At Least America Jails Its School Shooters
High school massacres are as American as apple pie, and the country’s unwillingness to address their causes is shameful. But whatever else you say about the United States, when there is a school shooting, one of only three things happens to the gunman: he is killed by police, he takes his own life at the scene, or he is arrested and spends the rest of his life in prison. While researching this article, I could not find a single case of one just walking away.
This article isn’t about America though. It’s about a society where school shooters get away with it.
It happened at a school of 450 children, just after noon on a Tuesday. Staff spotted armed men on a hill above the grounds. The head teacher began evacuating the children through a back exit. Most got out. But a handful panicked and ran out the front gate. As they fled, one of the men dropped into a sniper’s crouch and opened fire. There is video. He shot a fourteen-year-old boy in the head. Then he killed an adult who ran to help. The police who arrived simply stood and watched. Two dead, four wounded. The gunman strolled off.
That was three months ago. The gunman still hasn’t been arrested, though he is known to police. The investigators never spoke to the head teacher. Laughably, the police say the shooter was returning fire after stones were thrown at his car. Video directly contradicts this: he was at least 200 metres from the road, calmly taking aim at the school. Weeks later the village was attacked again, and the dead boy’s seventeen-year-old cousin was shot and killed. Nobody was arrested for that either.
This is what you can get away with if you’re an Israeli settler in the illegally occupied West Bank.
In America, they tear down and rebuild the schools rather than send children back where they were traumatised. Here, the children were back within the week, because there is no other school and Israel won’t let them build one. In America, politicians descend on the town to mourn with the families. Here, the police fire tear gas and stun grenades at them as they bury their dead.
And the motive? In America, they comb the manifesto and the browser history for a clue. Here, there is no mystery: he shot up a school as part of a racist, nationalist campaign to drive Palestinians off their own land.
The shooter, an IDF reservist, has been suspended and an inquiry has been announced. But don’t get your hopes up: Israel’s investigations into its own drag on for years and end in prosecution 0.17% of the time. By comparison, the system it uses on Palestinians has a 99.7% prosecution rate. The purpose of a system is what it does.
He was never arrested because, in the eyes of the state, he was doing his job.
Acknowledgements
This piece was prompted by the Chapo Trap House episode “The Hills Have Eyes 2”.
It draws throughout on Jasper Nathaniel’s reporting. If you want to understand the “hilltop-youth” settlers terrorising the West Bank, his Substack Infinite Jaz is vital. He traces the American Zionist charities bankrolling them, and the Israeli state’s complicity in all of it.
The al-Mughayyir school shooting is also covered in the Guardian, NBC and the Times of Israel.
Details on American gun violence come from NPR, Everytown and Sky News.
The comparison of Israeli prosecution rates is drawn from an earlier Possibility Space article.