First, let’s get this out of the way: kudos to the principal of Ontario Christian High School, Benjamin Dykhouse, for preventing a mass casualty incident at his school. RedState’s Jennifer Oliver O’Connell wrote about the chilling story. There appears to have been a plot to kill at least five students. One of the targets got wind of the attack and reported Sebastian Villaseñor, 18, to Dykhouse of the threat, which led to authorities being informed. On February 14, it was announced that Villaseñor was arrested and charged with one count of an attempted criminal threat and five counts of attempted murder.
A school shooting was foiled—shouldn’t that be celebrated? Nope. There’s nothing that can be used against Republicans, so the media is ignoring the story. O’Connell nails the reasons, which you already know. You’d think the press would leap onto this foiled attack since multiple AR-15 rifles, 30-round magazines, and handguns were cataloged by police at this kid’s residence. The guns belonged to Villaseñor’s father.
Update on school shooting plot averted by tip from a student this week.
— K-12 School Shooting Database (@K12ssdb) February 17, 2024
An 18-year-old Ontario Christian High School (CA) student who was plotting to shoot five fellow students developed his hate-based and neo-nazi ideologies online.
High school senior “was fixated on school… pic.twitter.com/ghy7rdgHf5
Villaseñor isn’t white; he didn’t kill anyone, and it would be a genuinely taxing exercise for even contrarian publications, like Slate, to cobble together how this incident could be used to attack Second Amendment rights. There’s also the mental health angle:
I'm sure some Taylor Lorenz-type is digging to see if they can find a selfie of him with a MAGA hat, but as far as can be ascertained from Chief Lorenz' Thursday press conference, Villaseñor was an awkward young man who had trouble connecting with others and this caused him to go down a rabbit hole.
[…]
Ontario PD Chief Lorenz said Villaseñor was obsessed with mass shootings, particularly Columbine, and actually used Google Maps to gauge the response time from the Ontario Police Department to Ontario Christian High School in the event of a shooting. This degree of obsession points to a mental imbalance of some kind; whether that imbalance was induced by medication or lack of it, is yet to be ascertained. Here's the good news: Sebastian Villaseñor can get some serious help and I pray he does. What a tragedy that this help will be coming through the penal system, but he will at least be getting focused care.
But what of the other young men and women who could use some focused care, but are being ignored? While there are supposedly resources being poured out to address this, what do we find being pushed by school systems? Gender-affirming care and activist curricula. Destroying children, especially boys, started way back in the '90s with blanket diagnoses and over-medicating for ADHD, and has now progressed to genital mutilation.
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Again, instead of ignoring this kid, the school acted. O’Connell made a good point to cite how this high school reacted to a threat like this compared to Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which allowed Nikolas Cruz, another disturbed individual, to keep attending classes despite his incidents with the law and lengthy mental health history.
The foiled Ontario Christian High School plot proves that there are plenty of laws on the books to stop these sorts of shootings. School administrators took the threat seriously and informed the police, which led to Villaseñor’s arrest. We didn’t have to hear about dead students, how the shooter was known to law enforcement or any of the follow-up details from these tragedies that often lead to these incidents being preventable.
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