador Ramos kill? Why does modern America have angry young men obsessed with violence and death and murder? Why does this keep happening?
Humans are social animals. It is not just that they are born physically helpless and must be nurtured and cared for by others. We do almost nothing by instinct. Everything we are - in essence - is imparted to us by the social structure around us.
The most basic element of that social structure is the nuclear family, two parents, typically male and female raising a child. That process does not simply involve clothing and feeding and housing. In fact, the most important elements of that process involve the teaching of rules, values, and morals. A child who grows up without this instruction becomes a wild animal.
For decades in this country, we have effectively waged war on every element of this social fabric that binds us together. We have emphasized personal gratification and “fulfillment” above all else. Husbands and wives that encounter marital difficulties, which is to say all of them, are encouraged to destroy the marriage, consider children they may have together an afterthought, and march off in search of their own happiness. A child support check in the mail every month is considered the complete satisfaction of any parental obligation.
Getting married at all is increasingly optional at best. Impregnating a woman and bringing a child into this world is no reason to interrupt your quest for your own personal fulfillment. You “owe it to yourself” to do whatever makes you “happy.”
Being a “baby daddy” is the new norm.
Religion is increasingly branded the same as superstition. Moral equivalency is everywhere. There are no absolutes. Good and evil do not exist. It is all about what makes you feel good, right now, right here. The consequences ‘be damned’.
Our children are adrift in a sea of ambiguity. They are not disciplined. They are not loved. Such parents as they may have, are absent in every way imaginable. Our kids absorb lessons about what to do and what to think from increasingly ubiquitous electronic sources that tell young men to be thugs and young women to be whores.
Want to know what comes out of all this? Take a look at the life of Salvador Ramos. Ever since the shooting stopped in Uvalde there have been non-stop revelations about the horror that was his life.
Ramos’ father was absent physically and in every other way. His mother had a drug problem and was overwhelmed with an increasingly violent child. She eventually pawned him off on his grandparents who clearly were unable to compensate for the fact that the boy was spinning out of control.
Ramos was coming apart at the seams, and red warning lights were flashing everywhere. He cut his face up with a knife for “fun.” He talked about how much he enjoyed cutting himself. He was obsessed with guns and violence.
Ramos posted pictures of automatic weapons online. He posted videos online that showed him with guns and knives, or boxing and training for fights. He wore all black, grew out his hair, and walked around in combat boots. He posted video of him yelling obscenities at his mother. Law enforcement was called to his house to deal with his explosions.
Ramos demonstrated antagonism toward women. He was rude toward girls at work. He sent them inappropriate texts. He “joked” about how some women “deserved to be raped.” His behavior was so bizarre that he had the nickname “school shooter” online where he regularly joked about rape, kidnapping, and murder.
No one intervened. No one acted to control him or provide the structure Ramos so clearly needed. He was angry at his parents and at the world and he wanted to lash out in any way he could no matter how horrific.
Eventually, he found a way to force people to pay attention and to end his pain. A great many innocent people, most of them children, paid the price.
Ramos is in the news because school shootings are “sensational.” But our nation is filled with kids just like him.
At least nine people were killed and 50 others wounded over the Memorial Day weekend in Chicago. Take a cursory look at the victims and those arrested for the killings and you will see the predictable. They are, as they almost always are in our inner cities, young, black men raised in neighborhoods where the institution of marriage is largely extinct. They were lucky if they even knew who their fathers were.
They grew to adulthood, at least physically, without discipline and without love. They became man-children. They were effectively doomed from birth.
We are failing our children. We are putting ourselves, our personal gratification, and the pursuit of meaningless material possessions ahead of the only thing that really matters, the future. Amidst historically unprecedented levels of prosperity and wealth, our ancestors could only have dreamed of how we are condemning our children to emotional poverty and abandonment.
What made Ramos kill? The question should more properly be – who made Ramos kill?
We did.
>>"We did."
We were accessories, and share culpability on that basis.
The Cultural Marxists that have been purposely deconstructing our culture "did it." Everything from attacking the nuclear family (as you noted), to the wider culture. Up in to the 1960's television and movies presented positive portrayals of the nuclear family, and (most importantly for this discussion) of men, fathers and masculinity (and the ethos thereof).
So even kids in bad environments were exposed to positive role models, and some recognition that what they were experiencing was not the norm, and did not necessarily have to be that way.
Today even kids in (relatively) good environments are subjected to the opposite.