The ceremony of innocence
By 
What happens when somebody who suffers from paranoid delusions and has a history of violence can get easy access to an assault weapon and a bullet proof vest?
[T]he suspect’s 34-year-old brother, told The Daily Beast that authorities searched his house all night after the shooting.
Alissa said his brother was “very anti-social” and paranoid, adding that, in high school, he would describe “being chased, someone is behind him, someone is looking for him.”
“When he was having lunch with my sister in a restaurant, he said, ‘People are in the parking lot, they are looking for me.’ She went out, and there was no one. We didn’t know what was going on in his head,” Alissa said, admitting that he believes his brother is mentally ill. . .
“[It was] not at all a political statement, it’s mental illness,” Ali Aliwi Alissa told The Daily Beast. “The guy used to get bullied a lot in high school, he was like an outgoing kid but after he went to high school and got bullied a lot, he started becoming anti-social.”
Court records show Alissa has at least one previous run-in with the law, including one arrest after “cold cocking” a classmate in 2017. According to court documents first obtained by KDVR, Alissa punched a classmate in the head after he “had made fun of him and called him racial names weeks earlier.” The victim suffered bruising, swelling, and cuts to the head. Alissa pleaded guilty to an assault charge in relation to the incident in 2018.
An employee at Arvada West High School told The Daily Beast that Alissa had transferred into the school midway through his freshman year, and graduated in 2018.
The brother noted the family have been in Colorado for almost 20 years, and that they are “so sorry” for the victims.
Because this is America, instead of dealing with the actual issue — easy access to weapons of mass destruction — we’re going to get a bunch of thoughts and prayers, calls for the reinstitution of the death penalty, nativist hysteria about those violent Muslims-foreigners, much chin-scratching about how we “should” do more about treating mental illness, etc. etc.
And we can’t do anything about that actual issue because instead of getting rid of the filibuster we’ll make it marginally harder to employ, maybe, when we what should really do is get rid of the Senate, which is of course totally impossible because Jesus wrote the Constitution, especially the part that says that freedom means the freedom to own assault weapons.
The worst part of these shootings, except for the dead and their loved ones, and all the people who witnessed all this and are more or less permanently traumatized, is that the whole culture now has to be organized around the idea that some lunatic with an AR-15 may show up pretty much anywhere at any time. Hence tens of millions of schoolchildren are now regularly subjected to the obscenity of “active shooter drills,” because of Freedom and Jesus and the Constitution and all the other garbage we can’t get rid of, because our national history is a nightmare from which we are not even trying to awake.
Christ what a planet.