It didn’t take long after news broke of a shooting at a Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin before the usual suspects started calling for gun control.
This is normal after school shootings, particularly high-profile ones like what happened at Abundant Life Christian School. However, as per usual, those usual suspects were more than a little premature. After all, while the killer has been identified–and since she’d dead, we don’t have to say “alleged” or anything of the sort–there are still a lot of questions remaining.
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For example, how did she get the gun she used?
The pre-Christmas buzz and serene sense of safety at a Wisconsin private school were shattered when a student pulled out a gun and opened fire – killing two people, wounding six others and devastating a bewildered community.
Now, investigators are digging into how and why the 15-year-old shooter, identified as [killer’s name redacted], got the gun used to unleash terror at Abundant Life Christian School – traumatizing some 420 students from kindergarten to 12th grade.
Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes said Tuesday the motive for the shooting appears to have been a “combination of factors,” but declined to give more details.
“Some have asked if people were specifically targeted. Everyone was targeted in this incident, and everyone was put in equal danger,” he said.
The police chief previously told CNN that authorities are also investigating whether the shooter’s parents owned the gun.
“We also want to look at if the parents may have been negligent. And that’s a question that we’ll have to answer with our district attorney’s office,” Barnes said. “But at this time, that does not appear to be the case.”
Madison police are also working with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to find the origin of the gun.
“We have asked our partners with the ATF to expedite what’s called an ATF trace form to try and determine the origin of that weapon, who purchased it and how it got from a manufacturer all the way to the hands of a 15-year-old girl,” Barnes said. “These are questions that are going to take some time to answer.”
The motive might also take time to determine. The shooter, who also went by the name Samantha, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said.
Investigators are looking into online posts and a possible manifesto that might be linked to the shooter, the police chief said Tuesday.
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That’s interesting, in part because if the parents owned a gun, it would seem like a simple matter to ascertain.
Unfortunately, considering the prosecution of parents for the actions of other school shooters, I could see how the killer’s parents might be less than cooperative. Yet Chief Barnes says that doesn’t seem the case, which raises all kinds of questions.
If she got it from her parents–I believe the father is who she claimed she took it from in her possible manifesto–and they weren’t negligent, it’s a point that even if you try to secure your guns, kids can still figure out a way to access them.
If she got them via some other means, well, that will be an interesting development.
By now, we’ve all seen pictures of the killer. There’s no way she passed as 18, much less 21. That means there’s no set of circumstances where someone sold this girl a gun believing it to be a lawful transfer.
Of course, we don’t know if that happened or not. We don’t know much, which seems interesting to me considering how quickly we seem to know everything about every other school shooter in history within 15 minutes of them being identified, but it is what it is.
