In early September, at Apalachee High School 50 miles outside of Atlanta, Georgia,14-year-old Colt Gray opened fire, killing two teachers, two classmates, and wounding nine others. Fortunately, Gray’s killing spree was relatively contained. The police arrived within five minutes, subdued Gray, and took him into custody.

Surprisingly, Gray’s father, Colin, was also charged with manslaughter. It was only the second notable example of punishing the parents who enable their children’s murder sprees, the first example being Ethan Crumbley in Michigan last year.

Despite the initial attention media outlets expended on the story, it quickly cycled out of coverage and was effectively memory-holed in just under two weeks. Considering the gravity of the matter, it’s worth asking why that happened.

For instance, why did Gray shoot those people and why did no one stop him ahead of time? The details given by police suggest he fired his gun indiscriminately. Evidently, he was not targeting anyone in particular, nor did he have any explicit vendettas against the school.

What is known is that Colt Gray was mentally disturbed, bullied, and came from a broken home. His parents were divorced, and his father (yes, the guy who gave his son an AR-15 for his 14^th birthday) had primary custody, because his mother was a drug abuser. In middle school, kids teased Colt and apparently called him gay. Outside of school, he spent time on the group chat program Discord, where he took a username inspired by the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter Adam Lanza. There he expressed a desire to shoot up his school and “expressed frustration that transgender people were being accepted in society,” according to reporting by CNN.

Last year, the FBI questioned Gray, who was then 13 years old, about an allegation that he’d threatened to shoot people and apparently determined there wasn’t enough information to continue the investigation or even recommend precautions. Presumably, it was known that Gray was making these threats, that his father was training him to use firearms, and that there were several red flags indicating a possible violent psychotic outburst. And yet they did nothing.

Gray’s mother even warned the school that her son might do something, both on the morning of the shooting and a week prior to the shooting. But again, no action was taken.

Why? Despite all the reported details, this question is still not answered. Instead, people are left to infer the reasons and causes, and that is often done from a political angle.

The gun-control advocates will suggest that the destructive power of the AR-15 seduced Gray into going on his rampage. And the Second Amendment supporters will point to the criminal thoughtlessness of Gray’s father as well as the incompetence of the FBI which dropped the ball on investigating Gray.

Then there are the culture warriors who, recalling the school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee by a transgendered biological male, see the picture of an effeminate Colt, read about him being called gay, notice him bringing up transgenderism in his Discord chats, and conclude that he suffered from gender dysphoria. They then speculate that he might have been receiving hormone therapy or at least taking some kind of anti-depressant medication that possibly induced homicidal behavior.

While authorities are trying to prevent certain problematic narratives from coming to light, the lack of clear answers about Colt Gray’s mass murder only promises that more such shootings will happen. If we don’t know what caused him to shoot up the school, then we will not know how to stop the next one—and there is always a next one.

Speaking as a teacher, I see nothing different about school security and the way these threats are neutralized. Sure, every person at a public-school campus is trained to respond to an active shooter and report any suspicious behavior, but what does this matter if we are all still guessing who might be the next crazed shooter? Even the best protocols and state-of-the-art automatic lockdown systems will come to nothing if known psychopaths are free to come and go with little supervision.

At the heart of this shooting, and nearly every shooting, there seems to be an inexplicable unwillingness to intervene. This basic truth is covered up with so much detail about the timeline, the shooter’s family, the victims who died, and every tangentially related political issue.

Although people might think that these deranged minors are impossible to identify, the opposite is true. There is an abundance of paperwork on every mentally ill student prone to violence—this is indeed one of the few virtues of public schools. Everyone knows who these students are, and no one is surprised when they turn out to be school shooters.

The problem is that there are instances when nothing is done even when all the evidence points to a potential catastrophe. Lately, this seems to happen because the people in charge want to avoid accusations of discrimination. After all, the student may suffer from a psychological disorder, be a racial minority, have a disability, or identify as gay or transgender. He may also be posting insane things on social media, making threats to the school, and living in a troubled household where guns are easily accessible. Yet school authorities and law enforcement are hesitant to act for fear of lawsuits or pushback from the community.

Thus, it’s quite possible that if school administrators threw the book at Colt Gray as an 8^th grader and assigned him to the district’s Disciplinary Alternative Education Program for the following four years, there would have been an outcry from all directions. Administrators would be portrayed as intolerant homophobes targeting an innocent student who was routinely bullied and struggled with depression. Sure, they would have saved the lives of Colt’s future victims and possibly Colt himself from spiraling out of control, but no one would understand this.

People might understand, however, if we finally let the truth come out about this story and all the others like it. It’s clear that there needs to be strong preventative measures for kids like Colt Gray. This doesn’t necessarily equate to imposing a system akin to a police state at our schools, just applying common sense interventions for students who pose safety risks. The answer doesn’t always have to be beefing up security or somehow confiscating people’s guns. In most cases, it’s just having the courage to do the obvious thing and giving troubled kids the help and protection they and their classmates need.