A school shooting in Connecticut has left 18 elementary-school children dead, as well as nine other people, including the shooter. An event like this will naturally lead to calls for stricter controls over guns. Which it should! There’s no reason why we can’t protect the rights of responsible citizens to own guns, while making it difficult or impossible for the kind of person who might walk into an elementary school and open fire to easily obtain weaponry. (Earlier this week in China, a disturbed man walked into a school and began … knifing. It was a tragedy, but nobody died.)
But our inability as a society to enact sensible gun rules is nothing compared to our massive failure when it comes to dealing with mental illness. We don’t know whether the Connecticut shooter actually was mentally ill, but it’s hard to imagine that the massacre was the act of someone calmly contemplating alternatives and coming to a rational decision. This graph, showing rates of people in mental health facilities and in prisons over time, tells you all you need to know. Around 1970, a combination of well-intentioned campaigns to clean up horrific conditions in mental health institutions and a desire on the part of governments to cut costs led to a huge number of people being dumped out on the street without the ability to really care for themselves. Combine that unfortunate situation with our bizarre drug laws and incarceration policies, and many of those people end up in prison, with little or no treatment for their conditions.
From an even bigger-picture perspective, modern secular/cosmopolitan society faces an enormous challenge over how to take care of its less fortunate citizens. We no longer live in a world of small towns and rural hamlets where people know each other and neighbors take care of those who are less fortunate. (I’m not sure we ever did, but there is undeniably less neighborly cohesion now than there was when communication and transportation was much more primitive.) It’s easy for “institutionalization” to be a scapegoat, and I have no doubt that conditions in mental health facilities were and are often very deplorable. But doing little or nothing is not the right alternative.
This is, of course, second/third-hand, but I heard a sociologist/criminologist on NPR refer to mass killers of strangers (like the movie theater shooting) as psychotic. This is as opposed to mass killers of known people; those are probably not psychotic but almost certainly have some level of mental problems. As he pointed out, it is much easier to say why someone became a mass killer than it is to identify someone, even from within the expected group, as the next killer. Another thing that has been pointed out is that this and other cases of mass killings have demonstrated that certain weapons are far more efficient than others at killing lots of people in a short time. Obviously the weapon used in Connecticut is one of them — a large-capacity magazine and semi-automatic fire. Increased access to mental health services combined with limiting the availability of such weapons seems like a good approach to reducing the probability of mass killings. It’s true that murders will happen, but it’s irrational to assume that nothing should be done because you can’t eliminate all killings.
When you kill a stranger then they call it psychopathic because you don’t see the stranger as a person, just a piece of information that isn’t doing what you would like it to do. Seeing the way so many people drive in so many cities around the USA; this is one psychopathic country. anyway…
I read this and decided not to comment because I didn’t know what to say, but now it looks like the motive was that his mom was trying to have him committed to a mental health hospital. Apparently he was angry about this and shot his mom in her sleep, then went to the school to do what he did; not a very convincing way to prove you shouldn’t be committed. Also learned that he had Asperger’s and was home schooled by his mom who was a doomsday prepper who taught her mentally challenged and mentally ill son how to shoot in order to try and teach him responsibility… While I would put a lot of the blame on his parents for not being interested or apparently intelligent enough to raise children, I’m sure there are other factors that play in to it. I think one of the very overlooked issues is that there aren’t as many bad parents these days (parents don’t beat their children as much anymore, i.e. paddling, hitting, etc.) but there also aren’t enough good parents who know how to raise a kid. I wouldn’t be offended at the idea that anyone who is going to have a kid or who has kids, needs to take a state/federally funded parenting class once a year for 18 years after their child’s birth so that they can get guidance if their child is too much for them to understand. A lot of problems between parents and their children comes from the vast gap in intelligence/knowledge between generations. Look at parents from the 70s and parents today; that’s a big difference in parenting styles. Still, the whole thing is one big mind fuck to try and figure out exactly what caused what and how fucked up society is. There are so many things a person could say about it all, and all those things would be true. You could say with an increasing population you’re going to see crazier acts of violence occur. You could say worse shit happens (to children the same age) every fucking day in African countries, yet nobody really gives a shit enough to do anything about it until it happens to white suburbanite children in America. All I could honestly say is that just about every view on this event is probably irrational; as irrational as a civilization that can’t work together on simple problems can be.
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“Good people don’t need laws to tell them to act responsibly and bad people will find a way around the laws.” – Plato.
Like drug prohibition/control, gun prohibition/control won’t work. All you’ll do is leave good people who respect laws defenseless against criminals who don’t respect laws. This includes the greatest criminal of them all: the government & it’s military.
Every tyrant in the 20th century began his tyranny by confiscating guns from the people over whom he ruled.
Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc.
Rather than focus our energies on resolving the real cause of these tragic events (mental illness and psychiatric Rx over-dependence) we willfully resort to PC red herrings in shallow exhibitions of groupthink.
While we rightly mourn the deaths of these innocents, lets not forget the thousands of the world’s other children whom our government, and by implication we, ruthlessly kill in the name of God knows what exactly?!?
<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/19/newtown-drones-children-deaths" title="Newtown kids v Yemenis and Pakistanis: what explains the disparate reactions?"
Where I live asking sonmoee if they own a gun would get a “yes” about as often as asking them if they owned a car. The truth that when secnds count the police are ony minutes away is quite obviouis in rural America.I bought my first pistol a few weeks ago, primarily for home protection and to carry on walks and bicycle rides. You never know what kind of animals my pop out of the woods. Bears and mountain lions have been reported in my county. I’ve seen a bobcat on my back porch and in my front yard. Plus a wild dog or coyote is always a possibilty.As for doctors, my doctor made enough mistakes in my treatment for me to go elsewhere. Simple stuff like incorrectly running glucose test and such. We could save a lot of lives if doctors policed themselves better.I think I’ll use Trey’s response if asked. I keep my gun unloaded but the clip and gun within reach of each other.