Fryberg School Shooting and a Community's Misappropriation of "Forgiveness"

I can't quite put my finger on it, but there is something troubling and just plain "off" in the way the latest school shooter's community has expropriated one of the English language's most sacred moral imperatives, "forgiveness."  This is not a term we fling around to stop a ghastly crime from being investigated, or to divert a nation from emotionally processing a nightmare. And yet, less than forty eight hours after fifteen year old Jaylen Fryberg shot 5 friends and relatives, killing 3, including himself, news headlines have the surviving victim, Nate Hatcher, lying in a hospital bed with a bullet hole in his jaw, tweeting (at least according to the grandfather) "I love you and I forgive you Jaylen rest in peace." In fact, even more gruesome details of the crime have now been revealed.  The shooter sent text messages asking the victims to meet him at a table in the cafeteria, where he subsequently marched in with a .40 caliber Beretta handgun and proceeded to shoot each one of them with a bullet to the head.  

The survivors of such a tragedy can forgive or not forgive as they see fit, on their own emotional time table.  But what distresses me about what appears to be a rush to forgiveness on the part of that community, is that its detachment from the reality of a young man who has just executed his "best friends" oddly mirrors the psychopathic detachment of the perpetrator, himself.  Practically, the first things out of the mouths of classmates were "we love and forgive Jaylen."  But if these young people considered themselves his friends, I can well understand Fryberg's sense of emotional isolation and loneliness.  It's as though no one cared to know the real Jaylen.   Those who claimed to "love" him were too detached, unwilling and unable to see this young man as the vulnerable, emotionally needy person that he truly was. So Fryberg orchestrates a crime so ghastly that people will have to hear his screams. And yet they still don't, covering the commotion with declarations of "love and forgiveness."

Of course this is a community in shock and deep mourning. But it is also a community that must get to the bottom of this tragedy, the sooner the better.  Who gave Jaylen Fryberg the Beretta?  There was an account in a London newspaper that his parents had given him a gun for his birthday.  Was this the gun?  Is it even legal to give a child a firearm?  Might this kid have been on steroids, which have been known to make people enraged and aggressive?

Verbal expressions of "love and forgiveness" are not sugarcoatings for facts, nor can they suppress the pain of grief without creating their own set of unintended emotional consequences.