Astrology and the Parkland School Shootings

I have thus far avoided commenting on the shooting at Marjory Stonement Douglas High School for a couple of reasons. First of all it sometimes seems to me that our incessant discussion of these events becomes, at least in the minds of some deranged people, a means of celebrating them. Somewhere there’s a lonely and terribly unhappy person (almost certainly male and most likely white)listening to all the coverage of the Parkland shooting and thinking about what a rush it would be to become suddenly famous.

The second reason I’ve not commented on this latest atrocity is the fact that I’m not sure what astrology has to say about it. If I had a horoscope of the perpetrator I could certainly map the aspects that led him to this fateful decision. I have done this for other shooters. But in every case, the decision to kill has been made by that person. There is no aspect or astrological placement that makes someone a murderer. This is something you have to choose.

We could point to the New Moon and partial eclipse that took place on Feb. 15, the day after the shooting, as a factor. As I said in my last article, this was a particularly powerful and significant New Moon. However, though some mass shootings have taken place during difficult transits, most have not. The deciding factor is always what is happening in the horoscope of the shooter, and how he chooses to use that energy.

This makes the whole matter infuriatingly random, and astrologers typically have a deep distaste for randomness. “Everything happens for a reason” is something I hear a lot. I’m sure that in a larger, cosmic sense this is true, but in the immediate, in the broken heart of a grieving parent, this sentiment carries little weight.

I think that, as astrologers, we have to accept a degree of randomness, particularly when it comes to death. The soul may be programmed to live forever, but the body is fragile. There are circumstances, such as the failure of a major organ or an unfortunate encounter with a bullet, in which it will cease to function. These circumstances typically coincide with difficult transits and/or unfortunate secondary progressions, but these are almost always difficult aspects that we have encountered previously and survived. What makes one event deadly and another not is the nature of the circumstance, our access to medical care and how badly the soul wants to stick around.

There are, of course, things we could do as a society to make it less likely that the random circumstance that brings about your death will be an idiot with an AR-15, but we’re not going to do them. The fact is that the “mad shooter” lobby presently has control of our government and any political solution is going to have to wait for a couple of election cycles. Until then, we will wake up every morning with the certainty that a violent death could be waiting for us or our children, and what will determine whether we live or die will be what Mars or Uranus is doing in the horoscope of some lonely, deeply unhappy person with a gun permit.