LETTER FROM NEW YORK
"A fact of life." That's how JD Vance, Donald Trump's running mate in the November presidential election, described the massacre perpetrated by a 14-year-old in a Georgia high school on September 4, which claimed the lives of two students and two teachers. "I don’t like this. I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life. But if you’re, if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets," Vance said at a rally.
Immediately, Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, shot back on X: "School shootings are not just a fact of life. It doesn't have to be this way. We can take action to protect our children – and we will." Harris surprised viewers during her debate with Trump on September 10 by revealing that she was a gun owner.
When it comes to shootings, the situation in the US is appalling, as evidenced by the database compiled by Northeastern University (Boston) in partnership with the Associated Press and USA Today. There have been 604 mass killings resulting in 3,120 deaths since 2006, 234 deaths in the record year of 2019, and 131 since the start of 2024. Although "only" 14 school shootings have happened, they have made a major impact. Parents continue to feel a sense of dread as they send their children to participate in "active shooter drills" at school, where they rehearse what to do in the event of a gunman entering their classrooms.
Americans are increasingly refusing to accept these "facts of life." More and more often, when a teenager commits a massacre, their parents are arrested. When 14-year-old Colt Gray was charged with four counts of murder as an adult after the Georgia shooting, his 54-year-old father, Colin Gray, was also charged with murder for having given his son an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle for Christmas in 2023. Colin Gray has been charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder, and eight counts of cruelty to children. This has come after the conviction this past winter of the parents of another teenage murderer: James and Jennifer Crumbley, whose son murdered four classmates at Oxford High School in Michigan in 2021, were each sentenced to between 10 and 15 years in prison.
Colt Gray lived in a troubled environment made worse by his parents' divorce. His mother, Marcee, 43, had a long criminal record, with arrests for drug trafficking and violence. "There were nights when the mother would lock her son and sister out. They'd bang on the back door shouting 'Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!' and crying. It was absolutely devastating," neighbor Lauren Vickers told the New York Post.
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