Three months after Victor Hawkins walked into Pauls Valley High School in Oklahoma with two of his father’s handguns, he was back in a courtroom yesterday. The preliminary hearing and testimony have filled in a lot of the blanks.
Here’s the recap for anyone just catching up. 20-year-old Hawkins showed up at the school around 2:20 in the afternoon of April 8th while carrying two pistols he’d taken from his father without anyone in his family knowing.
He fired a shot down a hallway to make sure everyone understood what was happening, then walked into the lobby, yelled for everyone to listen up, and pointed the gun at students. Principal Kirk Moore heard the commotion, came out of his office, and went straight at him. Hawkins turned and shot Moore in the leg. Moore tackled him anyway, got a hand on the gun, and held him down with help from Chad Chronister until police showed up and took Hawkins into custody. Nobody died, but not because Hawkins didn’t try.
Yesterday’s hearing gave us Principal Moore’s own account for the first time. He said the whole thing happened in a matter of seconds, that the gunshot was so loud it seemed to put Hawkins into a kind of shock, and that he managed to get his hand on Hawkins’s gun hand and pin it down before anything worse could happen. That’s not the language of a man performing heroism for a headline. That’s someone describing a fight he doesn’t fully remember winning.
The OSBI’s lead investigator, Meric Mussett, also testified. Hawkins is said to have told investigators he has autism and that he’d developed what he called an obsession with school shootings. Specifically, Columbine and Sandy Hook.
Hyperfixation is a real thing that shows up in a lot of people on the spectrum, and it’s not inherently sinister. The stereotype is that they fixate on trains. However, the fixations could be as varied as weather patterns or video game speedruns or the complete filmography of a director nobody’s heard of.
Every so often, though, that same intensity of focus latches onto something violent instead, and in rare cases, it’s followed all the way into committing the violence they’d been fixated on. That’s a real pattern researchers have documented. But it’s a small sliver of a small sliver. The vast, overwhelming majority of autistic people never hurt anyone, and Hawkins hasn’t even had his diagnosis confirmed in court yet. He just claimed it to an investigator after the fact.
Autism and Asperger’s have been floated as a courtroom defense in school violence cases before, and as far as I’m aware, it’s never once worked. Nobody’s walked on a school shooting charge because their lawyer argued the spectrum made them do it, and I doubt Hawkins is about to become the first.
What actually stands out to me isn’t the diagnosis but the motive. Hawkins told Mussett he wanted to kill the entire office staff, plus two specific students he disliked, plus Kirk Moore, who he said had never been nice to him and, worst of all apparently, didn’t shake his hand at graduation. That’s it. That’s the grievance. A missed handshake and some vague resentment toward people he hadn’t seen regularly in years.
This is a 20-year-old man we’re talking about. High school should have been two years in his rearview mirror by the time he walked back through those doors with a stolen gun, not the center of his entire universe.
When the motive is that thin and that old, it stops looking like a plan and starts looking like a script somebody else already wrote, one he just wanted to perform for himself. And even then, most of these guys don’t actually go after the people who supposedly wronged them.
Study after study on school shooters shows the same pattern. The perceived grudge is real to them, but the violence usually lands on whoever happens to be nearby, not the specific person who snubbed them years earlier.
Hawkins fits right into that mold too. He fired down a hallway at nobody in particular before he ever got near Moore, and the students he pointed the gun at in the lobby weren’t the two he’d named as people he disliked. The grievance is just the excuse. The target is whoever’s closest when they decide to act on it.
Again, Hawkins wasn’t building toward something original. He was chasing a version of Columbine he’d apparently spent a lot of time watching videos about. According to Mussett’s testimony, he’d been telling a friend on Discord what he was planning, even sending a photo of the two guns beforehand. Nobody flagged it. His own parents didn’t know their guns were gone until it was already too late.
That’s the same story we keep telling on this blog in different towns with different names attached, and it’s worth saying again. A 20-year-old getting his hands on multiple firearms that easily isn’t a fluke of one careless household. It’s now become typical among ‘responsible gun owners’™ in Oklahoma and across the country.
Hawkins is now facing five charges after yesterday’s hearing, including shooting with intent to kill, and he’s due back in court on September 28th for formal arraignment.
If he was hoping to be remembered as anything close to what he idolized, the record so far suggests otherwise. He’s just another loser with a stolen gun and a grudge over a handshake.
(Sources)
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