After the Roxborough shooting, I’m left wondering why our children are so willing to kill each other

When police announced that a 16-year-old was wanted in the murder of 14-year-old student-athlete Nicolas Elizalde, I was numb. Even before the announcement, I knew in my heart that the shooters were children, just like Elizalde and the four teens who were wounded in the incident.

The crime was heinous. Five shooters and possibly a sixth suspect, a getaway driver, sat in a stolen SUV, waiting for a group of teen football players to walk toward the locker room after a junior varsity scrimmage at Roxborough High School. As the boys approached, the shooters jumped from the vehicle and sprayed the area with more than 60 bullets. Elizalde fell at the bottom of the steps leading to the locker room as one of the shooters chased a 17-year-old, firing until his gun was empty.

The suspect, Dayron Burney-Thorne, will face murder charges, but he won’t face them alone. When high-profile crimes like this one take place in Philadelphia, those involved are typically caught and prosecuted. In the everyday shootings that don’t make headlines, the chances of arrests and prosecutions are abysmal, at best, especially when the victims are young Black men.

» READ MORE: As fear grips our city, I understand why some are calling for the return of stop-and-frisk | Solomon Jones

But this isn’t the time to bemoan the inadequacy of our criminal justice system. This is a time for truth. The truth that goes beyond race and class, poverty and affluence. This is about identifying why American children of every stripe are so willing to kill their peers.

This is about parenting — a task that was already difficult before technology made it impossible to hide the world’s evils from children. Now, in an age when our children spend more time on TikTok than they do with their parents, those of us who are attempting to raise our children to adulthood face a stark reality.

We live in a society where firearms are the leading cause of death for children. It is a society where gun violence is encouraged, where ignorance is celebrated, and where murder is relentlessly presented as a viable option when conflicts arise.

Our children are fighting for attention in a society where every sordid detail of our lives is shouted through a virtual bullhorn, and he who shouts the loudest is the winner of a never-ending reality show.

That is why people are engaging in behavior that’s meant to be outrageous, meant to be shocking, meant to be a game of one-upmanship.

» READ MORE: Why the war on gun violence is also a battle against systemic inequality | Solomon Jones

Drill music — the catchy, profanity-laced hip hop anthems that punctuate the culture of murder — teaches children that the rules of the streets are more important than the rules of their homes. It teaches them that if someone takes one of yours, you should take two of theirs. And if your enemy puts the aftermath of a shooting on Instagram, then you should livestream your vengeance so that everyone knows you’re a killer.

Of course, parents know there are only two ways for that to end — with death or imprisonment. I know there are parents across the ideological spectrum who repeatedly deliver that message to their children. Sadly, the addictive lure of social media often causes such warnings to fall on deaf ears.

As a result, America is raising kids who are willing to die for the cheers of the crowd, for the approval of people who don’t matter, for the fake adoration of Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.

“So what do we do? First, we parent.”

So what do we do? First, we parent. That means providing real guidance, speaking real truth, listening to our children even when we don’t want to, and providing them with safety and security. We must work together to raise them, and let them know most of all that they are loved.

Would better parenting have stopped the carnage at Roxborough High? Would it have prevented the shooting deaths of two protesters and the wounding of another by 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wis., who claimed self-defense and was acquitted in court for his actions? Could better parenting have stopped 18-year-old Salvador Ramos from killing 19 children and two teachers at an Uvalde, Texas, elementary school?

There is no guarantee that it would have. The reality is that good parenting can’t make everyone do the right thing, and it can’t save every child, because sometimes, no matter what you do, your children will fall victim to America’s culture of violence.

Still, it’s worth the effort, because if we are to save this generation, we can’t be afraid to parent them. In fact, we should be afraid not to do so.