After police caution, father gave suspected Georgia school shooter AR-15

Who gives their thirteen or forteen-year-old an AR15 for Christmas? To my mind, that in itself constitutes child abuse.

I'll have to look it up, but seems to me the school shooter in Michigan a couple of years back was given a weapon - an automatic pistol? - by his parents. In that case, the parents were quite rightly prosecuted. In this Georgia case, too, the father has been arrested and charged.

An epidemic has been running through this country since at least as far back as Columbine twenty-five years ago. Boys and young men are so alienated, so deeply despairing that they obtain fire arms, often automatic weapons, and go into schools, houses of worship, malls and grocery stores... and slaughter as many people as possible. Holding parents to account is one valuable tool in confronting this mass madness. Comprehensive, sensible gun control laws would help as well. But there must be more that can be done.

Someone needs to find out why these kids are so dispondent, why they have such a bleek view of life that they think killing many strangers - and usually themselves, either by self-inflicted gunshot wounds or suicide by cop - is the only solution.