If the Second Amendment is to Blame for Mass Murder, Then the First is to Blame as Well: Do We Get Rid of Both?
Not surprisingly, mass murderer Adam Lanza was a deeply disturbed kid:
Lanza’s strange behavior was well-known among his well-heeled neighbors in leafy Newtown, Conn. His antics irked several residents.
Mass murderer Adam Lanza, 20, was a ticking time bomb, people who knew him told the Daily News.
“This was a deeply disturbed kid,” a family insider told the Daily News. “He certainly had major issues. He was subject to outbursts from what I recall.”
Lanza, who friends and officials said suffered from Asperger’s syndrome or a personality disorder, had a tortured mind.
“Adam Lanza has been a weird kid since we were 5 years old,” a neighbor and former classmate named Tim Dalton wrote on Twitter. “As horrible as this was, I can’t say I am surprised . . . Burn in hell, Adam.”
Apparently, his mother was often home to check on her son, despite him being 20 years old. Ann Althouse had this to say:
But why isn’t there more talk about institutionalizing the mentally ill? Adam Lanza’s mother needed to be home with him? What 20-year-old needs pervasive supervision from his mother? I suspect the mother, who is now dead, had very serious problems of her own. I can’t understand her keeping those 3 weapons — pictured at the link — in the home along with a 20-year-old man who — in her view — required her stay-at-home motherhood.
We’re so sympathetic to children, and now we’re distracted by our sympathy for the dead children, but what about all the deeply troubled young people? Why are we so sympathetic to them up until the point where they act? Or… I mean… why does our sympathy toward the mentally ill take the form of regarding them as socially awkward and weird and leaving them alone?
Good question. As you read this, there are hundreds if not thousands of mentally ill people and their families across the U.S. who have nowhere to turn for help or guidance — or the help they get is not enough. There are few mental health institutions left to take in these individuals, and our society leaves them and their families to fend for themselves. Left to their own devices, some of the mentally ill either lose touch with reality or their thought processes become so distorted or delusional that they think violence is the only answer. This distorted thinking, combined with the 24/7 news coverage of these mass shooting events, distorts the disturbed person’s mind further, often leading to a feeling that his anxiety, frustration, and anger must be acted upon. Seeing other shooters showered with media coverage leads to a possible copycat effect, as outlined in the book The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow’s Headlines.
There are many areas of blame that can be explored in a mass killing. I think that much of it has to do first with the perpetrator and also with deinstitutionalization, but others think differently. If some idiots want to blame the Second Amendment for the recent killings, go ahead. But if you do, you will also have to blame the First Amendment, which allows freedom of the press and which has just as much to do with these events. If citizens’ rights to bear arms is in question here, then so is the right to a free press. Are we really willing to give up our freedoms that easily? Wouldn’t it make more sense to figure out how and when to treat the mentally ill so that murder isn’t an option?
Also read: Bloomberg Uses Tragedy to Tell the 99% How to Live
Both you and Ann Althouse are more aware and alert than 98.773% (I checked) of MSM journalists and even your fellow PJ bloggers (one of whom blamed this tragedy entirely on “evil.” Only Mike Huckabee could rival that level of simple-mindedness).
“Why?!” screams everyone today. It’s not complicated.
1. People with mental illness are not properly monitored. Whether you wish to go down the Institutionalization route or just recommend more frequent mental health checkups, both Adam Lanza and Jared Loughner gave numerous signals to members of society that something was amiss. From trying to purchase a firearm in an evident hurry (big flag there) to erratic social behavior, people like these could have been intercepted before they acted out their inner demons. Even the shooter at Virginia Tech made an attempt to purchase a firearm and his record for mental instability came up on the computer. Nothing was done, and as a result, history was made.
2. Safeguards are presently insufficient. See VT shooter, above. When a flag goes up, do responsible people know what to do? Clearly not.
3. Insufficient security measures at schools. Whatever procedures or safeguards they had at that Connecticut school were clearly not enough to repel a loopy 20-year old armed to the teeth. I could take a tour of the whole “Gun Free Zone” here, but you all know the drill.
So there’s why we had and will continue to have mass shootings. We literally have no gun problem in the US. We have a lunatic problem and apparently we’re far more afraid of guns than lunatics. So let’s arrest the guns and let the lunatics roam the prairies until they learn how to make TNT or just drive cars into crowds. They’re lunatics because they’re crazy. But, like jihadis, they’re not stupid.
Take away their guns and they’ll come up with something even more horrifying, which has been the acumen of lunatics throughout history.
The two young people who committed the Columbine Colorado mass murders had never been diagnosed with any form of mental illness.
We can’t just dragoon people who have an eccentric personality into psychiatrists’ offices and demand that they be diagnosed before they go crazy. The vast majority of young people in “goth” subculture don’t commit murder. And we do have something called the presumption of innocence in America.
Of course, someone who is diagnosed as psychotic should be monitored by his support network–family, friends, church, and doctors. But to prevent someone from going crazy in the first place would require turning America into a totalitarian society.
We can’t just dragoon people who have an eccentric personality into psychiatrists’ offices and demand that they be diagnosed before they go crazy.
One word: England
“The two young people who committed the Columbine Colorado mass murders had never been diagnosed with any form of mental illness.”
They were both on psychiatric medication, aka murder/suicide pills.
You have me on most of what you say, but you _appear_ to be denying evil. The fundamental principle behind all these mass murders, behind all the totalitarian slaughter of the 20th century, behind the Rwandan genocide – is EVIL. It exists. If you are a Christian, you know that evil is personified in Satan, who seeks whom he may devour. And he has a gargantuan appetite. The New Testament provides the best world view.
I agree that we completely fail in our lack of attention paid to potentially violent mentally ill folks. I am conflicted on exactly what to do; we must change very carefully; we are NOT to become Soviet-like in institutionalizing the truly innocent or merely disturbed for our convenience.
…you know that evil is personified in Satan, who seeks whom he may devour. And he has a gargantuan appetite. The New Testament provides the best world view.
I used to work for one of the three greatest ophthalmologists in the world at Harvard Medical School. He is in private practice right now running his own clinic, but at Harvard he operated the largest Uveitis clinic in the Western Hemisphere. One day he told me about how certain people with ocular disorders were persecuted for being possessed by the devil. He showed me some clinic photos of patients presenting with Sympathetic Ophthalmia, ocular cicatricial pemphigoid, and other perfectly charming maladies. Really disturbing, particularly when you consider how people primarily regard other people through the eyes. If the feet are ugly, no biggie. But if the eyes look like the back half of a Pink Floyd concert on bad acid, watch out…
People like you come out of the woodwork, talking about devils and evil and suddenly we’re back in the goddamned 7th century. Now go watch Mike Huckabee talk about how this tragedy was caused by “removing God from our schools.” It shouldn’t be too long before you’re blaming the gays for global warming.
Oh, for pity’s sake! You lunkheads are more blind than the poor fools that didn’t understand ailements back in the day.
Denying that evil exists is foolish. There are certain people that revel in the misery of others and who enjoy it when the world burns. They aren’t mentally ill – they are just EVIL!
but claiming the Devil made them do it excuses them.
Good Grief! Way to oversimplify. Of course, the devil didn’t MAKE them do it unless you’re talking about an actual demonic possession which I believe is so rare as to be pretty much non-existent in practical terms, so let’s forget I mentioned it. No, the devil doesn’t make you do anything. He can only tempt. He can only whisper. You’re the one who ultimately has the free will to pick and choose what you will do. The devil is only the source of evil, and no one but you can choose to use it or not.
Lanza chose evil. Now you can argue that if he had a mental disorder, his mind was weaker tham most, and God takes that into account when he judges. I don’t think it’ll help Adam much, though.
Just because people were misdiagnosed as possessed in the past, doesn’t mean demonic possession isn’t real. The Catholic Church requires that all candidates for exorcism must be thoroughly evaluated to rule out all natural illnesses before they undergo an exorcism.
Just because people were misdiagnosed as possessed in the past, doesn’t mean demonic possession isn’t real.
You people would be hysterical if you weren’t so tragic.
@Zorro – The greatest triumphant lie the devil ever achieved was convincing people he doesn’t exist.
Zorro, I have far less of a problem with Christian theology’s anthropomorphization of evil in the personhood of Satan, than I do with the far greater number of people who believe that there is no such thing as evil (remember the reaction to the “Axis of Evil” speech?), and that all such acts can be reduced to poverty, mental illness, “victimhood,” etc. The fact is we almost never saw any of this as recently as 40 years ago and now it’s a regular, if infrequent occurrence. Something has changed in our culture, and it isn’t guns, which were always available. One thing that’s changed is our exposure to almost unimaginable levels of intense, de-contextualized violence and mayhem as entertainment from a very early age. Another is the myriad ramifications of the decline of Judeo-Christian belief: you may believe ethical monotheism is silly and irrational, but it is silly and irrational to believe that there would be no negative societal consequences from a radical secularization of society. This murderer obviously did not have any concerns about an eternal soul and God’s judgment. If I’ve put the problem correctly, then it is obvious that there is no simple solution to the problem, hence the irresistible attraction of simple “solutions” like gun control. Want to see how well gun control works? Look at Mexico. Think gun control can work here? Let’s try an experiment: let’s ban marijuana and see how that works.
As I have stated before, the US health care system is extremely poor with its approach to people who suffer from mental disorders, personality disorders & other maladies that prompt episodes of insanely violent outbursts such as this that occurred in Newtown on Friday. Much work should be done in assessing, diagnosing & formulating programs designed to both contain & treat these patients, thereby providing a means to protect the rest of society from them AWA protecting them from themselves.
Agreed.
Mental illness is a BIG problem that needs loads more attention. However, whatever the reason behind this unspeakable tragedy, he wouldn’t have efficiently mowed down as many people as he did without the tools at his disposal.
I know, I know, we often hear the “guns don’t kill people – people do” argument. Likewise, planes don’t kill people – people flying them into buildings do. And yet, I recall that we immediately and decisively worked to keep deranged people from gaining possession of planes when a handful of those people used them as tools of mass murder. We can all agree that we need to keep guns out of the hands of crazy people, right? When are we going to have a national conversation about this and do something about it?
Yes – and fifty thousand people are killed every year with cars. Yet we don’t seek to ban those.
On the same day this guy killed 20 kids a guy in China killed 22 kids and 1 adault with a knife. I strongly doubt the Chinese will ban knives.
This guy didn’t “buy” the guns he used – he stole them. How do you prevent that? And while he’s been describes a peculiar, he showed no evidence of mental illness. The whole thing seems to stem from him having a confrontation with four teachers (three of whome he killed the fourth was not in the school that day) the day before. It’s the confrontation that set him off.
You raise several separate issues, each worthy of discussion.
What are we going to do about mental illness? There are many levels of mental illness and some people present a danger to themselves and others. Should we reinstate mental institutions? Hell, I don’t know but letting the most severely mentally ill roam free isn’t doing them or anyone else any good. A significant percentage of the homeless are mentally ill. They may pose no danger to anyone but themselves but the homeless live pretty miserable lives.
What about keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill? Well, there are already laws on the books about that. However, there are other laws such as HIPPA that prevent releasing the information that gun stores need to know about a potential customer’s mental illness. This is a significant issue with no easy answers. You can’t always just look at someone and know if they’re mentally ill or pose a danger to others.
As for banning gun ownership which some are advocating, it isn’t going to happen. Criminals by definition don’t obey the law. All banning guns will do is make the whole country a “gun free zone” and we’ve seem just how poorly those work.
I’m trying to avoid going political with this terrible incident but I’ll say this – when the attack first started, the school principal and psychologist bravely ran towards the sound. That’s what heros do. It would’ve been much better if they’d been properly trained and armed when confronting an armed and deranged young man. They might’ve had a chance to stopping him before he killed so many people. As it was, those brave women died in a valiant but ultimately futile attempt.
Cynical Wonder,
Did you miss what Zorro said? It doesn’t matter if we take away the guns. They will find more horrifying ways of killing people. China has complete gun control. There have been several mass knife attacks there that have killed many people. Instead of making us all completely defenseless against crazy people, why not give the teachers and adults at the school a fighting chance to live?
You will admit that guns are more efficient killing machines than some crazy person waving a knife, right?
Do you deny that properly placed explosives are more efficient killing tools than guns? McVeigh was a firearms expert with full access to any number of them, yet his weapon of choice was fertilizer and racing fuel (both still available) mixed to form ANFO. He never fired a shot and killed almost 10 times as many people.
Or the gunman could’ve always just stolen the guns. Oh wait, he did. If he hadn’t stolen them from his mother he could’ve smashed the window of a parked police car and picked up a full auto (guy in my hometown did that). What’s your brilliant proposal to stop that one?
” why not give the teachers and adults at the school a fighting chance to live?”
I didn’t catch that last line. Are you advocating that little Suzie pack heat in her Hello Kitty backpack? Really?
What an incredibly stupid remark. Your own quote said “teachers and adults”, not the kids. If the principle and teachers had been armed, they could have stopped him.
The week prior, a man shoved another man in front of a train in NYC because the voices in his head told him to. Mentally ill people don’t need guns to kill others. They need to be institutionalized which is no longer happening. Thanks to new drugs, these folks are roaming free, perhaps now being able to hold a job or study to some extent, but not completely cured.
Here’s the deal – He tried to obtain a gun legally and was denied. The laws worked. He only had the guns because he stole them another legal owner, his mother, whom he killed.
Did you know that CT had a bill from their Senate put before their legislature that would have changed the rules on institutionalization making it easier for people to be committed and medicated against their will? Were you also aware that CT is only one of ten states that does not have that kind of law in effect? See, this bill might have caught up Adam Lanza and institutionalized him for medicating had it passed, but thanks to groups like the ACLU and other civil rights groups, CT was unable to join the majority of other states who have these types of AOT laws. The bill died a quiet death.
If Lanza’s behavior was as disturbing as this artible makes it out to be, this bill, SB 452 (I believe), might have stopped what happened by catching Lanza for treatment he needed.
But of course, rather than see the obvious, you’d rather take away everyone’s guns because you can’t lock up the monsters in our society.
“And yet, I recall that we immediately and decisively worked to keep deranged people from gaining possession of planes when a handful of those people used them as tools of mass murder. ”
One word: TSA. How’s that working out for ya?
And we should try and keep both planes and guns out of the hands of the mentally ill. But we dont ban planes, nor guns, because both are useful when used responsibly.
I have a degree in Journalism and used to be a reporter and editor. If you think Education majors are dumb you should try the average Journalism major. Most of them are worse than dumb; they’re liberal, and they think they are intellectually and morally superior to everyone. That’s why the MSM is in the shape it is in.
You are wrong about Cho. He did buy at least two guns and ammunition legally because his mental instability and court ordered psych evaluation were NOT included in his records. For some reason the judge did not allow that to become a part of his record. Perhaps more of this coddling of monsters Ms. Althouse speaks of.
Zorro and many of the other comments are correct, as is this article. Our mental health system is broken, and too many people believe in “inexplicable evil” or The Devil Did It. I wrote a bit about the intial comments to the massacre yesterday, and went through Voltaire’s Candide and Melville on Evil and free will to get to the comments. See http://clarespark.com/2012/12/15/sandy-hook-massacre-and-the-problem-of-evil/.
Acknowledging evil doesn’t excuse it. There are evil people that walk amongst us and there’s even a medical term for it – sociopath.
Two Zorros in one!
Full disclosure. My family has close experience with mental illness. In my extended family of 100 or so persons, their are three known, positively.
I am so furious that I could scream. It is NOT about guns, it IS about mental illness. The public thinks of mental illness as described in movies like “A Beautiful Mind” (My brothers exact disease) and “One Flew Over the Cookoos Nest” (Which closed down mental institutions nation wide.) When will the smart people understand that mainstreaming mental illness is not helpful to the sick, but is only a feel good for themselves.
The number of times we, as a family, have dealt with one member or another only to have them check themselves out of the hospital after 72 hours (they are adults, ya know) is legion.
Scream, scream, scream.
Where are the professionals??
Rant off
For those of us who work in the field, the answer to your plaint of “where are they” can be answered by two words: “HIIPA Laws.” Since their inception, they have done more to prevent action(s) being taken when dealing with those with serious psychological issues. Effectively, we almost have to wait until one acts out before doing anything.
Always insist at the doctor’s receptionist desk that HIPAA be properly pronounced as “high-pay”. The ‘i’ is long because only one consonant separates it from a vowel. ‘AA’ is pronounced as a long ‘a’ because it is a doubled vowel. These are basic English pronounciation rules.
This shooting readily and clearly identifies that mental illness is not just a minor condition. The leftists in the 60′s went on a rampage about stigmatizing the mentally ill. Given that so little about the mind was known…yet so much was (I know, a paradoxical statement), they insisted that mental institutions be shut down and were 90% successful in that and re-aligning society’s view of mental problems, to the detriment of society as a whole.
Their argument was, “Well, if they hurt someone, then you can put them someplace but not before.” Yet, these same liberal-minded dolts are also the ones who think that guns are the problem.
Again, nanny-state-ism. By trying to control ever facet of human existence, except the ones that make sense, and by wanting to do it through government action instead of personal responsibility, you have…ta-daaa….Adam Lanza.
In the liberal mind of the left, Lanza had every bit as much owning/having access to guns as any sane individual. Now, why is it then that the liberal left portrays the average owner of the NRA as “insane”, “gun-crazy”, “unstable”?
I’m not sure but it sure does make a person think. Or, in the case of the average liberal—FEEL.
Secondly, I really don’t particularly care about Adam Lanza. Why? Because he should’ve been removed from society a long time ago. Stigma or otherwise matters not. After reading the list of names on Michelle Malkin’s site, it’s those people and their families I care about; Not Lanza and how to try to “understand” his mental torment. This year we’ve had several cases of deranged people killing others.
The gun is not to blame. Liberals are. They wanted it…they got it….they own it.
The MSM have acted as the instigators of national lynch mobs after shooting incidents like this for some years now. The lynch mob itself is made up largely of librul know-nothings and ignorant independents who are inclined to let their moods of the moment do the thinking for them. With Obama as Federal Marshal, let’s see if he will turn back this mob or let the lynching commence.
I’ll tell you what though, no statement was ever more true than ‘outlawing self-defense by outlawing weapons will ensure that only the lawless will be armed as the lawful become defenseless.’
Yes, it is about mental illness and especially the fact that families have no place to safely house mentally-ill adult children. I discovered when I taught a large-enrollment introductory university course that there were always one or two severely disturbed students in the course. The graduate Teaching Assistants (TAs) would have problems in their weekly tutorial sessions with these disturbed individuals acting out and frightening both other students and the TAs. The TAs would bring their concerns to me and I would contact the university’s counselling centre for advice on how to handle the situations. I learned from the counselling centre that these students would remain enrolled in whatever courses they could get into on campus NOT to get a degree, but because their parents had no other place to put these young disturbed adults and felt they would be safe on a public university campus. It is the complete de-institutionalization movement that began in the 1970s which has caused the public health problem of mentally-disturbed murderers today.
Confining mentally-disturbed people who have violent tendencies is not an evil thing to do. Confinement in a humane and safe setting would provide security for both the mentally-ill people (who seem to be quite confused and frightened by the “regular” world) and for the public in general.
Liberals sought to ban the symptom, not the cause. So to reduce the terrible mis-management of these sanatoriums, they banned them. This is exactly what they want to do with guns, only they have this pesky second amendment to contend with.
However, banning these facilities has not dealt with the problem of the truly insane who need to be committed. And likewise, banning guns isn’t going to deal with the state of mind of those who seek to commit murder.
In both cases, they seek to reduce the disease by banning the symptoms.
Gloria and Gork, you are more right than you think. We have this kind of problem here in the UK as well. At one time you could be sent to what we then called a “lunatic asylum”, and every 5 years your case would be reveiewd by a “board of control”, which very often simply ordered a further 5 years’ detention. There seems to have been little or no attempt at getting to the bottom of one’s condition. Some tried escaping – only to be tracked down and taken back, unless they were lucky. Now the idea has been “care in the community”, so-called, but while we haven’t had cases as bad as yours what have happened have been bad enough,
As for the “lynching” spoken of, again we experienced that back in 1996 in the wake of the Dunblane shooting. Here again, the signs could be seen well in advance – and the police officers who wanted the killer’s guns taken from him were overruled by their superior officer, who quite properly resigned when this came out. In this case, for MSM read the Sun.
Check out this story over at Ace of Spades:
“I Live With A Son Who Is Mentally Ill. I Love My Son. But He Terrifies Me ”
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/335723.php
I was just about to post that same story. This lady “gets” it. Her child needs to be institutionalized. So did this last shooter. The mainstreaming must stop for those who display violent tendency’s, actions and words like this child.
The institutions need not be like the horror stories of yesteryear.. think “One Flew Over The CooKoos Nest” but they need to be.
Nice link. But I believe the Tupperware container is not the solution to securing the knives. She needs a strongbox or a safe.
The mom in the Ct. shooting should have secured her guns in a gun safe, preferably a biometric one, where her son would not have access to the contents. A firearm for personal security should have been on her person.
The problem is, we don’t talk about responsible gun use/security, there’s simply a hysterical “ban guns” reflex.
Just remember that the the left has ‘scientific’ research proving that conservatives are mentally ill.
Many experts in the field of mental illness are quite left of center, politically speaking.
The left currently holds most of the reins of power in this nation. Quite securely, in fact.
Keep well in mind that we’re a long way down the road towards open tyranny. (The right bears its own share of the blame, for that.)
In many tyrannies, those who oppose the state are often remanded to the custody of ‘mental institutions.’
Balance, people. Calm, measured breaths before making or endorsing decisions which may well have a very personal impact on your own life.
The left only holds power as long as we are still one nation. Conservatives hold the true power. We have most of the weapons, military training and grow the food. A civil war would be short and sweet except for those in high density blue areas.
And a civil war is what you would have if progressive/marxist tried to lock up 100 million conservatives. Not gonna’ happen.
I think they’ve made the mistake of strategic over-reach, myself…but that doesn’t man that things won’t get messy before it’s all done. iow, they’ve made their move too soon.
I *think* that they’re hoping for a ‘pour encourager les autres’ effect when they do try to round up a few people.
At the moment, the only rein of political power that they don’t hold is the House. They own everything else, including The Pentagon.
All that’s left is to get rid of The Second Amendment – in effect, if not by constitutional or legislative means – take the House, and they’ll think they’ve won. That’ll be when things get interesting.
Trying to convince some conservatives of this potential scenario and outcome is a bit like trying to warn them – in 2002/2003 – about the comming housing collapse. (iow, I must be a nutcase.)
‘signs of tyranny,’ or ‘of a police state.’ Over the last decade, we’ve checked almost all of them off the list. A couple of more items and we’re there.
The “They” you refer to own, to some extent, the flag officers, who are highly political. The field grade officers- the ones who control the guns, and the NCO’s and other enlisted, are another matter entirely.
Now, if Obama was successful in getting congress to fund his million man National Civilian Security Force, IOW’s, his own personal brownshirts, then we’d have a problem.
Its not quite as hopeless as you think. Yes conservatives are in touble at the fed level, but we have large majorities at the state level, just look at MI, leftist at the national level, but conservative enough to pass right to work at the state level, same with WI, OH, VA, FL. That is one reason why conservatives should be pushing hard for federalism, especially since in the competition between leftist and conservative states, the leftist states are clearly losing, as in CA and IL.
WB (no.4) I understand your points (see Zhores Medvedev’s and Roy Medvedev’s book “A Question of Madness”, which I read many years ago) and I often wonder if ‘Progressives’ do as well, and subconsciously fear that they would end up among those locked away…
The body count racked up by criminals, crazies, and even careless people who kill with firearms or any other means pales beside the number slaughtered wholesale by governments.
Obama is leaving for Newton in the morning to meet with the families and rescue workers. Time for the President to exploit personal tragedies for a political photo op and to be seen shedding a fake tear with some of the commoners.
What do you wanna bet that the president will return to Washington and report to the nation that one of the victims mothers looked him in the eye and demanded, “Mr. President, How many more mothers will have to loose their little 6 year old child before you will finally call for strict new limits on handguns?” And the President will answer solemly that the time has come and he is announcing his commitment to pass the new “Sandy Hook gun control” bill that he will present to the congress next week.
Yes, no crisis can be wasted. One must strike while the iron, or in this case, the raw emotions, are hot.
Cooler heads never prevail when socialists are concerned. Yet…I recall one, major Hasan who went nanoo-nanoo and wiped out several people…military members and little, if anything was said over that.
That freak-show Bob Scheiffer says that “if the shooter had an arab name, people would be going nuts”. Interesting turn-of-phrase, to say the least but the anti-gun people, who love to use gunplay in movies to further their agenda and for their ‘hero’ to make their point, seem to never ever get it.
If not a gun, then a knife. If not a knife then a garden tool. If not a garden tool, then any of a number of things that can be used as/turned into a weapon.
It’s gotten to where people don’t understand people even as well as they did forty years ago. Or, in the case of the confirmed socialist, maybe they do by using emotional upheaval to rile people into action; And always the wrong one.
In the case of flying airplanes into buildings, there were dozens of warning signs for people to take action. One was that the people who wanted to commit the act took flying lessons, but didn’t want to learn how to land or take off, but just to “fly around”. They were also known members of terrorist organizations but were allowed to go to FBO’s and do their thing for fear of reprisals from the politically correct (AKA, socialist liberals).
We are reaching a tipping point in society and the liberals say it’s because our policies of the past 230 years “haven’t worked”. Yet…I recall when I was a kid, people didn’t lock their cars, homes and often left their things outside. Nowadays, home invasion, car theft and theft of personal property is at an all time high. Let’s see, it seems to closely parallel the liberalization of America. Letting criminals out of jail, not punishing people for certain things, especially if they’re a minority, considering jihad-crazed middle-eastern men between the ages of 18 to 35 to be “just as normal” as everyone else.
Hm…
I’m thinking prejudice is a good thing. I’m thinking stereotyping and profiling are too. I’m thinking that people in the early 1960s’ would’ve put Lanza in a home. THAT would’ve certainly prevented him from getting ahold of a gun, or any other kind of weapon and killing ANYONE. But no…he had rights, you see. It would’ve stigmatized him to put him away and deny him the opportunity to live his life. After all, he hadn’t hurt anyone. Threats? What’s that? (cough, cough). So he was “odd”. Wasn’t like he was gonna hurt anyone. Oh…wait…never mind.
The academics and intellectuals have, for years, done more damage by trying to justify their own practices and studies than any other group of people I can think of, save for the socialists en masse. But they are members of that uber-intellectual group that over-analyzes everything. But even Freud said it. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”. But most people can tell when someone is a danger. It’s an instinct that humans have and always did. But thanks to “experts” who categorize, accumulate data and falsely analyze it, write books, papers and do “studies” in order to get tenure and be thought of as “brilliant” we now have “wag the dog”.
Seems it’s going to keep getting worse before it ever gets better.
Molon Labe.
Obama cares so much about children that he voted against providing medical care for infants who survive an attempted abortion procedure. Mooch wrote a fundraising letter promoting partial-birth abortion.
We must never lose sight of the plain and indisputable fact that the purpose of the Second Amendment to the Constitution is to afford the citizenry arms to protect themselves against a tyrannical government.
It bears repeating that the purpose of British regulars for marching upon Lexington and Concord was to confiscate a cache of weapons stored by Colonials – in other words, they were attempting to disarm the citizenry such that they would not have the means to defy the tyranny of the crown that they were so loudly protesting.
We have ample evidence that the very government that was established at the conclusion of the American Revolution has itself become tyrannical, operating in size and scope well outside of its charter and of its founding principles
We also have ample evidence that elements within our government are acting affirmatively towards collapsing the government from within through deliberate fiscal malfeasance, e.g. failure to pass a federal budget as prescribed in the Constitution, deliberate quantitative easing of the money supply, deliberate and exorbitant deficit spending leading to astronomical national debt (I could go on and on…).
There is no debate that what happened in Newtown, CT Friday was a tragedy. So many lives were lost, so many more were irreparably ruined. As has been the case in almost all of the recent media sensations, the media’s initial reporting was wrong and in this case horribly and inexcusably wrong. I would say ‘a pox on their houses’ but they already are diseased and that disease is spreading unto us.
But what is so particularly galling, yet as predictable as the sun coming over the horizon in the morning, is the immediate seizure of a tragedy by those on the left to trumpet their political hobbyhorses – you can look to Michael Moore as an example of this.
And if one decides that one must rise to the defense of the importance of the Second Amendment to the very freedoms that we enjoy, we are shouted down as trying to politicize this tragedy. This, of course, is poppycock.
Friday, those who abided by the gun control laws of Connecticut found themselves defenseless and were mowed down by the one who did not abide by those laws. Laws constrain the behavior of those so inclined to live within the rule of law, not those who are determined to act lawlessly.
Guns are inanimate objects, incapable of reason or action. Guns are also an undeniable reality – their presence is a genie that cannot be put back in the bottle. Confiscation would be folly – only law abiding citizens would submit to confiscation (although I would be strongly in favor of civil disobedience – refusing to submit to confiscation as a direct attack upon my rights) and as can be seen in New York City or Chicago (tyrannical governments in their own right), the absence of a law abiding populace bearing arms only leads to increased violence. As the clique goes, “Why do I carry a gun? Because I can’t carry a cop.”
This is exactly the debate my soon-to-be son in law and I had with another individual on Facebook (I know, I know). The individual COULD NOT and WOULD NOT understand that the gun did not wake up Friday morning and decide it was time to kill 6 year olds. It was the decision of a mentally ill young man – he could have chosen other weapons – knife, ninja stars, bombs, etc… It was only a coincidence that he chose a gun.
I do not yet own a gun, but as soon as I’m physically able (recovering from shoulder surgery) to withstand the training, not only will I complete the paperwork, but will purchase a gun. And, sorry to say, I will not be a “law abiding citizen” who turns in their gun. I worry about the direction this country is going, and believe we’ll end up like our forefathers – defending ourselves from a tyrannical government in an attempt to retain the rights our Constitution gives us.
I would like to see the focus of the conversation turn from guns to the real issue – how can we help the mentally ill and their families. The liberals are really good at talking, and really not so good at implementation. They want to wring their hands and whine that there are problems, but oh dear what can we do? What we can do is recognize that many (not all) of these individuals are dangerous to themselves and others, and that BEFORE they act is the time to help them. If that means resurrecting mental health institutions, then so be it. There’s nothing that says those institutions have to be in the mold of Bedlam Hospital of old.
For once, I’d like to see a serious problem addressed, and solutions found, then see all the sidetracking that goes on.
“even your fellow PJ bloggers (one of whom blamed this tragedy entirely on “evil.” Only Mike Huckabee could rival that level of simple-mindedness).”
Simple-mindedness, aye, and hubris; to opine where one knows not, and facts are not yet assembled.
This is the most sensible thing I have read yet about this incredible event. I wish I could add some useful perspective — but I can’t. Of all the accounts I have read of all the mass killings this one stands out in some way as a perfect storm — even more than the one in Norway that I feel was most similar and the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma that also involved small children. I don’t expect that real life is going to change much for very many people as a consequence this shooting. Much will be said about doing all sorts of things but the bottom line is that these events are to rare to prepare for and impossible to predict — beyond saying that it will definitely happen again somewhere.
Let’s be clear – only those who want to live in a totally controlled society believe that eviscerating legal access to guns is the way to go.
Rational folks understand that criminals, and all sorts of evil people, will get their hands on weapons, regardless of what it takes. Then the only people not armed will be law abiding citizens. And this is a win-win for those who believe in gov’t control.
As to the Newton killer, clearly he was disturbed and evil too, but the fact that his mom didn’t realize that guns in her home wasn’t a good idea surely is a cause for concern.
And now the Communist regime in China is exhorting the Radical-in-Chief to do the right thing by the kiddies, and implement gun control. O M G !!
Is it any surprise that the Obama regime, which hearts with communists/socialists/Islamists, wants to copy them too and targets ‘Teabaggers’ and Vets as America’s internal threats – http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/12/10/another-bullseye-painted-on-the-backs-of-u-s-military-vets-addendum-to-the-hunt-against-vets-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki/
Oh yeah…the answer to the mass murder is to give the gangsters in Washington total control.
Benefits of gun control: Concentration camps, killing fields, gulags
What I find disturbing about this article is that it promotes a therapeutic view of humans that is just as off base as the blame the gun school of thought. Perhaps Dr. Smith is as guilty as the NYT oped writers when comes to reading her own publication. I highly recommend Richard Fernandez’s “The Shadow in the Hallway” published in this very same pjmedia.
We have done away God and the concepts of good and evil. As Frederick Nietzsche predicted the death of god liberates the individual to commit unspeakable crimes. Most people think Nietzsche thought that this was a good thing but, on the contrary, it drove him to despair. Having done away with good and evil and cloaking the individual in the collective with supporting voices from Randian radical individualism while we wrap up deviancy in therapeutic language, we have unleashed these demons among who will continue to wreak havoc whether we have guns or not.
Before the collectivists and the Randian radical individualists normalized anti-social and deviant behaviors these sociopathic spree killers took other routes to kill their victims. They became clandestine serial killers like Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy. They killed 5, 10 or in, Gacy’s case 33 children, before they were caught. The reality is most serials killers are never found. In the real world the Mounties, the FBI and the CSIs of the LVPD don’t always get their man.
Dr. Smith, me thinks that goal of this regime is to trash ALL amendments.
Not all of them. I’m sure they like the 16th Amendment just fine.
Thank you for this post. I have tried several times to express my feelings since Friday, and each time deleted what I wrote. I could not find the right words to say what I felt. Your post is a much needed dose of sanity.
On Friday the one phrase repeated by media was variations on “Things like this don’t happen in nice towns like this.” But mental illness can happen anywhere. I wonder how much the attitude that “these things don’t happen in nice places like this” contributed to the shooter not receiving the help he so obviously needed. Just as none of us are immune to physical injury, there is no such place so nice, so well kept up that young people are immune to illnesses of the mind.
They say people with Asperger’s syndrome lack empathy. As a society we tend to view empathy in the abstract. Children are taught in the classroom to respect all cultures and people who are different. To feel empathy one must actually talk with the other person. Empathy requires person-to-person interaction. Our culture lacks empathy; media and entertainment teaches division and derision of those who are different. Many young people have mental illness. no doubt all too many are treated with powerful drugs, and otherwise left to whatever circumstances chance surrounds them. Places where children might learn empathy, I mean places of worship that teach about a loving God who asks us to express our love by loving our neighbor, are mocked and despised.
Since Friday so much has been written about guns. Then again, it is the nature of our society to seek a quick fix. I do not believe there is a quick fix for the many young people who are suffering with mental illness. But if we take away all the guns then we can say we are a nice people and bad things never happen in nice people.
As an Aspie, I dispute the notion that Aspies lack empathy. On the contrary, Aspies have so much empathy it’s often overwhelming. What you perceive as a lack of empathy is actually sensory overload.
Absolutely – as mom of an 18 yo Aspie, I have to agree. I have often been frustrated with her “lack of empathy” on the one hand only to see it’s manifestation in unexpected ways. What I really recognize in her as a lack of empathy I also see in myself – primarily an inability to empathize with an overly emotional and irrational point of view or behavior. It is disturbing to me to hear of clearly mentally ill people being referred to as having Aspergers or Autism – neither of those diagnoses in and of themselves are indicative of a dangerous psyche. What is far worse, to me, is the fact that we have a teaching problem throughout this country. There is no substitute for the teaching done (or not done) at home. Sometimes what is not taught resonates even more than what is taught. Temple Grandin charges parents that a diagnosis of Autism or Aspergers is NOT license to allow bad behavior – proper behavior must be taught and ill-mannered behavior not accepted. If this country is to recover, we must start taking responsibility for teaching our own children. Doesn’t mean you have to homeschool, but you darned sure better be plugged in and ready to correct the progressive garbage that is being taught your students in history, government, literature, etc.
>>Do we get rid of both?<<
To answer the question in the title of this article, the vast majority of those who would happily outlaw gun ownership for private citizens and leave only government employees (and criminals) in possession of firearms would also be just as happy to do away with the 1st Amendment whenever it suited their purposes. That is, any time they happen to be losing an argument. You really can't ask rhetorical questions like that of the left anymore. Of course they'd do away with any part of the Constitution that doesn't suit them. Their federal judges have been working on just that for decades now.
Perceptive comment. And if you look at the speech codes on many leftist colleges, they already have done away with the first amendment. The whole thing about “hate speech” or “hate crime” is just another word for Orwellian thought crime.
99.999% of all mentally ill and weird people never hurt anybody, including those who “give clear signals”. Yet you guys would lock them all up. NOBODY, including our esteemed Dr. Helen, has the clairvoyance to predict who will snap violently and who will not. Gun makers and Amendment 2 are not to blame either.
Why does our society insist that somebody has to be blamed? Or that a reason even EXISTS? If a tornado hit a neighborhood and 20 kids died, people would just say “Oh well, tragic but random. Glad it’s not me”. This is essentially the same thing. A random tragedy of nature. It’s rare and is not getting any more common.
“99.999% of all mentally ill and weird people never hurt anybody, including those who “give clear signals”.”
I think your statistics are so obviously made up that you’ve abandoned any pretense to credibility right out of the gate.
ZZ,
Correct, most of the mentally ill never hurt anyone but they do more violence than the general population, though often experts will tell you otherwise in their quest to keep from stigmatizing the mentally ill. No one said anything about “locking them all up.” However, I do think we threw the baby out with the bath water when we closed the mental hospitals and said that the mentally ill would get help in the community. Little of that “help” ever materialized. I do have concerns with those with mental illness or violent tendencies whose families have nowhere to turn. Until you yourself or your family has been in that situation, you have no idea what it is to deal with someone mentally ill who is violent or potentially violent. You are often alone and must wait until your loved one does something before anyone will take action and even then, they often don’t.
And yes, as a psychologist, I believe a reason exists, for I have seen the transition many times from destructive thought processes to violence. People don’t just snap, they descend into hell, often with what they feel is no escape. As for the metaphor of the tornado, if somewhere along the path of that tornado, there was a possibility of intervention to keep it from killing those 20 kids, wouldn’t you want that? I am not saying psychological intervention is full-proof. It is not and often, what stops these killings is their tendency to tell someone what they are planning. We must all be more vigilant, not in the way that leads to targeting innocent people–I doubt anyone here wants something that horrible– but in ways that may keep them from their final plans. It can be done. I have seen it and I believe that intervention is possible.
I think you are right that while the mentally ill don’t need to be locked up, we did throw the baby out with the bathwater since some do need to at the very least be in a supervised setting.
They also need more community support-counseling etc.
But the other big elephant in the room is that the parent of an adult mentally ill child can’t make that child take medications, and they can’t make that child accept counseling services or anything at all to treat the mental illness.
They also have to jump through some almost impossibly high hoops to seek and get an involuntary commitment for a mentally ill relative who is clearly losing it and becoming a danger.
Also, what few mental health beds that are available are generally available only on an emergency basis, and are meant for short term care (a few days to a few weeks or in reality when the insurance says it won’t pay for anymore days at the hospital). People with severe mental illnesses need far more one on one care than a few days in a hospital.
Parents and families also need more respite.
Our society has all sorts of respite care and supervised living housing for the disabled, but very little if anything for the mentally ill.
Dr. Helen,
A monitoring and reaction system of the type required to prevent such incidents might be theoretically possible, but I don’t think our schools can produce the hundreds of thousands of caseworkers that would be required to run it and to do the required detailed evaluations of every quirky person in the country. I don’t think that many qualified people EXIST in our population. Not everybody is as smart as you, unfortunately.
The truth is as usual somewhere in between, on the lock the crazy people up meme.
Statistics has a concept called type 1 and type 2 errors, with a r4elationship where the more you try to eliminate one error, the more you get of the other.
In mental health the 2 errors are not committing somebody that needs to be, vs committing somebody that does not need to be committed.
In the old days, we were pretty good at committing the people that needed to be, but less good at not committing people erroneously, and not treating them very well when they were committed. Nowdays, we are erring too far on the not committing end. What we need is a happy medium.
99.999% of all mentally ill and weird people never hurt anybody, including those who “give clear signals”.
You are so full of shit you could float.
If the Second goes, the First will naturally follow. Just look at how many in the media now want to shut up dissenting opinion even to the point of throwing people in jail. That will come eventually, sooner without the Second than with.
Just look at the recent comments by Belafonte…
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2012/12/13/Harry-Belafonte-wants-President-Obama-to-simply-jail-all-of-those-who-disagree-with-him-and-rule-like-a-3rd-World-Dictator
Blaming gun control for these murders is like looking for your lost keys under the streetlignt. Easier to see, just not where the problem is located.
We should all worry when lefty rags like The Atlantic start musing about keeping weapons out of the hands of the mentally ill. Incarcerating and even exterminating the “mentally ill” has a sordid history in totalitarian countries – and it has a pretty ugly history in this Country as well. The reason “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” shut down practically every state mental institution in the Country was that it was entirely too true and too real. As late as the early to mid ’70s a county judge could essentially sentence you to life imprisonment with no right of habeas corpus on your family’s words or on his own initiative. That state psychiatrist in Grisham’s “A Time to Kill” is entirely too real. In much of the Country in the ’60s running afoul of law enforcement and having long hair or a bag of dope in your car or pocket was enough for some redneck elected judge to send you to the state looney bin for a psychiatric evaluation to determine if you, an obvious drug addict, were sane enough to stand trial thereby sentencing you to life imprisonment with no right of habeas corpus if the state psychiatrists took a dislike to you. And if they took enough of a dislike to you, they’d just hook you up to their nice little electric shock “therapy” machines until you had so little brain left that you learned to get along with the psychiatrists, the sadistic staff, and learned to like your happy new home. Before long, you’d just be another one of the “shitlegs” doing the organic brain syndrome shuffle along the halls and incontinent because of all the brain damage from ECT and the massive doses of Mellaril or Thorazine. And I’ve seen every one of these things first hand!
We threw the baby out with the bathwater in the ’70s, but I sure as Hell don’t want the left to draw new bathwater. For the first time since the ’60s, I’m once again deeply afraid of my government but now it is my national government, then it was state and local government.
This has turned into the best thread I’ve seen yet on the situation, however even here we are a little bit premature, we don’t have anything more than some hearsay on the perp’s mental health.
Art, I certainly agree with all your post.
Do I wish we had more facilities and more aggressively locked up some against their will? Sure. We almost have no public spaces anymore because the homeless use them as living space, even the completely non-violent. And yet the record of any institutions with that kind of power, is of course bad. I was taking classes with Prof. Rosenhan back in the day he was getting himself locked up in mental institutions on phony evaluations and then acting normal, to see if anybody noticed. Nobody did.
There were plenty of warning signs in Colorado, also in the Gabby Giffords case. Let’s wait for some more facts on this one.
[I delete a further rant on "evil" being a poetic description but not a useful diagnosis nor a plan of action, but even that should probably wait on the facts]
And so the options today are to throw them in jail or into a nursing home with elderly people. Look, I don’t want people locked up. I want people to get appropriate treatment.
I don’t know if this is factual, but according to this piece our largest centers for treating mental illness are in our prisons.
http://gawker.com/5968818/i-am-adam-lanzas-mother
I know it is true here that the only place that looks and acts like the state mental institutions of yesteryear are the psychiatric units of the prisons. I’m not saying they’re any better and they may be worse, but there is something resembling the kind of incarceration with “treatment” that once existed.
But again, the factual predicate of being there is having first committed a crime, often an horrific crime. We need to find a way to have another factual predicate for psychiatric incarceration without returning to the bad old days of family, community, or government approbation as the factual predicate. The obvious answer is to return to judicial committment but with the right of habeas corpus but that has significant issues; first, it is susceptible to the same kind of expensive abuse that unlimited HC petitions cause in the criminal population, and second, HC petitions require resources that many people with “issues” don’t have, so they are dependent on attracting the attention of advocacy groups or kindly strangers.
All very good points. For a long time the state mental institutions were basically just utility closets, a place to stash difficult people. The goal was never helping the ill so much as helping those charged with taking care of the ill. We got all these treatment methods of dubious value to the ill, but it made them placid and quiet. Walter Freeman’s transorbital lobotomy procedure was invented so that underfunded, underequipped state institutions could perform lobotomies as a quick and cheap 20 minute procedure. And until the day he died Freeman was convinced that his procedure was a genuine help to the patients he inflicted it on.
But, what do we do with the mentally ill? Societies have grappled with that problem forever. We can’t just sweep them into the “utility closet” model of the past, but the current approach of doling out pharmaceutical band-aids with non-existent management isn’t working either.
I see a lot of people on here arguing that more guns could have prevented this incident. I imagine they picture themselves pulling out their gun and saving the day by blowing away this mass murderer. The fact is, the odds are much greater that you’ll blow away a loved one by accident or blow your own brains out way before you’ll get to be the big hero. Argue that owning gums is a constitutional right but don’t delude youself into thinking that guns make the US a safer place. They don’t. Countries with fewer guns have WAY WAY fewer deaths by firearm.
Wrong. Apparently the Oregon shooting ended when a legal chl holder drew down on the shooter. The citizen wouldn’t take a shot because he was afraid of missing. The shooter took it as a signal to off himself. Unlike NYPD private citizens are more careful about the use of lethal force. Unlke the cops who shot 9 civilians we don’t get two weeks of admin leave, a medal and our jobs back. Just because the MSM won’t report succesful DGUs doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I guarantee you that any person who regularly carries is more compitent than a NYPD patrolman. They are only required to shoot 100 rounds a year and a passing score is 40% on paper while we put multiple thousands of rounds downrange every year.
OK so you pointed to one incident where someone like you got to be the big hero and save the day. I counter your great argument with this- from wikipedia “17,352 (55.6%) of the total 31,224 firearm-related deaths in 2007 [were] due to suicide while 12,632 (40.5%) were homicide deaths”
So I guess the remaining whopping 3.9% were gun owners blowing away evil doers.
So you are sayin’ that 1000 evil doers were offed by gun owners. That is not a bad thing. As for suicide, do you think only a gun could be used? Pretty meaningless stat.
As for wiki, they can be a good source of info when it is not related to any of the progressives favorite talking points. Otherwise I would take what they put up with a grain of salt. And gun facts probably are not very accurate there… just sayin’.
The incident you so glibly dismiss that he pointed out is only a few days old.
Yeah? So what?
I stand by my point that for every story of someone saving lives by shooting a criminal you probably have 100 suicides by handgun.
I gotta know, CristobalGordo, what’s so bad about suicide by firearm? Aside from the obvious problem with a suicide, it seems to me that the only one hurt in a suicide is the person doing the hurting. Certainly, it’s not like one person is killing another who isn’t willing or wanting to die.
Yous stats counting only deaths are also deceptive, since in many cases the threat of citizen gun use against a perp is enough to deter or capture them, without a shot being fired.
Suicides rates are independent of means. There are no guns in Japan and few homicides yet their suicide rate is twice as high as our combined murder plus suicide rate.
Murder and violent crime are not uniformly distributed among the population. 50% of America’s murders occursin a subset of 10% of the population. The remaing 90% has a murder and violent crime rate as low as Canada. Our most violent cities, places where civil society has broken down, are run by Democrats. We would be better off banning Democrats from holding public office than banning guns.
Suicide, under certain circumstances, is an honored tradition in Japanese culture. In our own Judeo-Christian culture it is always a sin and a dishonor. You shouldn’t compare suicide rates without taking that into account.
Seppuku, the opening of the navel.
If a life cannot be lived honorably, then it should be ended honorably.
Hagakure. Return to the Earth from which you have come.
And you were being very PC in not mentioning which identifiable 10% (now 11-12%) of the population it is in which the violence occurs. When I post this on boards, I mention it. Truth and statistics are truth and statistics, not racism, sexism, or any-ism other then realism.
And yet those countries still have homicides. As far as homicide rates go worldwide, America is not particularly high. If you take out a certain 12% here who are the cause of most homicide in this country. The American rate drops to among the lowest. Even with all those guns in our hands.
Certainly the suicide rate is probably higher than someone shooting a perp. At least until more carry. But the use of a gun defensively is not always having to shoot it.
As for hero saving the day blowing away the mass murderer. Well, it would sure beat being a hero getting blown away because government mandated you be defenseless. There should have been weapons that the principal and other adults could have accessed. Including in the classrooms themselves.
As I posted earlier in this thread:
I’m trying to avoid going political with this terrible incident but I’ll say this – when the attack first started, the school principal and psychologist bravely ran towards the sound. That’s what heros do. It would’ve been much better if they’d been properly trained and armed when confronting an armed and deranged young man. They might’ve had a chance to stopping him before he killed so many people. As it was, those brave women died in a valiant but ultimately futile attempt.
All I’m saying is that if more people are armed, sure you may have armed people around to take down bad guys. Much much more common than incidents like this are, say, suicides by firearm. And yes, it matters that guns are used in suicides- most suicides by other means fail. You put a gun to your head…you’ll probably “succeed.”
Umm… do you have any facts to justify your statements, or are you just talking through your hat?
/I know which way I’d bet…
“More than 90% of suicide attempts using guns are successful, while the success rate for jumping from high places was 34%. The success rate for drug overdose was 2%, the brief said, citing studies.
“Other methods are not as lethal,” a co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research in Baltimore, Jon Vernick, said.”
Johnny Hopkins? I smoked pot with that guy.
*megasigh*
“More than 90% of suicide attempts using guns are successful, while the success rate for jumping from high places was 34%. The success rate for drug overdose was 2%, the brief said, citing studies.”
Unless all three methods are attempted with equal frequency, your percentages are meaningless.
I win my bet.
Drug overdose is less successful partly because many attempting it dont really want to die, they just want people to think they want to die, as acry for help, while somebody using a gun normally is determined to succeed, not just look like it. The jumping stat sounded strange to me, maybe they had a few half assed people as well, that jumped from a 2 story building. If they wanted to make really sure, they would jump head first from enough of a height to reach terminal velocity, with nothing below to break the fall, not many survive that.
Then why is Japan’s suicide rate nearly twice as high as oyr murder + suicide rate?
“most suicides by other means fail.”
Really? Tell that to all the women who kill themselves in China:
“Studies show that of all Chinese suicides, both male and female, 58 percent use pesticides.4 It acts as a poison that instantly burns the mouth and throat and is extremely lethal.”
http://rebekahnydam.hubpages.com/hub/The-Problem-of-Female-Suicide-in-China
OK wow great point- so there exist ways to kill yourself that are also very lethal.
I’ll correct my statement to read “most suicides by other means except for Chinese women who eat pesticides fail.”
I was thinking more along these lines
More than 90% of suicide attempts using guns are successful, while the success rate for jumping from high places was 34%. The success rate for drug overdose was 2%, the brief said, citing studies.
“Other methods are not as lethal,” a co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research in Baltimore, Jon Vernick, said.
In fact that kind of proves my point. Maybe people attempt suicide with what they have around- in China they must have really lethal pesticides lying around. So they use those. I’m sure such pesticides are illegal here. If people have a gun in the house thet’ll probably use that. But if they don’t, they’ll probably take a fistful of pills or go into the closed garage with the car on or slit their wrists- all means that have a much higher likelihood of failure. Is that so hard to believe?
Again, I’m not arguing to ban guns- but I think it’s BS to think that having a gun in the house makes you safer.
“but I think it’s BS to think that having a gun in the house makes you safer.”
In some sense, it makes your neighbors safer as criminals will often steer clear of places where they think the homeowners have guns.
The US ranks 38 on the suicide rate by nation, obviously easy access to guns does not correlate to an increase in suicides.
CristobalGordo,
Not to say or imply that you are nothing but a complete idiot in need of institionalization, but I challenge you to head toward your nearest Home Depot or Lowes and read all the labels on the pesticides and insecticides, and report back to us all of them that say, “Safe for humans to consume internally.”
The vast majority fo such items are chemically related to nerve gasses, and in large doses, will have much the same effect on the body. Ingesting them is not a pleasant way to die.
But reading your posts tells me why there are warning labels on everything. For people like you.
I really don’t know why anyone would try to prevent an adult’s suicide; I sure wouldn’t interfere with your attempt.
Thanks. What a nice guy.
Maybe if it were someone in your family (and I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy) you would understand why you would want to prevent suicide.
@the lefty idiot – It’s an adult’s decision.
And if you have taken any kind or introductory psycholgy course, you would know that there suicide attempts and suicide gestures. Suicide gestures use less lethal means- the person wants attention, not death. And if they are successful in getting the attention they crave, they will repeat, and repeat, and repeat until one day they are accidentally successful.
My prof told a story of when he was on duty in the ER when a girl came in, accompanied by panicked parents, “She swallowed a whole bottle of her mother’s sleeping pills.” Her boyfriend had just broken up with her. Doc ordered the duty corpsman- “Pump her stomach.” Preps were made, things were being set up. Mom and dad huddled over her. Story changed. “She only swallowed a few.” Order- “Pump her stomach.” Boyfriend came in- all teary eyed and apologetic. Asked for forgiveness- promised to stay with her, etc. etc. Her gesture was getting her everything she wanted. Parents come to Doc- “Turns out she had a headache, only took a few aspirin.” His response, “Well, we don’t really know what happened. We don’t really know what she swallowed.” Turned to the corpsman, “Pump her stomach, flush it, and pump again.”
She was getting what she wanted from the gesture, and if she succeeded without suffering, would go down that path. His idea was to make the experience so miserable that even though she got her desired results, she wouldn’t want to repeat the experience. Never had my stomach pumped, hear it’s not fun. He says they pumped, flushed and pumped, and never saw her in the ER again.
Each of those non-lethal suicide gestures gets counted as a suicide attempt, though they aren’t really. And they mess with the statistics.
you mean like norway?
I wish I had the stats to provide but many times a gun is used to prevent a crime or even a murder without killing anyone or even being fired. The stats will show that it happens more often than homicides.
I don’t believe that for one second. Most Americans will go through life without EVER being threatened by a crazed stranger let alone preventing an incident with a gun.
“Most Americans will go through life without EVER being threatened by a crazed stranger let alone preventing an incident with a gun.”
Really? Don’t know about the “crazed” part, but violent crime by strangers is not that rare, In 2010, males (9.5 victimizations per 1,000 males) experienced violence by strangers at nearly twice the rate of females (4.7 per 1,000). Yes, that rate is said to be decreasing but it is still high.
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/press/vvcs9310pr.cfm
Both encountering a violent criminal, and having a gun accident, are fairly rare, un;ess you are in the wrong neighborhood or family, although I suspect being a victim of crime is far more common than having an accidental gun death.
I believe the Department of Justice estimated during the mid 90′s that somewhere between 800,000 and 1,500,000 crimes were stopped per year by armed civilians, the vast, vast majority without a shot fired. They displayed the gun and assailant ran. As far as published reports, virtually all involving shots fired, I have read something like 50-100 defensive uses of guns every year. They usually don’t make it out of local papers.
Hey Gordo..you don’t Live near Detroit I can Tell!
Start with the revised edition of More Guns, Less Crime by John Lott. Then go through his references in detail.
I honestly consider the potential for suicide to be a legitimate reason for firearm ownership. People will disagree with me on this, but I believe that the individual has the right to end their life if they so choose. The state does everything possible to prevent this and a gun gives you a tool to go against that. I own guns mainly for self defense, but also partially so that if I ever came to a rational decision to end my life (for example due to crippling disability) that I would have a means of doing so that was fast and effective. I refuse to die in a nursing home hooked up to a million tubes.
The other advantage is that if you have a weapon in your possession an attacker can still kill you, but that’s all they can do. They cannot rape, torture, abduct, or otherwise defile you. With a gun you can fight such that the only way to subdue you is to kill you. A woman fighting a rapist with her gun may kill him, or may be killed herself, but she will not be held down and raped. I think the members of the Warsaw ghetto uprising were glad they were able to die fighting Nazis instead of in the gas chambers.
There are indeed things far worse than death, and a gun does go a very long way towards protecting you from them.
This and all other similar tragedies have nothing to do with first or second amendment. You like it or not this is the result of societal decay. Where there is no one is responsible for his/her action, no winner or looser, no one can be judgmental of others, no right and wrong, and no white and black but only grey. It is easy for such evil to foster.
I think it has a lot to do with the First Amendment – misapplication thereof. We long ago censored public executions: hangings, guillotinings, public stonings, etc because it was recognized as a gruesome form of public entertainment, but fictitious depictions of gruesome killings for fun are protected speech!? “Maceth” is a much needed morality play, but in “The Dark Knight Rising” the Joker is having too much fun for no other reason than titillation. I say bring back censorship.
I couldn’t agree with you more. Nice comment, short, sweet, and to the point…. and correct.
Interesting, but why not finish the progression and place blame on the families that refuse to acknowledge the danger that such individuals present because they aren’t that dangerous all of the time?
I’m sure it is nice to blame “society” and the lack of mental institutions, but let’s not forget that there are still people protecting these dangerous individuals under the pretense of not wanting to “stigmatize” them a record.
We recognize enablers of domestic violence or drug abuse who refuse to press complaints because they don’t want the person to have a record.
When do we recognize the enablers of this kind of devastating mental illness, and hold them responsibile, if not criminally and civilly, at least socially?
Sam, look at the Ace of Spades link I posted above. Many families do “acknowledge the danger that such individuals present”, but there is nowhere for them to go for help.
Sam:
Some people are broken beyond repair and some are just no damn good. Our theraputic society just doesn’t want to recognize that. Deep down in side every therapist believes if they got Ted Bundy in time he would have turned out a model citizen.
Most families do recognize the danger and are often trying to find help/support or in some cases answers.
There really isn’t much support in the community for the mentally ill, and even worse when it comes to an adult child a parent who knows something is wrong can’t even make their child see a doctor much less take medications and accept what help is available.
There’s no good reason for Lanza not to have been medicated into a vegetative state, with or without his mother’s permission. The neighbor’s should have alerted authorities to the implications of his weird behavior. And what about the father and the brother?
Mother initiated the divorce- and troubled son was living with mom. Father not physically present to do anything. Brother over 18, in another state, living his own life- and not his problem in any event. Cold hearted but true.
The fault is with the perp, mentally ill or not. You can say the fault is with the system. But the system is designed so that in reality, there is no system.
As several have pointed out, if we lock up the mentally ill, we open up a big bag of worms. The STATE will abuse its power. That’s a given.
A better way- IMHO- hold everyone accountable for their actions, batshit crazy insane or not. Whether they are minors or not. If they did it, punish them. If they didn’t, let them go.
What to do with the mentally ill and insane is problem in a free society that values individual rights. No solution is ideal, and there isn’t a solution that cannot be abused that I can think of.
In case no one’s noticed…this administration is already getting rid of the first amendment. Mandatory abortifacients for religious organizations anyone?
So let’s posit that Evil is the driver behind people like Adam Lanza? Then what. The vast majority of those who jump to ‘evil’ as an explanation have a very specific political and religious agenda. Then we get lectures about Jesus and so forth. Yet the United States, in terms of belief and institutions, is heavily Christian.
I am not sure what the ‘this is pure evil’ analysis accomplishes, except to convey that the writer is horrified at Lanza’s mass murdering and wishes to convey both sympathy for victims and despair at human nature. It is possible to do both without droning on about exorcisms and the like. In a weird way, ascribing it all to evil nearly excuses the actor, the murderer. Of course, those purveying this line think that anyone who says ‘mental illness’ is somehow a liberal or dupe of same, and ready to endorse mass gun control.
As a conservative, I neither have a fondness nor horror of guns. I see them every day in the hands of young soldiers. I trust these soldiers because they seem to be both well-trained and relatively sane. Which brings me to my main point – there is something in American society that promotes isolated lives. There are many opportunities to be sociable and contribute, of course, but many live walled-off lives. Is this liberal or conservative? Is mental illness, the true issue here, immediately fodder for partisanship? Well, everything is these days – and in every place, including Israel. Sad..
Larry;
“there is something in American society that promotes isolated lives”
An excellent point, Larry. It might be a cultural notion of rugged individualism and wanting to be independent. I have a parent who is from another country and it is uncommon for people to live alone there. Family bonds are strong, the widowed elderly are taken care of by their children instead of being put into assisted living, and miscellaneous family members may share the same home. In America, it’s quite different. Families are scattered around the country and many, many people live alone, whether by choice or otherwise, relying on pets to satisfy the human need for company.
If it was 18 Israeli children killed by a rocket landing on their school, Palestinians would be cheering. Does that make Palestinians evil or insane?
Mental illness + hundreds of hours viewing mindlessly violent videogames + unsecured firearms in the house = another tragedy just waiting to happen.
Yep. Anything at all to avoid acknowledging the elephant in the room – that somebody who shouldn’t have, found it easy to access a few rapid-fire weapons and wander off with them to use them against people.
That’s ok, though – keep arguing. In a few months, the same thing will happen again. And it’ll happen again a little while after that. And again. Kids fooling around at home will continue to find their parents’ guns and play with them – and shoot themselves. Random people will keep getting a skinful and shooting each other. And innocent people will keep getting caught in the crossfire.
All so that comfortable middle-class suburbanites can feel good about owning really cool boom-sticks.
The elephant in the room is gun free victim zones.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/people-don-stop-killers-people-guns-article-1.211272
“In fact, some mass shootings have been stopped by armed citizens. Though press accounts downplayed it, the 2002 shooting at Appalachian Law School was stopped when a student retrieved a gun from his car and confronted the shooter. Likewise, Pearl, Miss., school shooter Luke Woodham was stopped when the school’s vice principal took a .45 fromhis truck and ran to the scene. In February’s Utah mall shooting, it was an off-duty police officer who happened to be on the scene and carrying a gun.”
As for kids finding dads guns and shooting themselves… rarely happens. More kids drown in the family pool than by accidental gun discharge in the home.
Uh-huh. Very good.
The right-wing talking point of this shooting response is definitely that more people should be armed. Why? In order to defend themselves against all the other people who’re armed. Brilliant.
Rather than solve the problem, you’re proposing to just leave it up to individuals to cope with the consequences of the country refusing to solve the problem. The problem is easy access to firearms that are designed and intended for the purpose of shooting people. Deal with that, and you might end up being a country as safe as the UK and australia (both having less than a quarter of the US homicide rate), rather than being a bit more dangerous than palestine or pakistan.
“The problem is easy access to firearms that are designed and intended for the purpose of shooting people.”
Wrong. I’m not going to bother with a detailed refutation of this bilge, since it’s been so thoroughly torn apart many thousands of times over the past fifty years or so.
Two words. Anders Breivik
Killed over 77 people in a country with strict anti-gun law. The kind which it would seem you want here. He shot for over 90 minutes. You know why? There was no one to stop him. No easy access to guns.
You need to lose your unreasonable fear of weapons in the hands of a free People.
Your solution only guarantees gun free killing fields for the deranged. It is failed progressive/left wing nonsense.
“You need to lose your unreasonable fear of weapons in the hands of a free People”
You see the effects of that policy every time there is a mass shooting. That’s what weapons in the hands of untrained, undisciplined and unregulated people leads to.
“Your solution only guarantees gun free killing fields for the deranged. It is failed progressive/left wing nonsense”
Your solution put the gun in their hands in the first place.
No a God given right to self-defense and the tools to do so make guns available in a free society.
We have seen the fruits of what happens in your statist society which disarms it’s citizens. The result is posted above , in the post you just replied to.
Another two words. Timothy McVeigh. And he didn’t use a gun.
As I recall, Timothy McVeigh didn’t use a firearm to murder 168 people and injure another 800 or so. Do you suggest we ban rental trucks or nitrogen fertilizer? Maybe both, just to make sure?
Disturbed people will find a way to do whatever it is they think/feel they have to do. The key is to recognize these people and do whatever needs to be done to insure they do not commit some heinous crime. This young man was definitely not “wired” correctly.
Well, so then clearly the gun is totally the problem here. So I’ll ask you this:
If you were going to be locked up in a little 8×10 sealed room for a week with one of the following, which would it be? – a loaded gun, a live black mamba or the Aurora shooter?
I know you’re not going to choose the gun because you are clearly so afraid of it.
Is anyone else just at a total loss? I know that events like this are so inexplicable, so beyond any of our experiences and realm of understanding, that we get frightened by it. And that powerlessness and fear generates a desire to reassert some kind of control. If only we did this … if only we did that … if only … gun control, culture of death, missing fathers, mental health treatment …
Blame helps us reassert control. New programs. New laws. Diagnosing this or that as the problem … All this tries to restore some sense of control.
What if that’s all just a pretense?
What if we face something inexplicable, a heart of darkness, a horror, or as Conrad put, “an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention?”
Also covered by the First Amendment is the Right to Assembly. It seems all mass murders take place where people enjoy the Right to Free Assembly, yet nobody blames or seeks to curtail this right.
I’d like to respond to Dr Helen’s post -“Most Americans will go through life without EVER being threatened by a crazed stranger let alone preventing an incident with a gun.”
Really? Don’t know about the “crazed” part, but violent crime by strangers is not that rare, In 2010, males (9.5 victimizations per 1,000 males) experienced violence by strangers at nearly twice the rate of females (4.7 per 1,000). Yes, that rate is said to be decreasing but it is still high.
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/press/vvcs9310pr.cfm”
If you read the bulllet points in that study it says only ten percent of the violent incidents involved a firearm. So that gets us down to less than one incident per 1000 males (the highest figure.) What is the rate for suicide attempts? Wikipedia (sorry) says that the US has 19.2 successful suicides per 100,000. Lets say there are ten attempts per success (some say there are as many as 25 attempts per success) that would give us 192 attempts per 100,000 or almost 2 per thousand. I would argue that you are at least two times more likely to attempt suicide than to be attacked by a stranger with a gun.
So if you are depressed or mentally ill in any way or live with someone who is, I would suggest not owning a gun. (Oh sorry…or extremely toxic Chinese pesticides)
“Not surprisingly, mass murderer Adam Lanza was a deeply disturbed kid:”
As far as I can tell, up until the day he started shooting people, he was never in any kind of trouble.
If he ever was, it hasn’t been reported by the media.
“In some sense, it makes your neighbors safer as criminals will often steer clear of places where they think the homeowners have guns.”
Any proof of this? I think stats will show that more crime happens where there are more guns (inner cities) than in the burbs where there are fewer guns.
Wrong again, but you should be used to that by now. Read Lott’s book, check out his references, and educate yourself.
*snort*
Right. Then go read the articles that debunk Lott’s book. Whatever numbskull idea one might have, I guarantee that there is a book out there that will support it. From thinking the pyramids were built by aliens, to the world ending on the 21st of december 2012 (or 21st of may 2011, or several times before that) to thinking that universal healthcare is the first step to NAZIism, to believing that more guns makes more people safer – you can find a book that will claim anything.
Just use your eyes. There is no place in the world that is awash in unregulated weapons in the hands of untrained, undisciplined civilians, that isn’t a violent hell hole. The madness is that so many americans think that the US can somehow be different.
Quite a number of countries with much stronger gun control have a higher (up to several times)the murder rate that the US has. The UK has a higher rate of violent crime and also if I recall correctly, rape, than does the US. Doesn’t seem that lack of guns inhibits violent crime much.
Techno..”SNORT” I think that”s what you are Doing! Real Funny Troll!
It is not the guns in the inner city causing crime. It is the inhabitants.
That’s a new one. Just get rid of the people. Yep, you’re right – that would definitely make the US a safer place.
Just the facts maam’ just the facts.
But now that you mention it.
On the topic of mental illness, in my life I have known three different people with bipolar disorder who NEEDED to be institutionalized. They would be “stablized” and sent home after a couple of weeks but the treatment would not last and they would cause terrible pain and chaos to themselves and everyone around them. Just not physical pain- if they had crossed that violence line they would’ve been sent away- but absent that they were “free”. But they were also miserable and so very ill. I’m convinced that the most humane, compassionate thing for some people is for them to be cared for in a mental institution- whether or not they provably “pose a threat to themselves or others.” I’m sure there are questions of who pays and where do you put them and who cares for them etc in addition to the civil liberties issues but still…I think the idea behind de-institutionalization was to be kinder to these people but the result for many has been very cruel.
I meant to post the above in a new thread. Sorry for the non sequitor.
May have posted in the wrong place, but I agree with you on this.
The inner city is where we find an over abundance of illegal drugs. I would venture a guess that many of these inner city killings are directly related to drugs.
Is there a way to measure cascading effects from the press coverage of an emotional and gripping tragedy like this? An uptick in traffic accidents, mistakes by surgeons/doctors/nurses, etc? Could there be dozens more dead around the nation due to the press coverage itself?
If the mentally ill need 24/7 supervision, I’m sure there are 1000′s of ACLU lawyers willing to volunteer their time, homes, and offices, to that effect.
It’s the least they can do after de-institutionalizing these people.
Sure it’s about mental illness, but you can’t discount the killer power of 2 semiautomatic pistols with multiple fully-loaded clips. Each clip can contain 15-18 rounds, imagine Lanza had a dozen spare clips in addition to the 2 loaded ones. It doesn’t take a genius to do the math.
Yeah, but if the toddlers had all been packing heat, they’d have taken him down before he could reload, right?
No, but it’s overwhelmingly likely that since he had to take the time to shoot out a door to get in, armed school personnel responding could have have stopped him at that door or in the hall.
Poor poor Tecnoload, just can’t get his bean around the fact that every shooter who has been stopped, has been stopped by armed civilians. None of the civilians stopping these killers were ever shot.
And if the Principal, and some of the teachers had been armed, so too would this killer have been stopped.
Only in gun free zones do massacres take place. Even in Norway where guns are not easy to get.
“Poor poor Tecnoload, just can’t get his bean around the fact that every shooter who has been stopped, has been stopped by armed civilians”
Er, really? I think you’re just making that up. Usually it’s a cop – either on or off duty.
You really should educate yourself a bit Techno. Bad enough your unreasonable fear of an armed citizenry, but coupled with ignorance insures that wrongheaded conclusions are drawn.
http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2012/12/mass-killings-stopped-by-armed-citizens.html
The Pearl, Mississippi school shooting was stopped by the vice principal Joel Myrick with a Colt .45, The Appalachian School shooting was stopped by two students with handguns. Both of the above incidents were stopped by the armed citizens threatening the shooter without firing.
…………………………
Plans to slay everyone in the Muskegon, Michigan, store and steal enough cash and jewelry to feed their “gnawing hunger for crack cocaine” fell apart for a band of would-be killers after one of their victims fought back. Store owner Clare Cooper was returning behind the counter after showing three of the four conspirators some jewelry, when one of the group pulled out a gun and shot him four times in the back. Stumbling for the safety of his bullet-proof glass-encased counter, Cooper managed to grab his shotgun and fire as the suspects fled. They were all later apprehended and the three present during the shooting face life imprisonment.
…………………………
Gun-shop employee prevents massacre(California, 1999)
Morec said Stevens arrived at the National Shooting Club Monday evening and rented the rifle for target practice. The club allows people to rent a range of weapons for use on its own shooting range.
After several minutes on the range, however, Stevens returned to the club’s gun store and shot at the ceiling. He then herded three store employees out the door into an alley, saying he intended to kill them, Morec said.
Unknown to Stevens, one store employee was carrying a .45 caliber handgun concealed beneath his shirt. When Stevens looked away, the employee fired, hitting Stevens several times in the chest and bringing him to the ground.
The employee kept his gun trained on Stevens until police arrived, Morec said. When Stevens refused to comply with police demands that he show his hands, he was shot again with several rounds of rubber bullets.
………………………
This is the story you saw on the evening news:
At lunch hour on Wednesday, Oct. 16, George Jo Hennard of Belton, Tex. smashed his Ford pickup through the plate glass doors of Luby’s cafeteria in Killeen, injuring some patrons immediately. While other patrons rushed toward the truck believing the driver was a heart-attack victim, Hennard calmly climbed out of his pickup, took out two 9-millimeter semi-automatic pistols, and started shooting people in the cafeteria’s serving line.
Hennard continued shooting for 10 minutes, reloading five times. One of his pistols jammed repeatedly, causing him to discard it. There would have been plenty of opportunity for any of the cafeteria’s customers or employees to return fire. None did because none of them were armed. Texas law forbids private citizens from carrying firearms out of their home or business. Luby’s employee’s manual forbids employees from carrying firearms.
Police officers were inside Luby’s within minutes. But before they were able to corner Hennard in the cafeteria’s restroom, where he turned his gun fatally on himself, Hennard had killed 15 women and 8 men, wounded 19 and caused at least five more to be injured attempting to flee.
The Killeen massacre was ready-made excitement for the media: a madman with a gun, lots of gruesome pictures. CBS News devoted an entire “48 Hours” Dan Rather report to it. Sarah Brady of Handgun Control Inc. capitalized on it in a nationally published column to call Congress cowardly for voting down more stringent gun laws the next day.
Now here’s a story you probably didn’t see:
Late at night on Tuesday, December 17, two men armed with recently-stolen pistols herded 20 customers and employees of a Shoney’s restaurant in Anniston, Ala., into the walk-in refrigerator, and locked it. Continuing to hold the manager at gunpoint, the men began robbing the restaurant.
Then one of the robbers found a customer who had hidden under a table and pulled a gun on him. The customer, Thomas Glenn Terry, legally armed with a .45 semi-automatic pistol, fired five shots into that robber’s chest and abdomen, killing him instantly.
The other robber, who was holding the manager at gunpoint, opened fire on Terry and grazed him. Terry returned fire, hitting the second robber several times and wounding him critically.
The robbery attempt was over. The Shoney’s customers and employees were freed. No one else was hurt.
Because Terry was armed, and used his gun to stop two armed robbers who had taken a restaurant full of people hostage, there was no drawn-out crisis, no massacre, no victims’ families for Dan Rather to interview. Consequently, the story hasn’t received much coverage.
Among those who rely on national news media for their view of the country, the bloody image of Luby’s Cafeteria is available to lend the unchallenged impression that guns in private hands serve only to kill innocent people. The picture of 20 hostages walking out of Shoney’s refrigerator unharmed, because a private citizen was armed that night, is not.
As we celebrate the bicentennial of the Bill of Rights, it’s worth noting that the Framers wrote the Second Amendment so the people’s defense would be in our own hands, and we wouldn’t have to rely on a “standing army” or “select militia” for our security. Though no police departments existed in America then, there’s no historical doubt that the Framers had considered centralized public defense, and considered it not merely ineffective, but itself dangerous to public safety. Recent vigilante-type police attacks, such as the beating of Rodney King, lend credence.
Yet, it’s fashionable to relegate constitutional protections to the dustbin of history. Judges sworn to defend the Constitution ignore its clear provisions, as do legislators. Virtually every major organ of society – both political parties, the media, the American Bar Assn., the ACLU – urges them to do so.
Today’s “consensus reality” asserts that private firearms play no effective role in the civic defense, and that firearms must be restricted to reduce crime. The media repeat these assertions as a catechism, and treat those who challenge them as heretics.
Yet, we have before us an experiment showing us alternative outcomes. In one case, we have a restaurant full of unarmed people who rely on the police to save them. The result is 23 innocent lives lost, and an equivalent number wounded. In the second case, we have one armed citizen on the scene and not one innocent life lost.
How can the choice our society needs to make be any clearer?
It’s time to rid ourselves of the misbegotten idea that public safety can be achieved by unilateral disarmament of the honest citizen, and realize that the price of public safety is, like liberty, eternal vigilance. We can tire ourselves in futile debates on how to keep guns out of the wrong hands. Or we can decide that innocent lives deserve better than to be cut short, if only we, as a society, will take upon ourselves the civic responsibility of defending our fellow citizens, as Thomas Glenn Terry did in Alabama.
My account of Thomas Glenn Terry’s actions in this article was based on an Alabama newspaper account. I later interviewed Terry for a weekly radio program I was hosting and discovered that the account was mistaken on several points.
Postal clerk Terry was finishing a late-night dinner with his wife when the robbers came in and took over the restaurant. Terry hid his .45 Colt Government Model under his sweater, not seeing any immediate opportunity to use it. Terry’s wife was captured with the other customers and herded off to the cooler, where one of the robbers proceeded to collect wallets and jewelry.
Terry did not hide under a table; he had separated himself from the other customers and managed to get to a back door in the Shoney’s to see if it was open so he could escape and call the police. The door was chained shut. At that point one of the robbers discovered him and when the robber drew on him, Terry pulled his own handgun from under his sweater and returned fire, incapacitating this robber, who ultimately survived. The second robber heard the exchange of gunfire and also drew on Terry; it was the gun fight between Terry and this second robber which resulted in the robber running out to the parking lot, where he died from his wounds. It was at this point that Terry told the store manager to phone the police, informing them that an armed customer was present; Terry then proceeded to the cooler and released his wife and the other customers.
Both robbers whom Terry shot had previous armed robberies on their record, and one had murdered a motel clerk just a few days earlier. A third robber escaped as soon as Terry exchanged gunfire with the first robber.
The only national media outlet to cover this incident as news, just two months after the Killeen restaurant massacre, was the Christian Science Monitor. -JNS
……………………….
And the list goes on and on Techno. Sure some were stopped by off duty or former cops. But the majority are just the average Joe Blow like that principal gunned down by a deranged nut because those who fear a armed citizenry set up a government sanctioned killing field.
It would have been interesting to see how an Israeli teacher would have handled him. They all have to be armed in their classrooms in Israel (for good reason). But you can find photos of teachers with rifles slung over their shoulders on the ‘net.
And in the largest case of mass murder in the USA they used jetliners…… 2997 died, you do the math.
Is your point we should ban jets?
Er, no. The analogy would require that we secure access to jets and control who can fly them, and who can travel on them.
Thank you , we already do that with guns.
Let me make a simple point: if social stability *needs* the mad to be institutionalized and the bad to be imprisoned, and we do neither, then we must run the country as a madhouse and a jail. We put the walls around them, or we put the walls around ourselves.
The 1st amendment also makes it possible for publishers to distribute software that enables mentally ill people to sit at their computer and simulate murder over and over, thousands of times. Where is the outrage when a new version of “Call of Duty” is advertised on national television?
As the parent of a teen with Asperger’s and a bonafide “weird kid” who is under monitoring psychiatric care, I expect that mother was more worried about her son committing suicide than imagining that he might kill her and everyone at school. Murder never crossed her mind. I cannot explain why she would keep guns in the house, but it may not have been her choice or even awareness and I refuse to make myself into a screeching harpy of ignorant judgment. There is virtually no support for people and their families who “have problems” but have not YET done anything violent. Trying to get mental health services when you KNOW there is a problem but there is no criminal record is a nightmare gauntlet for parents and other loved ones. It took us almost a month to convince a psych to see my son AFTER he told me he wanted to kill himself. And we have private cadillac insurance. And yes, I had to stay home from work to watch the kid — a teen — until he had been taking meds long enough to start feeling better and convince us he was no longer a suicide risk. You people have utterly no idea. My prayers for the repose of all the dead, including the poor parents.
Firearms have been in existence for centuries, and the same goes for mental illness.
So why are these mass killings happening with such frequency now and why are certain elements in society trying so hard to pin the blame on guns. The answer is that the total sum of the current culture is the real culprit and that fact must be concealed because these very same scapegoaters are the purveyors and profiteers of the current culture.
They are accusing others of what they themselves are especially guilty of.
Nirvana. Cool. We can achieve it by doing everything everyone says we need to do in order to make the world a safer place for everyone, everywhere, at all times and in all places.
…and we’ll seveely punish anyone whodoesn’t go along with the program, including their mothers, fathers, kids, grandkids, grandparents and aunties and uncles, too.
The minute you call for government licensing of weapons, you’ve given up the ‘inalienable rights’ that ‘shall not be infringed.’
In short, you’ve abandoned the Bill of Rights and The Constitution.
You’ve also bought into the left-wing definitions of gun ownership and limitations of the same.
iow, you’re begging the question…and buying into circular reasoning…at best.
At worst, you’ve subsuned your lives to teh state. Your talk of ‘for the children,’ ‘for the national good,’ ‘the government must/should do anything for our safety’…is the same as the propaganda of a police state, or a security state, at best.
You’re already slaves.
Enjoy your chains.
But never again think that you are free.
I have an idea. Let’s just lock up the 10 least popular kids in every middle school. That would have absolutely prevented this tragedy. We can have a panel of the popular kids decide which ones the police should come and get.
Or, let’s just pass a law that all 300 million guns in the US be handed in by their owners. I’m sure everybody will comply.
Specially the criminals. They most certainly wouldn’t want to be accused of doing anything illegal.
Seriously, I urge you to stop referring to the clown by his given name, giving him the notoriety he sought, encouraging other murderers to think they’ll get notoriety, too.
Call him “that clown”, please.
YES!
Permanently imprison ALL of the (hundreds or thousands)* of mentally ill people.
And not just the violent schizophrenic either. Everyone with AUTISM, anxiety, depression, OCD, ADD, Tourette’s, Drug and alcohol addiction, Anorexia/Bulemia, Any serious Phobia, and anyone who has panic attacks.
And, after that, we’ll get started on the retards.
Then, the physically deformed.
Then, the gypsies.
Then, … oh, you get the idea.
So, Dr. Helen, what are you a “doctor” of, exactly? Basketweaving? Fascistic Totalitarianism? What?
* Try 16+ MILLION. And how would you, Althouse, and your loyal Sturm Abteilung here propose to do this?
The Samurai tradition died a generation ago. The suicide rate is a result of alienation not honor. The Japanese don’t even bother to have sex anymore.
There seem to be two streams of thought on this – gun control on the one hand, and putting troubled teenagers in institutions on the other.
Both are overreactions, IMHO. Growing up in the ’80s there was a very popular song, got played on MTV a lot, called Institutionalized about a more or less normal kid put in an institution for simply being a teenager. It resonated with kids of my era because it was a common problem until Reagan’s deinstitutionalization.
Okay, the band was called Suicidal Tendencies and they dressed like gang members, so it kind of undercuts their point a little bit, but still, go to youtube and listen to the song, it’s very well done.
They keep reporting about this young man having Asperger’s, as if that had something to do with it.
People on the autism spectrum are less likely than average to be dangerous.
My guess is that he had undiagnosed schizophrenia or similar. 20 is a common age for that to hit. Just because one is on the autism spectrum does not mean he can’t have other conditions.
“Just use your eyes. There is no place in the world that is awash in unregulated weapons in the hands of untrained, undisciplined civilians, that isn’t a violent hell hole. The madness is that so many americans think that the US can somehow be different.”
LOL. The United States is one of the least violent places on the face of earth.
It’s a haven of peace and sanity compared to a heavily regulated, trained and disciplined Europe, with it’s famously disarmed civilian populations, which has seen, quite literally, tens of millions of people murdered by their trained and disciplined governments over the last 100 years, and millions more killed in wars fought by those governments.
Maybe you ought to open your eyes. Start by taking a good hard look at Auschwitz.
The criminally insane at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in DC were studied for decades. The docs eventually exhausted all theories of criminality as invalid and noted the inmates were criminal-minded folk whose mental illness ruined their criminal success in either spurring hopeless criminal projects or fouling up their ability to escape the law.
Hollywood trains the nation and the world about firearms. The mechanics of introducing props necessary to the plot involves displaying the gun before a felony action happens. The audience after 10,000 of these lessons confuses drama mechanics for the facts of life. The industrially-menacing-looking mouse rifle, held waist-high and fired full auto, massacres the evil enemy far off in the impossible disstance (with the laws of physics in full violation). After 10,000 of these lessons, the movie-goer thinks there is some kind of a link between the industrial menace appearance and the heaps of bodies off in the distance.
Add to this mess is the freedom to be different and the freedom not to take one’s meds, and any public policy resulting will be a real Cloud-Cuckoo Land punishment of the innocent.
The only positive thing in this ghastly situation is that America’s enemies wielding AK-47s have the same Hollywood beliefs in “Spray-’n'-Pray” and eschew aimed fire as stupid behavior.
When Charles Whitman killed his mother, then climbed up the tower at the University of Texas and opened fire on people, it was revealed after the autopsy that he had a brain tumor. That may be a reason, but it’s not an excuse.
Brenda Anne Spencer had no such reason or excuse. She was a psychopath. She opened fire on an elementary school for no reason other than that she wanted to. Her excuse was, “I don’t like Mondays.”
Nobody talks about her. Maybe that’s because she’s a girl, prone to violence I might add.
You can’t disinvent the gun, any more than you can disinvent the knife or the staff. Hell, anyone who knew what they were doing could kill someone with a magazine–simply roll it up and stab him or her in the throat. A rock works just as well.
I don’t hear anyone calling for knife control, or magazine control, or rock control.
To me this whole discussion is ridiculous. If I were so inclined, and I’m not, I could kill a lot more people with a pickup truck. Just wait for a parade or some large gathering, then plow over a bunch of people.
Anyone for truck control?
Just because “Dr.” Helen done royally pissed me off.
Here’s the long & short of it.
Schizophrenia is the mental illness most associated with violence.
Out of 100 schizophrenics. 8 of them will commit a violent crime.
Out of 100 perfectly “normal” people. 5 of them will commit a violent crime.
Thus, the association of schizophrenia or other mental illness, with violent crime is FALSE. It is believed by many, based on the SPOTLIGHT fallacy.
Hypothetically (assuming 100 to be the total number), if you permanently confined all schizophrenics, you would sentence 92 innocent people to LIFE IMPRISONMENT to prevent 8 violent crimes.
By the same token, if you permanently confined all “sane” people, you would sentence 95 innocent people to Life imprisonment, to prevent 5 violent crimes.
Your justification for the PERMANENT IMPRISONMENT OF 92 INNOCENT people, is those THREE additional crimes prevented. And you call the schizophrenics “crazy”?!
So, to prevent 8 violent crimes, all you have to do is sentence 92 innocent people to LIFE IMPRISONMENT WITHOUT PAROLE; WITHOUT TRIAL; WITHOUT APPEAL; WITHOUT DEFENSE; WITHOUT CHARGE.
Why not, then, prevent ALL violent crime by putting everyone in prison? (after all, everybody knows there’s no violence IN prison)
What’s that? You don’t want to confine ALL schizophrenics? Just the one’s with “violent tendencies”? Such as assault?
Aren’t they already confined when they commit a crime?
You’re not talking about schizophrenics with a history of ACTUAL violence. Such violence is ALREADY criminal. ALREADY requires confinement. (p.s. just in case you don’t know, violent THREATS are criminal …. tortious, too.)
By “violent tendencies”, you mean non-violent acts and speech indicative of violent thought. How many “sane” people say “violent” things? How many have ranted and raved when angry? How many do it, DAILY, on the internet? How many “sane” people have ever taken out their anger on an inanimate object? Are they given LIFE in prison? Should they be?
What is being advocated is the permanent confinement for Schizophrenics who SAY (but don’t DO) “violent” things, but not for “sane” people who do the same.
Things are not improved by reliance on the post hoc and circular argument that someone is “crazy” BECAUSE they committed a certain crime. This type of argument is FALLACIOUS. That is, the entire premise of the argument to confine the mentally ill to prevent more “Newtown’s” is logically flawed.
Still, “spotlighting” certain events, and begging the question after the fact will convince many “sane” people to agree to permanently confine the mentally ill. If their support for permanently confining the mentally ill is based on faulty logic; then it is — by definition — IRRATIONAL.
Now who’s crazy?
Nevertheless, “SOMETHING MUST be done”, right?
Well, let me add that there is a much stronger correlation between schizophrenia and violence when substance abuse is added to the mix.
Additionally, there is a very strong correlation between “sane” people and violence when substance abuse is involved.
I have a solution which is more consistent with both fact and logic than the permanent confinement of all mentally ill persons.
Permanently confine everyone who EVER drinks alcohol or uses any “recreational” drug. That’s right, LIFE IMPRISONMENT WITHOUT PAROLE; WITHOUT TRIAL; WITHOUT APPEAL; WITHOUT DEFENSE; WITHOUT CHARGE.
(No, I’m not serious; it’s a valid reductio. But even as a serious argument, it’s sounder than your’s.)
There is a crime in this country — and THIS country particularly — that is worse than all others. Worse than murder. Worse than rape. It is the imprisonment, by the State, of an innocent man.
And you propose to do it multiple times over, in perpetuity.
Frankly, even if 99 of 100 schizophrenics committed violent crimes; what you suggest would still be evil, as it would permanently imprison one innocent man.
NOTE: I didn’t even broach the subject of race as it relates to percentage of violent crime committed; but you should be aware that if this illogical and EVIL argument succeeds, it will set the precedent — logically, and INEVITABLY — for the imprisonment of all black people. This is why there is a VALID Slippery Slope argument to be made against this push to “Institutionalize”. Go on, say it. Say, “That could never happen here”.
I have a cousin with schizophrenia, and he’s as harmless as human beings come. Far less dangeroust han most allegedly “sane” people I’ve met.
God help the person who comes to imprison my cousin, because I’ll be there with him … waiting for you.
I hate to say this, gun owner that I am, but gun control WILL happen, sooner rather than later. It has come up in discussion with several female friends/colleagues. They are talking in terms of whether anyone “Needs” to have a gun.
Women are frightened. They will use the government to disarm us so they FEEL better.
Sadly, a 5’4″, 120# woman needs a gun more than this 6’1″, 230# man does. They will discover, to their own detriment….
More is coming out about the poor little misunderstood angel (sarcasm) who committed mass murder at that Connecticut elementary school.
His mother would not allow others to enter their house. She slept outside his bedroom door at night to try to keep him in his room. Reports have said that she had so many guns because she was a “doomsday prepper”, but it seems much more plausible that she had them because she was scared of her li’l angel. It also seems likely that in addition to Asperger’s/autism/lack-of-asswhipping-burger’s, he also had some sort of serious personality disorder, making for a lethal combination.
But don’t fall for the BS that people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are simply sweet nonviolent snowflakes. All over the Internet you can find account after account, usually in hushed tones, about those with ASD—brilliant or retarded, verbal or nonverbal—who start with ever more violent meltdowns and outbursts, then move to attempting to hurt and then actually hurting, siblings and pets. I’ve seen accounts of ASD kids getting caught beating infants to stop them from crying because the noise bothers them. Of course, the lamestream media never cover any of this stuff, oh noes! Might burst someone’s bubble!
Plenty of testimony details normal brothers and sisters, many of whom get drafted by their loving parents to look after the defective one, getting hit, kicked, and beaten by the ASD kid. The violence escalates, and the ASD kid eats a lot, then gets huge and hard to control (especially males).
The catch is that it doesn’t get reported, or gets swept under the rug, because it’s within the family and not one of the parents committing the abuse. The parents make excuses and even stop abused siblings from telling authorities about this domestic violence (because that is what that is). These normal siblings get little or no relief, until they get the heck out of Dodge later.
There is a report that a neighbor had to watch the little angel because his outbursts made it impossible for his older brother Ryan to handle him, for example, and it’s highly revealing that Ryan had not spoken to angel in some two years. Like so many other siblings, he escaped a progressively bad situation and wanted no part of the looming debacle. Finally, in too many cases, the ASD child hurts or kills someone, often his mother, and only then is there intervention—but it’s too late. Li’l angel’s example is a prime one.
We need to stop looking at people on the autism spectrum as innocent, gentle souls. Many of them are quite capable of violence and get away with it all the time even as (usually) the mothers make excuses and cover for them. Li’l angel in Connecticut is an extreme example, but I’ll lay odds that many more on the autism spectrum are more than capable of doing something just as bad if given the opportunity.
Let the flame wars begin. What I say isn’t politically correct in an era in which we mainstream people with massive mental problems and expect everyone else to put up with them, but it needed to be said. But I’ll sure take a lot of flack for my comments. So get on with the flames.
K-man,
Perhaps unexpectedly, but you won’t catch any heat from me on what you said.
From the first tricklings of news on Friday, a chorus was raised up, shouting “INSTITUTIONALIZE”! Institutionalize the mentally ill, that is.
Without differentiation among kinds and degrees of mental illness, this can only mean to permanently incarcerate EVERY American with any mental illness.
Oddly, when one of the first bits of information to come out was that Lanza was Autistic, there was a rush — including here on PJM — to qualify the call for institutionalization to exempt people with Autism. It became necessary to claim (rightly or wrongly) that the autistic are no more violent than any “normal” person.
Maybe that’s true, and maybe not (though evidence PRIOR to this shooting would seem to indicate that it’s not); but the fix was in to exempt the Autistic not only from involuntary institutionalization, but also from any criticism, and from any hint of a suggestion that it could possibly have anything whatsoever to do with Lanza’s actions.
I no more want to “round up” every autistic person and shut them away, than I want someone to do the same to my meek, schizophrenic cousin. But I have no hesitation about noting the influence that schizophrenia MAY have IF and WHEN someone with schizophrenia commits an act of violence.
Somehow, this is verboten when it comes to autism. With everyone who’s ever met an autistic person trying dismiss any connection of Lanza’s acts to autism. Even to the point of pushing blame ONTO folks with other mental illnesses, regardless of whether it’s schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, or even ADD. And this, with no evidence he had ever been diagnosed with ANY OTHER mental illness besides AUTISM.
“Oh, but he must have ALSO had a personality disorder.”
“He MUST also have been schizo.”
“He was certainly bi-polar, too.”
Why?
With the only reporting being that he was Autistic; and with ZERO evidence of his having another, different mental disorder …. WHY?
Because, for some unknown reason, the Autistic are a “protected class” among the POLITICALLY CORRECT.
Sane People Tend not to Commit Mass Murder! There Fixed it for Ya!
Insane people tend not to commit mass murder.
There, fixed it for YOU. (even though I doubt that you can understand it)
Your proposed solution is obvious, but at what point do we either euthanize them or institutionalize them wholesale? Should we insist on prenatal testing and forced abortion of any child determined to be genetically predisposed to be emotionally or mentally defective? Do you limit your final solution to just the ASD kids and adults, do you expand that to all those with congenital, cognitive disorders, and will you eventually mandate the dehumanization of all who are less than perfection who might cause some detraction from the common good? Heinrich Himmler would be proud of you.
My proposed solution, Elephant4Life, is not as obvious as you might think. Let me put a different nuance on it.
The thrust of my post is simply that it’s time to stop treating those on the autism spectrum as completely innocent people who would never harm another being, and instead recognize that many of them in fact do—and once begun, the behavior escalates over time.
Once anyone begins initiating violence against pets or other people, or shows cruelty toward other animals—regardless of any mental issues, autism, or other excuses—then is the time for intervention to protect other people and animals. No such violence, no problem; simply treat children with mental issues as best we can so they might be able to function in society one day.
But deliberate violence directed against others at a young age should mandate whatever is needed to protect society, as the behavior can only escalate. In many cases this will mean institutionalization. Maybe for life. Expensive? Sure. But if the alternative is more incidents like Sandy Hook Elementary School, institutionalization becomes the cheaper, safer, more humane alternative. Dr. Laura Schlessinger used to cite a “one-hit” rule of thumb for relationships: the first time a boyfriend or girlfriend deliberately hits you, the relationship should end right then. A similar rule should apply for children with mental disorders.
In no event should a young child who has acted against animals or people be just left at home with no consequences—but that is standard operating procedure today. It ends with such things as Mom sleeping outside her son’s door to try to keep him from leaving, before he finally kills her and goes on a rampage at a school. This SOP is unacceptable. It has to change, and change now.
By the way, given the research into genetic causes of ASD that is beginning to show affirmative results, I strongly suspect that once prenatal testing for ASD becomes available, parents will overwhelmingly choose to abort just as is the case with over 90% of fetuses with Down’s syndrome today. I don’t like this potential outcome. But with the challenges that children with autism disorders present to parents, I will find it difficult to condemn parents who choose to terminate the prenancy instead.
Dont worry, the Left is all over infringing upon Freedom of Speech via Hate Speech laws.
To avoid the likelyhood of violence, criticizing Islam, Mohammed or Muslims (among other groups) is to be made a criminal offense, punishable with imprisonment. Community cohesion is more important than freedom.
You are right, with an exception. Do not slander the Muslim religion, but do not preach about Jesus Christ the son of God either. And if you do, then you will be slandered, cursed, and brought to justice. This country was created by one creator, who is now not allowed in our schools, or public now days, and we wonder why we have problems. We have replaced it with drugs, alcohol, self gratification, and everything against what God asked. Now when something goes bad, we blame guns, God, or whatever will allow us to stay in our daily routine. GOD has turned his back on our nation, and you have not seen anything yet. From financial ruin, to natural disasters, to disease and eventually mass government genocide. Just as every other Ottomon Turkey around 1915 (result over 1 million killed by government), Russia 1929-53, (result 20 million), Europe 40′s Hitler, (result 13 million), China n the 50′s 60′s 70′s (result 20 million), Guetamalia 60-80′s, (result over 100,000), Uganda 70-79, result over 300,000, 75-70 cambodia, result over 1 million. United States, Soon to come.
Adam Lanza was “weird since he was five years old”?
This begs the question: what could have happened to that child by the age of five to warp him so badly? Who abused him, and how? At five years old and before, he, like those babies he killed, was still innocent of evil. It takes a warped adult to destroy a child’s mind, and someone failed to protect him. The abuse he suffered must have been beyond contemplation.
Perhaps we need look no further for motive, and no further for an explanation of why he targeted his parents. Even, in some twisted logic, an explanation of why he, too, went after small children in that particular school. It is becoming more possible than ever that picture-perfect Newtown harbors a not-so-pretty secret.
‘Adam Lanza was “weird since he was five years old”? This begs the question: what could have happened to that child by the age of five to warp him so badly? Who abused him, and how? At five years old and before, he, like those babies he killed, was still innocent of evil.”
There are kids as young as three years old who have killed and not all kids who kill are abused.
The federal government including obama is to blame for this crap. They are smart enough to know that every one of these mass killers has been on some type of mind altering drug. Do not say you people are unaware. They should be put put in jail for what they know yet refuse to act on. Why? It is simple, there is an agenda to take away the arms of the American people. Call me what ever you want, but over 15 years of research tells me the truth. So go bury your head back in the sand if you do not want to hear this. I only hope Americans stand up to the administration and the UN when they try. So many innocent lives are lost. Not one cop or law enforcement was able to prevent this. Well lets take away guns from everyone (of and like drugs and alcohol), it will only make it more available on the black market. Only now you have the same amount of police trying to keep up with what will be triple the load. Get real people. If you don’t have the balls to take care of your own, you think someone else can. In my life, I have been stabbed, mugged, beat up, and not one time was I able to thank law enforcement for their help. Man up, defend yourself, your family, your friends. And above all, be aware of your surroundings. When your guards down, you will get hit.
Dude was taking college courses and getting a 3.26 GPA at 16, then his parents get divorced and mom (who doesn’t have to work) pulls him out of that for homeschooling and not letting him get his own haircut by himself 2/47 up to age 20… no teenager, mentally ill or not, would stand for that (unfortunately, he was mentally ill… and heard mom was going to put him in the bin, take away what little life he had AND move up there with him so she could be there EVERY day too– obviously, he didn’t take that too well). So left/liberals, who like to treat adult people like children anyway, feel we need to restrict or even confiscate guns. Great story about mishandling of crazy people, too bad left/liberals aren’t into protesting that any more– if he was so bad, why wasn’t he on medication, why isn’t there a readily known diagnosis/history of treatment, why wasn’t this addressed in the divorce/custody arrangements, why didn’t family court check up on this (as invasive as family courts often get) and why didn’t they do anything (like get social services involved) about a legal adult formerly under their baliwick still having his life run like a dependent child? If he wasn’t that bad, how’d mom get away with making him that bad to the point he did what he did (and he was certainly responsible for his definitely premeditated actions). He should’ve run away and told his mom where to go (as his older brother did– notice he hadn’t been in contact w/ mom or his brother in a while) but, then again, he WAS mentally ill and that would’ve been the sensible course to do.
I know this is an old thread, but I’ve just come across it so I’ll post anyway.
I posted this first on a Washington DC blog that reported the suspension from school of a six-year-old child who pointed a finger at a classmate and said “pow.” Needless to say, everybody involved has hired a lawyer. And the lefty commenters, of course, have popped up to blame the “gun culture” and especially the NRA. So:
“Nothing to do with the NRA. Little kids, for the most part, know nothing about real guns, the gun control debate, or the NRA. What they know about is what they see on TV and in the movies and in their video games.
“When I was a kid, we used to play World War II. We took turns being the “good” Americans and the “bad” Nazis or Japanese. Which is to say, we took turns pretending to kill each other and be killed by each other.
“We didn’t learn about how to do that from the NRA or from seeing adults walking around with rifles or concealed weapons. We were imitating what we saw on TV. In prime time, we could watch “Combat,” “The Rat Patrol,” and “12-O’Clock High.” On Saturday mornings, we had stuff like “Combat Theater” – featuring a new war movie every week.
“And that’s just the World War II stuff. Our Westerns always featured men gunning each other down in the street, often for no good reason. Spies – 007 and the Man from U.N.C.L.E. slung quite a bit of lead before our impressionable young eyes. And good old Hannah Barbara gave us “Jonny Quest,” which featured bad guys getting shot in every other episode. We’d play like them sometimes, when slaughtering Krauts and Japs got boring.
“It wasn’t “gun culture” that made us into little pretend killers – it was pop culture. The first gun I ever saw was on TV. I never touched a gun until I was thirteen. But by that time, I’d won and lost hundreds of playground battles, shed gallons of invisible blood, wiped out entire divisions of my playmates, destroyed a number of tribes of school children, and blasted my way through a few posses of little girls.
“The interesting thing is, I NEVER got confused about what I was doing. I knew that killing real people in the real world was different from play-killing kids on the playground. I was one of the “good guys” (as we all were when we weren’t playing Nazis or other enemies), and good guys don’t shoot their friends, their parents, innocent people, total strangers. Good guys defend these people against “bad guys.” The definition of “bad” was rather vague, but we had plenty of examples from TV. Most of us didn’t personally know any bad guys. We knew the school bully was a bad guy, but for some reason we never thought of shooting him. Shooting was pretend. The school bully was real.
“By the time I was a teenager in high school (evidently the prime age for becoming a school shooter), I was pretty miserable and lonely. But despite my “violent” past, it never occurred to me that I could murder my way out of my misery. Girls didn’t like me. Boys made fun of me. I didn’t want to kill any of them. The most violent thing I did at the time was play tabletop wargames with some other lonely geeks. I knew kids who were much worse off than I was. None of them ever shot anybody.
“Now I’m a technical writer. I don’t own a gun. I’m not afraid of guns. I don’t want to take guns away from other people unless those people are demonstrably insane or habitual criminals. I don’t know what the “solution” to school shootings or gun violence is. Neither do you.
“What I do know is that childhood has obviously changed. Something is missing, or something has been added. I don’t think it’s guns in the hands of adults. Those were present when I was a kid but we didn’t really notice. Our guns were all on TV.
“It’s possible that the lines between good and bad were more evident to us back in the 60s. Our TV shows and movies, while violent, instilled in us something like “rules of engagement.” It was obvious who to shoot and who not to shoot. It was obvious that pretend shooting was OK but real shooting was serious and dangerous. It was obvious that heroes used their strength to protect others, not to conduct personal vendettas. It was obvious that there was more to killing with a gun than some loner striking a cool pose in your trenchcoat and dark glasses while spraying millions of slow-motion bullets in every direction.
So – why is it no longer obvious?”
I know Dr. Helen has dealt with kids who committed murder. Maybe she can answer the question. I’ve always thought that theorizing about the availability of guns (the default liberal explanation) or the lack of black/white morality (the default conservative explanation) wasn’t getting at the truth. Are these children simply untreated mentally ill people? Or are they average kids who’ve been warped or robbed of coping skills by “society” or “culture” or “the educational system?”
My question is, WHAT DO THE KIDS SAY? The ones who survived, I mean. I know how it was to be a kid when I was a kid. What’s it like today? Why is the unthinkable now thinkable?