Millennials and Mass Shootings

Chris Albert 00:00:00 (link to this point)

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I hope you get a lot out of it. And without delay, let's get into it.

This is Chris Albert, and I'm here to remind you of one thing. Someday, you're going to die. That's not some morbid statement or scary idea. It's solid fact. Your time here on this earth is limited.

We need to be reminded of this as much as possible with one simple reason, to live your best life while you can. This is the Warrior Soul podcast.

You know, there's this idea out there that somehow the millennial generation is weaker than our generation. Somehow, they ended up in a place where they're in their own world. Right? They're like us. They're enmeshed in their phones, they're enmeshed in themselves.

They're super sensitive. They can't handle criticism, they don't know how the real world works. And there's not a day that goes by where I don't see some meme or some statement being made on social media that criticizes that generation. And I cringe a little bit. I cringe because when I think back to my own childhood and my own teenage years and my own years and my early 20s, well, I was a complete dumbass.

I was awkward. I was super sensitive. I didn't have a smartphone to be enmeshed in, but I was enmeshed in MTV, and the constant screwed stream of garbage that was coming out of my television set. I didn't care much about the world around me. I didn't feel like I needed to work.

And it wasn't until a few older guys got ahold of me, taught me how to lift weights and knock some sense into me, that I started to really mature. And that level of maturity is what led me to eventually join the Marine Corps. I think we're being really hard on this generation. And in being hard on this generation, we're also removing the blame from ourselves. Because if this generation is weak, and I don't think it really is, you know, two wars were fought largely by millennials recently.

But if it is weak, if there is weakness in this generation, it's partially our fault. Yeah, we can blame their parents. But what are we doing to actually have an impact on this society? And my thoughts return to the recent bouts of mass shootings. Every time one of them occurs, the media goes and they start talking about gun control, they start talking about, you know, assault rifles that are supposedly wreaking havoc on our society.

But at the end of the day, it's not the guns. I mean, even if you believe in gun control, you have to understand that these are human beings who are committing these crimes. And they seem to be more and more common. I did a show on this a few weeks ago. And it was in the aftermath of the recent shootings in Dayton, Ohio and El Paso, Texas.

And it's because it weighed heavily on my mind. You see, I think we all have a role in this. And I'm going to give you a little story from something that occurred this past week when I got into an altercation on Instagram. You see, I was watching CNN for some reason. And I saw a news story.

A kid from my hometown, Norwalk, Connecticut got snatched up by authorities as part of a red flag operation. He'd been amassing parts for an AR 15. He had body armor, tactical pants, and all the tools associated with the stereotypical mass shooter. He'd also been trying to import large capacity magazines into the state of Connecticut, a big no no in one of the most restrictive states on gun ownership. But the thing that tipped off the investigation were some of his posts.

There were racist posts on Twitter, posts of him posing in his body armor on Instagram, and a Facebook post in which he reportedly stated that he intended to commit a mass shooting. Look, I want to state out front and I'm not defending this kid. He said some really racist shit, shit he probably shouldn't have said. He also broke the firearms laws of the state he lived in by trying to order large capacity magazines. And despite my opposition to red flag operations and gross infringements on our second amendment rights, law is the law.

As someone who understands the consequences of violence, I also have no love for mass shooters. Newtown, Connecticut is two towns over from where I grew up. That's where a monster named Adam Lanza killed 20 grade schoolers and six adults just before Christmas in 2012. A disgusting human being named Elliot Rodger terrorized and killed multiple people in my old neighborhood in Isla Vista, California, just near the UC Santa Barbara campus in 2014. And a married couple named Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik murdered 14 people just a few miles away from where my girlfriend works in San Bernardino, California in December 2015.

They lived just down the street from me. I hate mass shootings. And like anyone, I never want to see one happen again. But I know they will, regardless of what happens with gun laws. They'll happen again because guns aren't the problem.

We are. And this brings me back to my altercation on Instagram. I first saw the news report on CNN. Connecticut man picked up on suspicion of planning a mass shooting. Then I found out he was from Norwalk, my hometown.

Damn, I thought. That's another one that's a bit too close to home. The media, as they always do in cases like this, published the name and social media account of the kid who got arrested. Call it curiosity, voyeurism or weakness. But I whipped out my phone and went right to his Instagram page.

I saw the last post he posted, a picture of a local strip mall with a cloudy sky overhead. No caption. And then there were a few awkward pictures of him looking like a dork in a Kevlar helmet, and a picture of him giving the thumbs up while wearing his new body armor, and a lot of pictures of cars. The kid really liked cars. And I thought to myself, this must have been one lonely kid.

In all the pictures I saw on his Instagram account, there were no pictures of him with anybody else. There weren't really any smiles. And having grown up in the area, I know what it's like if you don't really fit in. In New England, and especially Fairfield County, Connecticut, people rate you by what school you went to and what job you do. If you're average, it's easy to fall through the cracks.

I didn't have a father growing up. And I was average in every way. If I wasn't lucky enough to meet a lot of older guys who showed me how to lift weights and get strong, I could have been in a really similar situation. And knowing that this kid probably hadn't received many kind words in his life, especially now that the media had plastered his face all over, I wanted to tell him that it was still possible for him to change his ways and to live an awesome life. And then I saw the comments.

Your life is ruined. No school, no job prospects. If anyone searches for your name, your friends probably think you're insane. Woman will never wanna date you. Good job, wrote the preppy looking kid posing with his girlfriend in his profile picture to the new societal outcast.

Now it's at this point that I wanna remind you, this kid hadn't committed murder. Of course, he's got a weapons charge, and that's no walk in the park. He'll probably do some time, but most likely, he'll be out before he's 30 years old. And if he's got a good lawyer, he'll be out sooner than most people think. That means that he's gonna be back on the streets of my hometown, where my family and my friends also walk the streets, or he could relocate and end up somewhere closer to where you are, where your family and your friends walk the streets.

Bad decisions have bad consequences, and the offender made some really stupid decisions, but none that are going to put him in prison for life. Point being, when he does end up back in society, we'd all benefit from him being truly reformed and not so angry. And honestly, if that does happen, we should all be really happy. We stopped a mass shooting from happening for good. People's lives were saved, and the offender could potentially start a new life, have a career, and contribute to society after he's paid his debt to it.

But that's not what the preppy dipshit was trying to do. That preppy dipshit was needling him and trying to throw gasoline onto a fire. This is what I wrote back. Do you really think that this is going to help future incidents not to occur? That's the goal.

Right? To keep people from going off the deep end and committing these types of awful crimes. Chances are that this kid probably hasn't had many kind words sent his way ever. And given that he never really got the chance to go through with the crime, he's probably going to end up back on the streets sometime soon. And since he's young and has a lot of life left, I don't think it's in anyone's interest to have you teasing him like this, including yours.

I have loved ones in that geographic area. And given that you heard about the news, you probably do too. So why push somebody just to get your social media rocks off and potentially endanger people in the future? That's pretty childish, and it makes you part of the problem, not the solution. Then I mentioned that if the offender or anybody else who was on that page who was having problems wanted to talk, that I was there.

A day later, I got a reply from the preppy kid. He said, ah, yes. Please, won't someone think of the mass shooters? I replied, it's not about thinking of the mass shooters. It's about understanding that this person will likely end up back on the streets.

And if he doesn't get help, he'll be in position to actually commit the crime. A crime that could potentially mean that someone you or I love ending up in the line of fire. And you're needling him behind the safety of your phone, just asking you to think. This didn't get anywhere. He said that he was well within his rights to shame the kid, and that I was coddling a potential mass shooter.

I replied that the kid hadn't actually committed a mass shooting. He was just accused of planning one. And that as righteous as he thought he was in shaming this kid, he was actually sending this kid down a darker path, a path that could eventually get him to commit the crime. And he was putting people in danger by doing this. Maybe it was stupid of me to think that I could get this preppy kid to change his opinion.

Maybe I wasn't trying to talk to that kid at all. Maybe I was trying to get a message to the accused. That getting caught wasn't a curse. In fact, it was probably more likely an intervention from God, telling him that he could change the course of his life before it was too late. I wanted him to know that.

Maybe I also wanted to create a teachable moment. I don't want to turn this into a sermon, but I see a parallel here with Jesus in the desert when the devil appeared to him with the three temptations. And I'm going to read this out. Quote, then Jesus was led by the spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry.

The tempter came to him and said, if you are the son of God, tell these stones to become bread. Jesus answered, it is written, man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. If you are the son of God, he said, throw yourself down. For it is written, he will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.

Jesus answered him, it is also written, do not put the Lord your God to the test. Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. All this I will give you, he said, if you bow down and worship me. And Jesus said to him, away from me, Satan, for it is written, worship the Lord your God and serve him only. And then the devil left him, and the angels came and attended him.

End quote. Now, what I want you to do here is to look beyond the religious nature of what I just read. When we go through life, we face a lot of temptations to get off the path. A lot of times things happen in our lives that we think of as curses. But in reality, they're just obstacles in front of us that we can see as opportunities to become better.

The problem is that if you see them as a curse, if you see them as something that's being wrought upon you by the world or by God or by whatever you believe in, then the temptation is to go down a darker path. That preppy kid, without knowing it, was tempting the accused to go down this dark path and to take the identity of an outcast. He wasn't tempting him with bread or power or materialism, but rather with darkness. And this is my point. Mass shootings aren't caused by guns.

They're caused by us, all of us, by our tendency to label people as outcasts, by the way we treat mental health, and by the way we fail to catch people as they're falling. You see, being flawed doesn't mean that you're irreparable. It means that you need guidance. And we should be trying to catch these kids before they commit the crime. But our tendency isn't to try to guide them back on the right path.

Our tendency is to point the finger and say, hey, look at the freak. It's as if we know that we are all deeply flawed individuals. And by pointing fingers and casting this person out and placing all the blame on this one individual. We're actually trying to cleanse ourselves and hold ourselves up as being better. This is virtue signaling at its worst.

And like I said, the accused was definitely somebody who had issues. He was a racist. He was putting disgusting views out there onto the Internet. But every single one of us has a darker side, a side that we don't like to let out in public. Take the preppy kid that I got into the argument with.

On the surface, he looks like a clean-cut Connecticut boy with an attractive girlfriend, a real positive force for society. But his willingness to try to bully a person when they're down shows a big lack of character. And chances are that that clean-cut Connecticut boy is gonna get married and have kids. What's gonna happen if his kids develop mental problems? What's gonna happen if they become outcast in school?

Is it gonna help them by ridiculing them? Will karma come and bite him in the ass if he ends up raising a potential mass shooter? Now I don't know this kid. God's honest truth. I don't wish this on him.

I hope that he's happy for the rest of his life and that he has amazing kids. As a religious man, I know that we have God and the devil in all of us. And beyond religion, there's thousands of years of empirical evidence to suggest that all of us are capable of good and very capable of evil. So what's my point? It's that if we are ever going to fix this situation, more of us need to be forces of good rather than forces for evil.

That kid, that preppy kid wasn't serving any good by going over and needling the accused. He was turning himself into a tool for evil by throwing fuel onto a fire. It's really easy to be an asshole. It's easy to be mean spirited. It's also easy to sit back and point the finger and say, hey.

Look at the monster. But that's not what a good person does, and it's not what a leader does. We have so many veterans within our own community who've been stigmatized because of PTS, depression, and other issues. So many who've been outcasted because they don't fit in. And there's some amongst us who play up that stereotype with the no fucks given mentality.

We served this country because we wanted to defend it and see it thrive because we wanted to defend liberty and freedom. Well, I'm here to tell you that the biggest threat to our liberty and freedom is our is our own societal nihilism. There's not enough people out there who actually care. They're content to have the government put a Band Aid on the situation, to have the authority solve the problem. And if you wanna win the war for America's soul, the only way that it can be won is if there's more of us out there building businesses, building careers, hiring people, and having a true impact on our own communities.

There's got to be more of us out there talking to the youth. There's got to be more of us out there reaching out to guys who are dealing with issues, and actually giving them real guidance. There's lots of people talking about our problems. There's lots of people putting up millennial memes, memes that are making fun of them, calling them the lost generation, talking about them as if they can't handle themselves. But there's very few people doing much more than posting on social media about millennials.

Far generation is harder and more capable than the millennial generation. And I don't think it actually is. It's only because we had older men with a lot more sense than us put us on the right path. And it's because we failed this generation and are currently failing this generation with a lack of real guidance. And if this country is weaker than it once was, well, we might not want to admit it, but it's also because of all of us.

When you serve in the Marine Corps or any other military service, you're responsible for the training and upbringing of your subordinates. You need to train them so that they can eventually take over your own job. Well, that's not happening in society for some reason. And everybody wants to point the finger. The reality is, if we don't step up, if we don't take charge, if we don't become leaders in our communities, if we don't put ourselves into position to help others, then we are to blame.

And if we want to change anything, that needs to change and we need to change at our core. This is Chris Albert with The Warrior Soul podcast and I want to thank you for listening to this episode and this rant. I hope that this all made sense for you. And I hope that you make the decision to take a greater role in your community, a greater role in the lives of the young men and women around you. And I hope that life treats you kindly, and that you live an amazing, awesome, wonderful life that our fallen brothers and sisters could be proud of.

Thank you so much, and I'm out. What's going on, gents? This is Chris again, and I wanted to come on here to gauge your interest on something. I've been toying around with this idea for a while, and it's been to create a real brotherhood within what we do here at Warrior Soul, a community of men who are trying to live their best lives. And the concept is called this, the Warrior's Obituary Society.

Its purpose is to empower its members to live epic lives worthy of an epic obituary. And the way it's gonna work is this. We've created an eight week development program. That development program is gonna take you through a process of getting your body in order, your mind in order, your personal finances in order, your relationships in order. And then once that eight week program is done, then you will take your place in what's called the Warrior's Obituary Society.

And that society is going to be an inner circle, where we hold each other accountable for getting to our goals. We follow through on assignments each month, both mental and physical challenges, and we help in developing other new members who come in. What I wanna do right now is to put this out as a pilot program. And I know that the details are a little bit hazy right now, but if what I just told you seems to pique your interest a little bit, send me an email over at chris@warriorsoulagoge.com. That's chris@warriorsoulagoge.com.

What I'd like to do is to pilot this with a few of you to get things started so that you guys can take your place as leaders in developing new members as they come in. This will be a paid program, but I'm not thinking of anything crazy expensive or anything like that. There'll be a monthly fee to keep operations running and also to help to support this show and its production. And like I said, what I'm trying to do here is to create a real community where we can all get together and help each other to have greater impacts on our family, our communities, and to make our visions in life come true. So if you're interested, let me know.

Like I said, you can email me over at chris@warriorsoulagoge.com, and you can DM me over on my Instagram. The account's name is Warrior Soul Agoge. And thank you guys so much for listening. I'll talk to you all very soon.