Live from Music Row Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for a special conversational edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
Leahy: An ominous event yesterday; tragic, evil. Nineteen elementary school children and two adults were murdered allegedly by now-deceased suspect, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos. It’s just a tragic, evil instance that you just cannot explain.
Carmichael: I’m guessing, because we don’t know everything we will eventually know about the killer, but I’m guessing that his life was incredibly troubled.
Leahy: I do have a little bit of information about him. It’s in the New York Post, 18 years old. Apparently, the reports are he bought the two rifles that he used shortly after his 18th birthday, very recently. He had worked at a Wendy’s there in town. He attended the Uvalde High School.
He worked at a Wendy’s there, was considered a loner, and quit his job a month ago. And had apparently been sending Instagram messages where he had posted selfies to somebody who he’d never met, and also showed images of the guns and said something’s going to happen, and something did. Evil.
Carmichael: I think we’re going to learn more about his mental state. I think before he went to the school, didn’t he kill his grandmother?
Leahy: There’s a report he killed his grandmother before he went to the school.
Carmichael: Now if he did kill his grandmother, do you think he was living with his grandmother?
[UPDATE: The shooter’s grandmother, as of the most recent report, remains in critical condition as a result of gunshot wounds.]
Leahy: We don’t know. We don’t know, other than you might assume that. But I think you’re right, Crom, in this instance now, that this is a horrific mass murder committed by an 18-year-old who appears to have been isolated. But all of the details now will come out over the next week or so.
Carmichael: This reminds me a bit of the 18-year-old from Buffalo …
Leahy: [From] Conklin, New York, who drove three hours up to Buffalo and killed 10, I think, 10 or 11 people in a grocery store.
Carmichael: In this case, this fellow in Texas was from the area.
Leahy: Right. From the area.
Carmichael: He lived there, but he went to a middle school. He didn’t go to the high school [he attended].
Leahy: He went to an elementary school. It was not his own elementary school.
Carmichael: If he had been bullied, for example, in high school, then somebody who is mentally deranged might go back to the high school and just start shooting people. So it wasn’t that.
But I think the point, Michael, is that in the society that we live in today, partly because of COVID, partly because of a variety of reasons, including perhaps opioids, I think that there’s a larger group of people who are mentally ill and mentally unstable.
Leahy: I think you’re quite right.
Carmichael: And I think that we as a society are going to have to figure out how are we going to deal with people who are mentally ill. Now in this particular person’s case, I think you said earlier that he worked in Wendy’s for a period of time, not a long period of time.
Leahy: According to the New York Post.
Carmichael: So if he was capable of holding down a job then he wasn’t mentally ill in the way that you see street people are. Many street people are mentally ill because their brains are fried for one reason or another, and some people who live on the street are quite violent, and so we’re going to have to figure out as a society how we’re going to handle people who are a danger to society and can’t take care of themselves.
And then the other thing is that I think we’re going to have to redesign our schools and our places where you have large crowds who go on a regular basis and we’re going to figure out how to improve the security of those places to make what happened in Texas more difficult.
Leahy: We’ll find out the details of that, but obviously, the first question is, what level of security did they have and why didn’t it work better? We’ll see. That’ll come out. The initial reaction doesn’t look like they had any security.
Carmichael: Was there a police officer in the building?
Leahy: We do not don’t know any of that.
Carmichael: These are things that we’ll learn, but we’re going to have to figure out how to do things differently because of our society.
There are elements of our society that are broken. And all it takes is literally a thousandth of one percent. A thousandth of one percent to create this kind of mayhem.
Leahy: I think you’re quite right. There are elements of our society right now that are imploding, and the one 10th of 1 percent …
Carmichael: It doesn’t even take one 10th. It literally takes less than 100 deranged people, less than 100, out of 330 million. That has to do with security and other things.
Listen to the Crommentary:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Robb Elementary School” by UCISD.
