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San Diego Local News

Opinion: A School Shooter’s Vow to ‘Become Death’ Evokes a Famous Warning to Mankind – Andrew M. McClellan

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Ethan Crumbley, 15, charged with first-degree murder in a high school shooting, poses in a jail booking photograph. Oakland County Sheriff via REUTERS

The family of a student wounded in the shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan in November is suing the school district and its officials for $100 million for failing to prevent the mass shooting that left four students dead and another seven injured.

The claim states the school ignored a bevy of evidence leading up to the attack (including warnings from students and parents about the alleged shooter, Ethan Crumbley) which could have prevented the atrocity. A separately filed state suit will seek an additional $100 million.

Among evidence brought to bear in the suit is a disturbing message Crumbley posted on Twitter the night before the shooting: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. See you tomorrow Oxford.” Initial media reports noted the first part of this post quotes a clip from the video game Fallout 4, a post-apocalyptic action role playing game set in a nuclear war-torn future. Crumbley — an avid gamer– seems likely to have repurposed the quote from this game as a grim precursor to his horrific act.

But the quote itself has a complicated history, far more ancient and nuanced than the cowardly shooter probably realized. This history deserves some brief consideration in light of Crumbley’s bastardized evocation of the phrase.

The quote is a loose translation of chapter 11, verse 32 of the ancient Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita (itself a section of book 6 of the lengthy epic poem the Mahabharata), written sometime during the second half of the first millennium BCE. In the moments before a massive war is set to break out, the warrior-prince Arjuna and his charioteer Krishna (an incarnation of the god Vishnu) have a discussion — 700 verses worth — about Arjuna’s apprehensions (as he stares down an opposing force filled with his own friends and kin) and his duty as a warrior.

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