There’s a 900-Year-Old Answer to Our Most Modern Problem

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David French

Opinion

There’s a 900-Year-Old Answer to Our Most Modern Problem

April 30, 2026,

5:04 a.m. ET

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George Douglas

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By

David French

Opinion Columnist

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In the spring of 2025, a relationship between two young Florida State University students took a dark turn. Phoenix and Chad had been texting about their classes, grades and social lives. But their conversations began to change.

First, Phoenix expressed deep despair and talked about suicide. Next, he started asking disturbing questions about school shootings. Were the shooters typically convicted? What was their punishment? How did the media cover the shootings?

He also asked Chad a series of questions about firearms, and asked when the campus student center was busiest. Chad answered every text, providing Phoenix with precise, factual information: Here’s how the gun works. Here’s when the most people are in the student center.

Chad didn’t contact Phoenix’s parents, didn’t raise an alarm with law enforcement. Instead, Chad just answered Phoenix’s questions, seemingly oblivious to the red flags waving high. And those red flags mattered. Florida enacted a law after the 2018 mass shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland that allows law enforcement to obtain a

risk protection order

in the event that a person poses a “significant danger of causing personal injury to himself or herself or others.”

Chad, however, remained silent.

Then, shortly before noon on April 17, 2025, Chad got the most ominous text of all: Phoenix asked how to disengage the safety on a shotgun. Chad answered, and less than three minutes later, Phoenix opened fire in the Florida State University student union, killing two people and injuring several others.

Everything about that story

is true, according to officials, except for one crucial fact: The man accused in the shooting, Phoenix Ikner, wasn’t texting with a person named Chad, but rather

with an entity we call Chat

. He was speaking, as you may well have realized, with ChatGPT, the most popular artificial intelligence platform in the world.

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