What the hell is wrong with the parents of the Highland Park shooter, Bobby Crimo? These people should be in jail! The inimitable Chicago columnist John Kass writes:

Immediately, the mass shooting at the Independence Day parade at Highland Park was weaponized for its political value, even before the grief-stricken families of the victims could begin to process their loss.

And the suspect’s family was out there too, at least one of them saying he never saw this coming, that he was surprised.

Surprised?

Does anyone really believe that his family did not know of his violent fantasies and bloody dreams? No, nobody believes that. You take one look at the suspect, with the face tattoos and that mouth of madness, you listen to the violent videos he put out, you see the eyes that are so dark and lightless, you see the evil that should have been locked away and yet was not locked away.

He’s locked away now, but it’s too late for the people of Highland Park.

Get this:

Meanwhile, his parents’ attorney has spoken out in their defense to insist there were ‘no red flags’ for them to report to police.

Crimo used a legally purchased Smith & Wesson M&P 15 to carry out the attack. He bought the weapon – which costs around $800 – in 2020

Crimo’s father supported his application for a FOID card – the license needed to buy guns – in 2019 when he was 19 and just two months after an incident when police were called to the family home.

Police confiscated 16 knives after that incident because Crimo had ‘threatened to kill everyone’.

He was not arrested and his family say cops gave the knives back two weeks later.

The Crimos are not victims. They are in some way responsible for this — morally, if not legally. The father helped the freak son buy a gun even after the cops had come to his house to take his knives away after he threatened to kill people!

How do you pass a law against that? Against an adult helping his adult son buy a gun? More Kass:

Bobby Crimo III, the 21-year-old suspect, had posted videos filled with violence and his fantasies of mass shootings. He calls himself “Awake the Rapper.”

And no one knew?

He left a trail of violent videos and images, glorifying murders, talking of the inevitability of his “awakening,” the way an insect transforms, or a mass murderer morphs into what he’s becoming. I watched one video in which he’s in a classroom talking about murder. I turned it off. I couldn’t watch him anymore.

And there were no warning signs? They didn’t see anything?

Nobody believes that.

The skinny, bug-like kid with tattoos all over his face. Who was a loner with no friends. Who drove a car with “PUSSY MAGNET” on the windshield? The one who once threatened to kill everybody? This guy?

This guy?

We don’t know what exactly was wrong with Crimo parents, but I wonder if people have just become so absurdly comfortable with the transgressiveness that we don’t notice extreme behavior, or signs that things are terribly wrong with young people? Someone wrote me recently with news of the local school instructing teachers to honor a student’s claim that his identity is as an animal. (The reader gave details, but asked me not to write about it because he didn’t want to burn his source. As I recall, he was just trying to assure me that these stories are not false, that this stuff is happening in some places.)

Last bit from Kass:

We subject the young to relentless psychological pressure to satisfy the emptiness of our politics. We don’t think of the culture we raise them in. We’re our own gods now.

And yet we’re surprised at the monsters that we’ve created?