A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor (The Carls, #2)

by Hank Green

We gave everyone in America that power when we decided that basically anyone can buy an assault rifle. I don’t pretend to understand the motivations of these shooters, but ultimately it has to be at least a little bit about power, right? They’ve been convinced that having power is how you measure your worth, and they are sad or angry or, as is so often the case, both, and they see that there’s one way they can definitely change the world. They’ve seen a dozen other guys do the same thing, so why not them? I hate that I even have to write about it here because, ultimately, billions of people decide every day to be decent and kind, but one person decides to be powerful for a moment and now I have to talk about it or people will be like, “But what about the shooting?” Well, what about it? It happened. It was terrible. Why did it happen? Was he a Defender? Was it ultimately about the Carls? No. Those are all the wrong questions. It’s so tempting, even now, to try to blame all of the politicians and pundits who were rising in power by feeding on people’s fear and confusion. We can blame those people, but the only thing a mass murder “means” is that we’ve made it too easy to kill. None of us are going to talk about it anymore in this book, because if we did, that man will get to keep having his power on us, and I’m sick of it. Moving on.

Do you know what I think the most amazing thing the human race has ever done is? It isn’t the weapons we’ve built, and it certainly isn’t the weapons we’ve used, it’s the weapons we haven’t used.