Pop quiz. Do you remember the shooting at a high school graduation in Fairfield, California? If the answer is no, or a vague “maybe,” or you had to scroll back through your memory to place it, that’s not a failure on your part. That’s just how this country processes gun violence now.

A teenager is killed at an event meant to celebrate him; it leads the local news for a few days, and then the next tragedy arrives to bump it off the feed. More than a month ago, a young man named Jamario Baker was shot and killed in a parking lot full of families taking graduation photos, and there’s a real chance you’d forgotten his name until just now.

Anyway, there’s finally a suspect. More than a month after gunfire tore through that graduation crowd, killing Baker and injuring three others, police have someone in custody. A 17-year-old is facing a murder charge, along with related offenses, after being tracked down in a home outside the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He’d fled California within days of the shooting. Because he’s a minor, his name isn’t being released.

Investigators haven’t released a motive. They haven’t said whether the suspect knew Baker or any of the other victims, or whether this was random, targeted, or something in between.

So, the person accused of killing an 18-year-old who died shielding his own little sister is himself 17 years old. Not a hardened career criminal or someone with a decades-long rap sheet. A kid, allegedly, who had access to a gun and was willing to use it in a crowd of families. That’s not an aberration in American gun violence anymore. It’s the default setting.

I wrote last month that the real scandal wasn’t the bureaucratic mix-up over police staffing at the ceremony. The scandal is that a 17-year-old in this country can get his hands on a gun in the first place. An arrest gets you a defendant. It does not get you an explanation for why we keep building a country where teenagers shoot teenagers at events built to celebrate them.

Once extradition runs its course, there will be a hearing, probably several. There may, eventually, be a trial. None of it will tell us anything we don’t already know. That this keeps happening, that it will keep happening, and that the country will forget the names again long before it finds the will to stop it.

(Source)

• 17-year-old accused of deadly shooting after Sem Yeto High School graduation in Fairfield