Welcome, guys and gals. I'm Connor Beaton. And today we're going to talk about a little bit of a different

subject than normal. Recently, as I'm sure you've seen in the news, there was a mass shooting,

two mass shootings the other day, one in El Paso and the other one in Dayton, Ohio, where over,

I think, a little bit more than 31 people were shot and killed. And usually I

don't talk about these subjects on the podcast. One, because they're crappy to talk about,

just in a basic way. But two, when these things happen, we get inundated, inundated. All social media platforms and media platforms are talking about it and what to do and what they

think is best and their opinions are being let loose and it can feel overwhelming.

They can feel like it's hard to escape this negative hate-fueled conversation that actually doesn't seem to go anywhere,

right? The problem is that largely I haven't wanted to talk about it, mostly because I don't

think that it necessarily goes anywhere. But I think that that time is coming to an end.

And I'll tell you why.

One, there seems to be something a little bit different about what happened this week,

mostly because the two shootings happened 14 hours apart.

And one of them was clearly fueled by racism and more xenophobic ideology.

And the challenge with this is that most of these mass shootings are not necessarily because

it's not a simple, it's not a simple take on why these things happen, right?

And I think the challenge is that we can get lost looking at why someone commits a mass shooting.

And there can be hundreds, maybe thousands of reasons why people do that.

Largely, though, we can see that the environment that people grow up in is indicative of who they become. So if people grow up in an environment that is absolutely fueled by hatred towards black people or Hispanic people or whatever, gay people, then that's the environment they grow up in.

And if they adopt that mentality, because that's been preached to them, and they have been

taught this hatred and they've been taught this separation and segregation, and they've been

taught this level of better than other human beings and that and that they they have the right

...