Earlier today, a 14-year-old boy walked into his grandparents’ house in Nonthaburi, Thailand, just outside of Bangkok, and shot them both dead with his grandfather’s 9mm handgun. Then he walked into Debsirin Nonthaburi School, the branch of a century-old institution founded by the Thai royal family, and kept shooting.
By the time police reached him, five teachers were dead, and he’d turned the gun on himself. More than thirty people were wounded, nine of them critically. Police didn’t even find his grandparents’ bodies until they searched his house after the fact.
Thailand isn’t a country you’d expect to be having this conversation. But it has the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in Southeast Asia and ranked thirteenth worldwide for small-gun possession.
Its licensing process doesn’t require mental health screening for new applicants, and it doesn’t require periodic reassessment for people who already hold a license, meaning once you’re in, you’re in for good, no questions asked.
That’s how a 14-year-old ends up with unsupervised access to a loaded pistol registered legally to his grandfather. Nobody had to break any laws to make this possible. The laws just weren’t built to stop it.
Thailand Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul called the attack “well prepared,” with “clear steps and clear goals,” and noted the kid still had more than thirty rounds left when he decided to stop.
The national police chief added that the shots were “quite accurate,” landing in vital spots, and said they’d be looking into that further. I’ll save them the trouble. A 14-year-old doesn’t develop that kind of precision on his own, and he sure didn’t get it from video games, no matter what some will try to tell you.
His grandfather owned the gun. It doesn’t take a massive leap to wonder whether his grandfather also taught him how to use it, maybe at a range or in the backyard, the same way plenty of grandfathers pass down a hobby they love without any idea what it’s being handed down for.
This also reminds me of the Tacloban shooting in the Philippines. Both of these came out of countries that are supposed to be culturally distant from America’s specific brand of gun violence, and yet both are starting to look less like isolated national tragedies and more like exports.
This kid came from an affluent area, the same demographic profile that keeps showing up in American shooters, the white suburban kid with resources and access who nobody saw coming until he did the thing everyone eventually admits they should have seen coming.
It’s the same profile, transplanted onto a different continent, and it’s got me wondering whether he was pulling from the same well so many of these American kids pull from, the online True Crime Community, or TCC, that a certain corner of the internet has built up around school shooters.
The TCC isn’t one website or one forum. It’s a loose, shifting subculture that treats Columbine and its imitators less like massacres and more like mythology, trading manifestos, crime scene photos, and fan art of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold like they’re rock stars instead of murderers. Kids find it, get pulled in, and start seeing an attack of their own.
If this kid was influenced by anyone specific, my money’s on Kip Kinkel or Jeff Weise, not Harris or Klebold. Kinkel murdered his own parents in 1998 before he walked into Thurston High School in Oregon and opened fire. Weise killed his grandfather and his grandfather’s girlfriend in 2005 before doing the same at Red Lake High School in Minnesota. Both of them killed the people who were supposed to be raising them first, then took that same rage and pointed it at their schools, which is exactly the sequence this Thai teenager followed almost beat for beat. That’s not a coincidence I’m comfortable dismissing.
And of course social media is involved, in this case, Instagram. Police say the gun he used was the same one he’d posted a photo of back in April, like it was something to be proud of and out in the open for anyone following him to see.
That’s about as American a shooter trait as they come at this point, the pre-attack gun photo hiding in plain sight on social media while everyone around him scrolls right past it. Somebody always saw it, and somebody always says later that they never thought he’d actually do it.
Which brings me to the line that’s going to get said in Thailand now, the same as it gets said everywhere else after one of these. A resident, local to the shooting, said they thought it couldn’t happen here, that Thailand isn’t America, that this was some freak one-off. I’d ask them to look at Thailand’s history of gun violence. While not as bad as America, it’s pretty bad.
If your country lets its people own guns, it can happen there. The only real question left is whether Thailand’s promised new law does anything more than what every American state legislature does after one of these, which is talk tough for a news cycle and then let the next affluent kid with grampa’s gun prove them wrong.
(Sources)
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