As I mentioned in my previous post, yesterday, 20-year-old former student Victor Hawkins walked into Pauls Valley High School in Oklahoma in the middle of the school day with two loaded pistols he took from his father. He came in through the southeast entrance around 2:20 in the afternoon and immediately started trying to turn the school into his own personal headline.
He pointed a gun at a student in the foyer and pulled the trigger, but thankfully nothing happened. The gun jammed.
Hawkins then ducked behind a vending machine, cleared the malfunction, and came back out ready to try again. He pointed the gun at another student and fired. Somehow, that student wasn’t hit either. The student put his hands up and asked not to be shot. Hawkins, for whatever reason, decided to let him go.
Moments later, Principal Kirk Moore heard the gunfire and ran toward it. Hawkins fired again and shot Moore in the leg. Moore didn’t back off. He tackled Hawkins, wrestled him, and with the help of another administrator held him down until police arrived.
Hawkins didn’t buy the guns used in the shooting. He didn’t smuggle them in from some shadowy black market. He took them from his father.
We’ve been seeing this for a while now. It mostly started at Oxford High School, where a teenager used a gun his parents bought and left accessible. Since then, this has become less of an exception and more of a pattern. Guns in the home, not properly secured, end up in the hands of someone who shouldn’t have them, and then everyone acts surprised when it goes sideways.
So the obvious question is whether the father is going to face any consequences. And the answer to that is probably not.
Hawkins is 20, so legally an adult, and that’s going to be the shield. But let’s not pretend the situation exists in a vacuum. If you leave multiple firearms unsecured in your home and someone takes them to go shoot up a school, that didn’t happen by accident. That’s negligence at best.
But this is Oklahoma. Gun culture there isn’t just a hobby; it’s practically a personality trait. Personal responsibility tends to stop right at the gun safe that apparently wasn’t being used.
Then there’s the motive, and this is where it goes from familiar to almost boringly predictable.
Hawkins reportedly told investigators he wanted to carry out a shooting “like the Columbine shooters did.” He wanted to kill students, faculty, and himself. He wanted his own version of Columbine. Because of course he did.
This is what happens when you get what are commonly called Columbiners, or people embedded in parts of the so-called True Crime Community that don’t just study these crimes; they idolize them. Columbiners are individuals who fixate on the Columbine shooters, treating them less like mass murderers and more like antiheroes. They collect details, share photos, quote them, and in too many cases, try to follow in their footsteps.
The darker corners of the True Crime Community can feed into that. Not the people who are interested in understanding crime, but the ones who blur the line between analysis and admiration. The ones who turn killers into a religion.
And much like most of the TCC, Hawkins wasn’t even born when Columbine happened.
April 20th, 1999, might as well be ancient history, and yet here we are, decades later, still dealing with people trying to recreate it like it’s some kind of instruction manual.
That’s the legacy. Not just the tragedy itself, but the long list of people who look at it and think, “I want that.”
And for what? So they can be ‘remembered’?
That’s usually the idea. They think they’re going to carve their name into history, that people will talk about them, analyze them, maybe even understand them.
What actually happens is they become just another name in a long list of losers who couldn’t deal with their own problems without picking up a gun. Another entry in a database. Another face people forget as soon as the next Columbiner comes along.
Hawkins wanted his own Columbine.
What he got instead was a jammed gun, a principal who refused to let him continue, and a future where he’s remembered, if at all, as a failure.
(Sources)
Leave a Reply