14-Year-Old Guns Down Classmates, Teachers With Assault Rifle His Dad Gave Him For Christmas

Only in America ...

There was another regularly scheduled school shooting on Wednesday. A 14-year-old student carried a military-style rifle into Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, and opened fire. He killed two students — Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14 — and two math teachers, Richard Aspinwall and Christina Irimie. Aspinwall was an assistant football coach. Irimie was celebrating her birthday with her students on the day she was murdered.

Eight other students and a teacher were injured but are expected to survive. This was the deadliest incident of school violence in Georgia history, but there’s always next week.

The shooter, who was apprehended at the scene, was previously investigated when he was 13 for alleged threats of gun violence. His father, Colin Gray, told authorities there were hunting guns in the house but his son didn’t have “unsupervised access” to them. When your kid is posting online threats about a school shooting, maybe they shouldn’t even have “supervised access” to guns. Although his child reportedly "begged" for mental health assistance, Gray instead gave him an AR-15-style rifle for Christmas, just like Republican Jesus. Yes, that’s the weapon the shooter used to kill four people, and yes, the police have arrested this fool.

The 14-year-old shooter will be tried as an “adult,” as if the horrific nature of his crime somehow grants him wisdom and maturity. It seems as if the exact opposite is the case. It’s not like the 14 year olds who survived the shooting will now get to see Deadpool and Wolverine without an adult.

---

---

The shooter is apparently not Muslim or transgender because Republicans have moved directly to the “thoughts and prayers” stage. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp told reporters Wednesday, “This is not the day to talk about safety or policy. We need thoughts and prayers for the victims, law enforcement, and educators.”

Republican Rep. Mike Collins from Georgia didn’t think Thursday was the right time for solutions, either. However, he did blame a godless society (blah, blah, blah) and lamented that “a lot of violence … is condoned and people are actually pushing it.”

Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts shared Collins’s 2022 campaign spot where he spread lies about the 2020 election and claimed that Democrats “stuffed” ballot boxes to “steal” elections. He then shot up some stand-in ballot boxes like an emotionally healthy person who peacefully resolves his political disagreements.

Kemp signed a GOP law in 2022 that lets any Georgia resident carry a concealed weapon without a license or background check. He said at the etime, “(This bill) makes sure that law-abiding Georgians, including our daughters and your family too, can protect themselves without having to have permission from your state government.”

He does believe the state government should make it as difficult as possible for law-abiding Georgians to vote. He signed the Big Lie-inspired voter suppression bill less than three months after January 6. He also thinks state government should seize the means of reproduction: He signed a six-week abortion ban in 2019, which was at the time blatantly unconstitutional, but just a few months after the MAGA Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the ban was reinstated. Georgians have easier access to guns than abortions.

In fairness, Kemp doesn’t support minors stockpiling weapons and killing people. However, he’s actively made access to lethal weapons easier. The shooter’s supposed “law-abiding” father aided and abetted this massacre.

I do think it’s fair, though, to hold Kemp and Collins responsible for promoting the sick notion that guns are “kewl” and how “real Americans” assert their dominance. When he ran for governor in 2018, Kemp appeared in an ad where he pointed a rifle at a teenage boy. This was presented as a father ensuring a kid treats his daughter with “respect” through threat of violence. It was very Tony Soprano.

Americans fear the wrong things

The specter of school shootings has turned places of learning into post-modern killing fields. Parents live with this fear each day when they send their kids to school, no matter how superficially “safe” it is. Children of the Cold War prepared to “duck and cover” in case of a nuclear attack, but that at least remained a distant prospect. Today’s children prepare for the next mass shooting, and they know that regardless of the outcome, it’s not the end of the world. It’s just Tuesday.

Some Apalachee students recall thinking they were going to die, while others recall watching their teacher die in front of them.

“My teacher, Coach Aspinwall, he opened the door, and he ran outside to see what’s going on,” 17-year-old Stephanie Reyna told ABC News.

“We heard some popping sounds,” Reyna said. “We just stopped, we froze, we didn’t know what was going on ... So we all ran to the back of the classroom. We hid in the corner.”

A few minutes passed and the students saw Aspinwall “just there, in the doorway, just laying there,” Reyna said. “He was trying to crawl back to us ... we just think he was trying to get to us.”

“A couple minutes passed by. He’s taking his breaths,” Brayan Maldonado added. “And then we hear his final breaths.”

Sophomore Ariel Bowling said, “I just feel like you’re basically never safe anywhere and no matter if there’s cops in the school, there’s still no safety at all.”

“I really don’t want to go back,” 14-year-old Macey Right said. “I feel like I shouldn’t have to go back to school worrying about dying.”

She shouldn’t, no child should. Vice President Kamala Harris, reacting to this latest shooting at a campaign event, ruefully noted that she’d spoken to college kids who had grown up with active shooter drills. Thanks to Republicans, that was the only real response to Sandy Hook. We imprisoned our children so weak people could wave around guns and declare themselves “free.”

“It is outrageous that every day in our country, parents have to send their children to school worried about whether or not their child will come home alive,” she said. “It's senseless. We have to end this epidemic of gun violence in our country once and for all. It doesn't have to be this way.”

Something should happen, and would in a sane society, but Republicans would rather ban doors than assault rifles. They know they can get away with this because too many Americans fear the wrong things.

They fear video games and social media — seemingly more than guns themselves. Gov. Kemp signed a controversial law in April that mandates age verification on pornography sites and requires users to upload an ID before they can view adult content.

“We cannot continue to sit by and do nothing as young Georgians develop addictions and disorders, and suffer at the hands of online antagonists,” Kemp said. “I’m proud to sign this bill and put Georgians — children — first above all else.” 

Republicans won’t permit any unapproved porn-induced orgasms for kids but they will “sit by and do nothing” when it comes to protecting those horny kids from gun violence. (Shannon Watts points out that there’s currently no minimum age requirement to possess rifles or shotguns in Georgia.)

There are Americans who worry that teachers will make their kids queer or, even worse, sympathetic to others’ feelings and different life choices. Donald Trump personifies irrational fears and cultural resentment, so it was fitting that during an appearance with Moms of Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice, he rambled incoherently about the latest right-wing bogeyman.

“The transgender thing is incredible,” he said. “Think about it, our kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation.”

That’s obviously an insane lie, but it’s consistent with MAGA priorities. They’ll seize control of a 14-year-old girl’s womb, forcing her to carry a pregnancy to term, but they won’t seize the guns that could kill her in a few seconds. Republicans pass laws that treat women and girls like potential criminals and their bodies like lethal weapons. They fear the wrong things.

We’ve tried it their way. It doesn’t work.

Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance dismissed school shootings as a “fact of life.”

“If these psychos are going to go after our kids, we’ve got to be prepared for it,” Vance said at a campaign rally in Phoenix. “We don’t have to like the reality that we live in, but it is the reality we live in. We’ve got to deal with it.”

Apalachee High School was prepared for what Vance terms a “psycho.” The students had participated in multiple active shooter drills. A teacher immediately pressed a button on a device that notifies law enforcement of an “active situation in the school.” The students and staff locked down and sheltered in place.

An armed sheriff’s deputy, who worked as a school resource officer, confronted the shooter, who was disarmed almost immediately. Yet, two children and two teachers are dead. Eight students and a teacher are hospitalized. An entire community is traumatized. This is not the system working as it should. This is madness that sacrifices children on an altar to the gun lobby.

Gun violence is a uniquely American problem, and all of us are responsible. We might want to single out the gun-loving lawmakers who block any sensible gun safety legislation, and while they certainly deserve our scorn, Americans often talk about how “we” went to the moon when technically that was just 12 people over three years. According to a 2022 study, there have been 189 school shooting with 279 casualties since Sandy Hook. We all share that burden.

This doesn’t mean we should give in to despair. Right-wing gun lovers want us to abandon all hope and accept this is our inalterable reality, but I refuse to see the world through the same dirty ashtray as Donald Trump. When asked about the shooting during his Fox News foot rub session with Sean Hannity, his response was characteristically thoughtless and bleak: “It’s a sick and angry world for a lot of reasons,” he said, not recognizing himself as one of those reasons. “And we’re gonna make it better and we’re gonna heal our world.” Darth Vader had a more constructive approach to social harmony.

Guns remain the problem, and Americans collectively ignore the solution. We mask our insecurities and paranoia behind a cloak of “freedom,” and we continue to let children needlessly live in terror and even die. Americans fear the wrong things, because as Rod Serling wrote, they picked “the most dangerous enemy they can find and it’s themselves.”

I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber for $80 a year or just $8 a month, if you’re not already. This helps sustain the newsletter and keeps all the content free for everyone.

Follow Stephen Robinson on Bluesky and Threads.

Subscribe to his YouTube channel for more fun content.