Is this a fix for U.S. teen mass shooters? | Will Bunch Newsletter

Some 28 months in, it’s still impossible to do what everybody so desperately craves: completely forget the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to annoying new variants, local baseball fans get an additional slap in the face tonight as at least four members of the Phillies skip a crucial doubleheader in Toronto — barred from entering Canada for not getting their jabs. Will American “Covidiocy” ever end?

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In a brutal 2022 in which horrific mass shootings — Buffalo, Uvalde, Highland Park — have provided the exclamation marks, it’s been striking to see the two common threads that have run through each one of these murderous sprees. The first, of course, is the gunman’s choice of weapon: the AR-15-style assault rifle, a weapon of war that exists to obliterate human beings and have no place in a civil society. We should not rest until these kinds of killing machines are outlawed, as they once were in the 1990s and early 2000s.

But today I want to focus on the other commonality — that each of these mass murderers was a young man in the 18-21 age bracket, and that each had a similar biography in which their time after high school seemed a descent into an abyss of domestic violence at home and weird conspiracy theorizing or posturing on the internet.

The latest national tragedy — the July 4 parade sniper incident in the suburban community of Highland Park, Ill., in which seven random people were fatally gunned down and dozens more were injured by bullets or in the panicked efforts to flee — follows the pattern. The gunman (the policy here is to avoid using names, when possible) was just 21.

In a fairly affluent town where many teens head off to college, the future gunman had dropped out of Highland Park High School, attempted to promote a musical career as “Awake the Rapper,” and dabbled a lot in weird and even macabre stuff on the World Wide Web, such as a discussion board around violent descriptions of death. “When he left Highland Park High School, he left people’s radar,” a former classmate told the Chicago Sun-Times. “The red flags he was posting on social media went unnoticed because he wasn’t connected to many of the people at the school.”

You could have said much the same about the 18-year-old who murdered 19 third-graders and two teachers at a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school in May, who struggled in high school there and finally dropped out to work in the local Wendy’s, also going online to threaten to rape or kidnap girls or livestream the abuse of animals. In Buffalo, the 18-year-old who penned a racist manifesto before a shooting spree that killed 10 Black people did attend community college but showed signs of mental illness, reportedly telling a high school teacher who’d asked about his plans after graduation that “I want to murder and commit suicide.”

America’s young men didn’t always go off the grid so easily and so often. A few decades ago, in a time when the rate of college attendance was lower, there were also more decent, better-paying job opportunities for teens looking to enter the workforce, which fostered the ability to establish a home or get married at a younger age, in working-class communities that felt more stable. Today, this cohort is increasingly lost and in crisis.

It was just 16 months ago that two other mass shootings both carried out by 21-year-olds — one in metro Atlanta, where a young man freaked out over his addiction to pornography targeted Asian-American massage-parlor workers, and one in a Boulder, Colorado supermarket — prompted me to write a column about “the crisis of America’s young men.” Needless to say, next to nothing has been done since that time.

And to be clear, while mass shootings grab our attention more than anything else, it’s not the only manifestation of that crisis, or the biggest, or the most important. Here in Philadelphia and elsewhere across the nation, those in their late teens and early 20s are most likely the shooters and victims in the broader wave of gun violence in which youths who once would have settled a beef by throwing a punch are now squeezing a trigger.

Young people who don’t attend college — but again, especially men — also are increasingly prone to so-called “deaths of despair” from drug overdoses, suicide, or alcohol abuse. Yet many young people who do better academically are also stressed out to the max from the pressure they feel to get into “the right college,” or because of the exorbitant loans many need to pay for it. Even an elite campus like the University of Pennsylvania can struggle with suicide.

Part of the issue might be what I sometimes call “the college problem” in America — a shorthand for how the dream of higher education instead became a source of resentment for some and anxiety for others, and how these bitter reactions have fueled our political divide. But calling it a “college problem” undersells the real issue: the U.S. abandons its young citizens at age 18.

We need to broaden our ideas of what higher education — both in terms of job training, including trade school, but also critical thinking — can become, and to make this a “public good” like K-12 education. That could take the form of a so-called “gap year” for 18-year-olds of universal, mostly civilian (such as working on environmental projects or in public schools) national service, funded by the government.

The benefits of such a program would run well beyond spruced-up national parks. Instead of falling off the grid, 18-year-olds would be getting a helping hand to find themselves and maybe find something they love. The widespread acceptance of a “gap year” could encourage us to stop putting so much pressure on these teens to “figure it all out” their senior year of high school. If well run, programs like the proposed Civilian Climate Corps would bring together young people from the silos they now live in — including, yes, “red states” and “blue states” — and have them working toward a common purpose.

“We need to be reintroduced to each other in a place where we are all on the same team,” the University of Maryland professor Lilliana Mason wrote in a 2019 essay, along with her observation that a study showed Korean War veterans who fought in newly desegregated units came home scoring higher in racial tolerance than those who did not. Today, we’re very good at knowing everything that’s wrong with America, and terrible at doing anything about it. Universal civilian national service is one way of doing something about it.

Question: Why isn’t the local media covering what the anti-choice PA GOP is up to??! — Via @AmyLaurenSomers on Twitter

Answer: I got a lot of great questions this week, including from my friends Heather Cox Richardson and David Beard, but I’m answering Amy’s because, yes, everything is in play when it comes to women’s reproductive rights in Pennsylvania. And it’s no surprise that the GOP majorities in the state House and Senate chose the dead of night, in a week of major news over passing a state budget, to ram through the first steps toward a constitutional amendment stating there is no right to an abortion in the Keystone State. Republicans in Harrisburg want to satisfy their right-wing base without waving a red flag in the face of suburban and urban women before November’s election. The amendment — which would require a second vote in 2023 and then (highly uncertain) voter approval as early as next spring — isn’t the actual abortion ban, but a tool for fending off legal challenges if Doug Mastriano is elected governor and Harrisburg quickly enacts one. It’s why your vote in November — including your local legislative race — is a life-or-death matter.

A new poll this week on the state of American politics from the New York Times and Siena College offered so much stunning data that arguably the newspaper of record buried the lead of the article. The headline and poll numbers that got the most play centered on President Biden’s cratering popularity, with his overall approval rating dipping to a new low of just 33%. Particularly troublesome for the 46th president is growing dissatisfaction within his own party — some 64% of Democrats now say they’d prefer a different nominee in 2024 — as well as nearly universal disapproval of the oldest president in American history among voters under age 30.

But one could make the case that the widespread unpopularity of Donald Trump — who remains the frontrunner for the GOP nomination if he runs — is an even more striking story. The Times/Siena poll found that Biden still defeats the 45th president in a head-to-head 2024 matchup by a 44%-41% margin, similar to his 2020 victory. Despite gas hitting $5 a gallon, high supermarket prices and so many other Biden woes, most voters know things would be even worse under the most corrupt president in U.S. history. To me, these questions loom large over 2024: Why can’t America find a new generation of politicians who truly excite the public? And is that dynamic new leader out there, ready to catch some lightning in a bottle?