I know you’re supposed to be horrified by school shootings, and I am, but from the first description of Nikolas Cruz, my heart went out to him.

No one is justified in shooting up a school. The actions aren’t justified, but they seem tragically predictable. Given his circumstances, I believe he is a victim of Florida’s gun laws, and the NRA. Without easy access to assault rifles, he would just be a lonely outcast, failed by his parents, his school district, and the local police department.

Here’s an interview with a neighbor:

“He had emotional problems and I believe he was diagnosed with autism,” Mr. Gold said of Nikolas Cruz. “He had trouble controlling his temper. He broke things. He would do that sometimes at our house when he lost his temper. But he was always very apologetic afterwards.”

“He would sometimes be hitting his head and covering his ears. One time, I sent him home because he was misbehaving at our house and he took a golf club and smashed one of my trailers.”

He said that Mr. Cruz at one point had gone to a school for students with special needs. “Kids were really picking on him and would gang up on him and beat him up a little,” Mr. Gold said. “They ostracized him. He didn’t have many friends.”

Nikolas was adopted at 2 years old. His father died when he was six.  As a child, “Nikolas was moody, prone to an explosive temper and at times seemed to delight in antagonizing others.” People began to avoid him. In school, kids started calling him crazy. He played with his fingers and talked to himself. As he grew older, his mother often called the cops to reprimand him for his outbursts.

Let me stop here and say, HELLO, SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS? HOW ABOUT SOME INTERVENTION? HOW ABOUT SOME BEHAVIORISTS? HOW ABOUT SOME SOCIAL SKILLS CLASSES? HOW ABOUT A CHILD PSYCHIATRIST AND SOME MEDICATION FOR ANXIETY OR MOOD SWINGS?

Instead, Nikolas went to a nice, wonderful, gigantic high school where he could be shunned and act out with weird talk about knives and weapons. The nice wonderful school expelled him because he just wasn’t right in the head. Here’s what a student at the nice school said about Nikolas:

“He was definitely not accepted at our school socially. People saw him as someone who was different than the normal people at our school,” Parodie added.

Douglas High has a place students call “the Emo Gazebo,” he said. “That’s where all the kids that are considered weird or not accepted sat. Kids at the Emo Gazebo didn’t even accept him there. He was just an outcast… He didn’t have any friends.”

“Most kids ignored him at school. They pushed him off to the side as if he was garbage. He screamed in class one time. He was upset and just started yelling at the teacher. The teacher was trying to help him and he just took it the wrong way,” Parodie continued.

Meanwhile, his Instagram is full of guns and weapons. Right in the open for all to see. He is obsessed with them. He comments on someone’s video that he wants to be a “professional school shooter.” He uses his real name!

In November, his mom suddenly died of pneumonia, leaving him alone with no support system. A sympathetic family takes him in. But he is devastated by the loss of his mom, and very depressed.

You know what happened next. Now he’s on suicide watch. His lawyer says he is remorseful and distraught.

I have known families with troubled kids, kids who have conduct disorders along with autism, kids who flip out and can’t manage their impulses. Often, thee kids are sent to residential schools for intensive therapy. And often, they can move back home, more in control and aware of boundaries and consequences.

A few years ago, I had a new neighbor, who had just divorced a very famous movie director. She confided that their son was at a residential school due to his violent outbursts. She loved her boy but was afraid of him. His diagnosis was autism, but he may have been bi-polar as well. Time passed and I saw the kid at the Oscars with his famous dad, looking nicely groomed and very happy.

Poor Nikolas didn’t have a famous rich dad. That’s his crime.

The rest is on the fucking NRA and their flunkies in congress. Thoughts and prayers to those bastards.

For those of you who use ‘social media,’ did you notice how quickly concern for the dead lion evoked angry complaints that ‘black lives matter?’

People weren’t done mourning for whoever they were mourning for and they resented the outrage about the lion. Then some geniuses wrote think-pieces suggesting that it’s not an either/or situation: We could be upset about black lives AND lions.

Me, I don’t know what to feel upset about, or rather, what to put at the top of my list. There is just too much going on.

Mass shootings, police shootings, dead lions, Donald Trump, dead Palestinian baby, starving children in Yemen, transgender teen bullying, more riots in Ferguson, and a little hippo being mauled to death (Daily Mail online, don’t look!)

I couldn’t even feel a thing for the latest movie theater episode, except to feel sorry for Amy Schumer. Am I broken?

I don’t understand why the poor Palestinian baby is worth more discussion that the dying refugees in Yemen, complete with malnourished babies who look like tiny skeletons.

And while we’re on the subject, I was unable to be horrified at Planned Parenthood for marketing fetus organs. If someone wants to abort a fetus, why can’t it be used to promote life elsewhere? Because ‘life begins at conception?’ Why do Americans care so much more about the unborn than the born?

Tonight, there is a woman out on the cliffs near my house, deciding whether to jump. There are helicopters and firetrucks and lots of commotion. I would personally go out to talk to her if I were allowed to. Meanwhile, people on our local community Facebook page are sending their prayers or complaining about the noise. A couple of people want her to jump and get it over with.

I’ll bet you anything that those people are beside themselves about the fucking lion.

Let’s say your dad is a tattooed bully with pierced nipples who had a nasty divorce from your mom before you were even born, and later leaves you with his new wife four days a week.

Let’s say you changed schools six times before you dropped out after repeating ninth grade. Your dad still fights with your mom about visitation, his second wife can’t stand the abuse and finally leaves after dad beats her up.

You’re frail and weird looking and ‘painfully shy’, and you don’t have friends so you spend a lot of time in your room at your computer. No one pays much attention to you until you get kicked out of the local mall for acting strange and the cops find your Suboxone, a drug for opiate users trying to get clean.

Your sister plans her wedding but you’re not invited. She’s registered at Kohl’s.

You’re just an angry little shit with a bad haircut and probably some kind of brain damage from drugs or trauma, and you form some idiotic sub-KKK philosophy just to have someone to despise more than you despise yourself. You take a bunch of stupid pictures of yourself in your room with your Confederate flag, glaring like Robert Di Niro in Taxi Driver only worse.

Why the fuck would someone let you have a gun??

That made all the difference: You were just a little shit but now you’re a monster.

When I told [a family member] that 26 kids from Sandy Hook elementary school were going to sing at the Super Bowl, he was surprised and disgusted. I asked rhetorically why the survivors from the Aurora movie theater hadn’t been invited. He answered, “Because they’re not cute, and it would be harder to exploit a large group of them.”

He really gets it. Why don’t all Americans get it?

I’m tired of Sandy Hook grief porn. I don’t want to wait around for the Sandy Hook lego set and the Sandy Hook Happy Meal.  I have always been in favor of gun regulations and I’ve signed a million petitions urging legislators to stand up to the NRA. I didn’t allow my kids to have toy guns and and I have no regrets about it.

I wish that people could think about gun crime in America without needing to invoke a specific incident that then eclipses the real every dayness of homicide and suicide death by guns. You could fill the Super Dome with the people killed by guns in Chicago alone.

There were an average of 85 gun deaths each day in 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including two accidents, 53 suicides and 30 homicides.

If Americans needed a good cry before the Super Bowl, they should have been forced to look at some paralyzed veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe the lights went out during the game because god is disgusted, too.

While I’m at it, I’d like to thank our media for showing us only that one photoshopped picture of Adam Lanza with the huge chin and the bugged-out eyes, instead of the one above that depicts a regular human boy with bad skin and a sad little smile.

Watching the news tonight, I am struck by the word “evil” in reference to the shootings in Connecticut.

A disturbed 20 year old young man who lives with his mother, has no friends, hasn’t spoken to his older brother for two years and is remembered only for his nervousness and inability to fit in….that is not evil. I see no possible evil in this tormented soul.

A mother who hoards firearms and leaves them around her house, now that might be evil, since no one could be so astoundingly careless and stupid.

I am dreading the revelations to come.

What an intelligent, eloquent woman.   The anti-Palin, one might say.

Unearthen is a company that makes jewelry out of empty bullets. Each crystal is chosen for its “distinct qualities” and the stone with “the right properties for your needs will inherently attract you.”

This could be why these necklaces don’t attract me: I don’t need to have a bullet, either around my neck or lodged in my skull.

The medium sized bullet necklace (9mm, .38 SPECIAL, .40 S+W, .44 CALIBER, and .45 AUTO) will cost you around $400.

When I first saw these necklaces on some shopping website, I was not impressed. The whole idea seemed kind of pseudo-avant garde and lame, like wearing a silver razor blade or coke spoon on a chain.

Now, I feel more strongly.

A few nights ago, a Loved One was dropping me off at my house, early in the evening. I opened my door and walked inside. I was startled by the sound of shouting in the street. Outside, a figure I could barely make out in the darkness was screaming at my Loved One’s car, “Ima fuck you up, motherfucker!” The voice sounded unhinged with rage.

My Loved One was making a U-turn in the street, evidently impeding the speed of the gangsta and his female companion. I heard the girl screaming something plaintive, like “Stop it, stop it!”, trying to talk the guy down.

I instinctively ran down my steps, and yelled “No no no! What’s the matter?!” hoping to placate the gangsta. As my LO’s car sped away, the guy took a step toward me and screamed, “Homie didn’t get out of my fucking way! Why don’t you shut the fuck up, you stupid fucking bitch!”

I turned and ran inside and locked my door. I heard an engine start up, and the girl’s hysterical laughter.

I called my LO, who was glad the cracked-out guy hadn’t followed his car. He told me that the girl was actually yelling “Put it away, put it away!”, not Stop it.

My mind keeps wanting to go back and complete the scene with an alternate ending, an ending where one of us gets shot by a crazy gangsta for no reason at all.

I don’t want to see any guns, ever. And I don’t want to see bullets or death being glamorized. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with people who oppose better gun control. But they better not make any U-turns.