Is the Nashville mass shooting a gun issue? A mental-health issue? Or is it something deeper? “It’s really important,” Adam Baldwin says, “that we figure out what the patterns are. Why do they keep going into schools?” he asks. “Obviously, they’re soft targets.” But what leads mass shooters to commit the acts in the first place? And is society making it worse rather than better?
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Welcome back to my VIP video series “The Amiable Skeptics,” featuring my friend Adam Baldwin! Adam is well-known for his long and storied Hollywood career, starting with My Bodyguard, and especially for his roles in Full Metal Jacket, Firefly, its film sequel Serenity, Chuck, and The Last Ship.
“There are patterns that are part of this,” I reply, “and you see them over and over again. There’s mental illness that plays into this. There are red flags that come up,” I continue, and those are already emerging in the Nashville shooter’s background. “This is the same thing in Uvalde, it’s the same thing in Parkland.”
That’s why we need complete transparency into the perp, Adam argues. Releasing her ‘manifesto’ would be a start, Adam argues, although I question whether the media will report on it fairly, if at all. Most of the mainstream media ignored Josselyn Berry’s endorsement of gun violence against “transphobes” from her perch as the press secretary of Arizona’s governor Katie Hobbs, at least until she resigned almost 48 hours later. (As of this morning, the New York Times still hasn’t covered it!)
What we really have to ask ourselves, I argue, is why we’re producing more violent mental illness, especially in young adults, the typical age range for these perps. The guns haven’t changed, but young adults have. Why? “We have been raising generation after generation of narcissists who think that the greatest good is completely subjective and only really measurable in themselves,” I argue, “and now we’re telling them that, oh you have the power to even transcend you know the physical world with your desire, and it doesn’t work.” Should we not expect that shattering disillusion to create mental-health issues and violent lashing out when reality finally arrives?
Adam and I have plenty more to say about this difficult topic. Be sure to watch it all, and join the conversation in the comments. Our next episode on Monday will focus on the border and a different form of progressive nihilism, so don’t miss it!
