I wasn’t surprised by the shooting at East Towne Mall.
I didn’t necessarily think there was going to be a shooting at that mall on that day, but it has felt like tension has been building, and it was going to burst somewhere.
Let me start by saying that I’m not apologizing for these teenagers. Firing a gun in the middle of a shopping mall on one of the busiest shopping days of the year is a reprehensible act. They were the ones who let the situation escalate, they put a lot of innocent people at risk, and they deserve to be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
But this shooting wasn’t created in a vacuum. Many Madison teenagers don’t feel safe in the community anymore. They feel, perhaps not irrationally, that they will be attacked and have to defend themselves. That was the rationale for why a student at an alternative program brought a gun to school just a few weeks ago. When teens carry around weapons like this, they know they are breaking the law. They are scared of the police but they make what is, sadly, a somewhat rational decision, viewing other threats as more dangerous than getting in trouble with the law.
When teens feel threatened, they look for other people for protection. That’s how they end up in gangs. People don’t join gangs because they are excited about committing criminal activity; they do it because they are scared. I’ve known a lot of gang members — they aren’t generally bad people, just desperate people looking for support. Some try to look tough, some have done some bad things, but those are usually the ones who are the most frightened.
I’m not sure the teens involved in the East Towne altercation were in gangs, but I do know that they were armed, probably afraid and definitely driven by that deficit in rational decision-making common to teenagers. They didn’t pick East Towne Mall because it was a gun-free zone. They picked it because it was a mall, and malls are still where teenagers go on Saturdays.
We failed these kids. We make our high-schoolers ride city buses to transfer points where they don’t feel safe. We make our high-schoolers go to schools where there are too many fights in the hallways and not enough visible opportunities for them to succeed academically. It’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: People need to feel safe before they can succeed.
Fixing the massive systemic problems that plague this city is the way to stop future incidents like this. Not more guns, as one state representative/maniac recommended — I’ll have an entire post on that monster next week! These teenagers are already afraid of violence, which is why many of them are armed in the first place. The threat of more violence from some Charles Bronson wannabes isn’t going to do anything.
We’ve got to make things better for so many in our communities. Not only for these kids but also for anyone who would like to go to the mall without wondering when a gun is going to go off. Violence doesn’t stay isolated in small pockets; it spills out.
Once again, these teenagers deserve prosecution now. But it didn’t have to get to this point. We could have prevented it. It is in the best interests of everyone in Madison — except maybe those who exclusively shop online — to fix these systemic problems before we have another shooting.
