My kids are supposed to walk in the door in a few minutes. I may not let them go back to school again.
Honestly, I'm sitting here watching the news and weeping. They were kindergartners! I can't get past that.
What am I going to tell my own children when they come home?
Here's the latest from the New York Times.
Apt. 11d 
I am angry.
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If you want to contribute to efforts to end gun violence, consider a donation to the Brady Center. Their server maybe be crashing from the traffic, but stick with it if you want to donate. They are doing great, much needed work in DC to advocate for policy change:
http://www.bradycenter.org
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I feel physically sick. Tiny, young children. The absolute devastation their parents feel.
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As I’ve been surfing the web and crying, I couldn’t help but think of your post a week or so back about gun control. And some people said well – if there’s no difference between the two that you pictured, why ban them? Fine. I’ll admit that I don’t know much about guns, but can’t we have reasonable gun owners step forward, take the lead, educate us non-gun owners about what is reasonable. Because I am sad and tired, so tired of hearing these stories.
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Grain of salt, but … it’s being reported that the shooter had Asperger’s:
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/12/live-updates-newtown-ct-school-shooting/
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Yes, I made my donation to the Brady center yesterday, because of the shootings in Oregon, and the two young boys who were killed by their father’s guns in Houston and Pittsburgh. I know what meaningful steps I want to take to reduce the chances of this incident occurring again, and the first step is limiting and licensing chess to guns.
Those of you who believe otherwise, please strt talking about what meaningful steps you want to take.
(A mentally ill person in China went on a spree today. It seems that 22 children are in the hospital. In Connecticut, 20 children are dead and gone forever.)
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My next step is going to be to ask people my children visit whether they have guns in their home, and offerto host instead, if they do. I don’t want my children in homes with guns.
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The Pittsburgh one was actually way out in the suburbs.
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“Grain of salt, but … it’s being reported that the shooter had Asperger’s:”
I haven’t read the stories yet (just heard a bit before flicking the radio off as the kids got in the car at school), but that certainly did cross my mind when I heard the shooter described as “developmentally disabled.”
This is early, of course.
The structure of the event also reminded me a lot of the 1966 UT shooter, the combination of both killing of intimates and of strangers in different locations. That’s unusual. The UT shooter (Charles Whitman) had an aggressive brain tumor.
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It sounds like the shooter was autistic.
http://rt.com/usa/news/sandy-school-live-updates-091/
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I am curious, Laura, does this event change your calculus re: giving your son the violent video games you’ve written about? This is a genuine question, not meant as a provocation.
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It’s making me re-think the laser tag party my kiddo had. But it doesn’t seem like it’ll do very much good to restrict access to the fake stuff when the real stuff is so easily available.
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Yes, sf reader, I have been thinking through the violent video game present all day.
We don’t know enough about this shooter yet. But my guess is that he was a highly disturbed individual. Autism may be a factor, though it sounds like that it was part of a whole stew of disfunction. Normal people, even those who play horrible video games all day, do not do things like this.
Everybody has their pet issue that they use to make sense of these tragedies. Gun control, broken society, mental health. I’m holding myself back from all that right now and waiting until we get more information. But I can’t help wondering why someone with a history of mental illness can get access to this kind of firepower.
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“But I can’t help wondering why someone with a history of mental illness can get access to this kind of firepower.”
Anybody who is able to focus and plan long term can pull off this sort of thing under practically any society, under practically any laws (see Anders Breivik–he planned for literally years). The people who can be deterred are the impulsive types who weren’t planning to kill anybody yesterday, but would like to today.
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Previewing your Comment
bj
I’m not holding back because I realized one of the reasons I’m so angry is that I’m angry at myself. I’m angry that I let this issue drift to the backburner, even while reading the reports of kids killed accidentally by guns left on dashboards, in backpacks, even in gun safes, by hearing of people killed in my own building, of massacre after effective massacre, in a steady stream, and of suicides.
We need to talk openly about what changes can be made to limit people’s impulsive access to weapons of mass murder. We can have that conversation while still trying to restrict freedoms as little as possible. Waiting periods, training, licensing, all of those things might make differences in the incidents we’ve seen. Maybe if a father had to take a class before he was allowed to purchase a gun, he’d be a little bit less likely to see his child killed with it. Maybe if the Aurora killer had to wait a month or two, he could have gotten psychiatric help before he went on a killing spree.
We can talk about goals, and we can measure outcomes. If gun supporters are right, and our attempts have no effect on mass murders, well, we can talk about loosening restrictions again. But we have to try the experiment.
(and, if an amendment to the constitution is necessary, we should be talking about that, too, not give up in frustration.)
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“The people who can be deterred are the impulsive types who weren’t planning to kill anybody yesterday, but would like to today.”
That’s all to the good.
Repeating a bit from Ezra Klein, if y’all haven’t read his article yet:
“2. Eleven of the 20 worst mass shootings in the last 50 years took place in the United States.
Time has the full list here. In second place is Finland, with two entries.”
Those cold, dead hands the NRA famously talks about? They’re a kindergartner’s.
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The basic problem for any attempt at gun control in the US is that there is literally one non-military firearm in circulation in the US for every man, woman and child.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/09/politics/btn-guns-in-america/index.html
Even if not a single new firearm was manufactured or purchased ever again, that’s a heck of a lot of guns to attempt to locate and keep track of.
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Re: “I can’t help wondering why someone with a history of mental illness can get access to this kind of firepower.”
The press reports indicate that the guns belonged to his mother. I would not favor a regime in which people with mentally ill children were subject to discriminatory limitations. The mother may have been negligent in allowing her mentally ill son access to her guns, but she is beyond the reach of legal sanctions now.
Of course, the facts are still pretty murky.
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“Even if not a single new firearm was manufactured or purchased ever again, that’s a heck of a lot of guns to attempt to locate and keep track of.”
An argument for doing nothing? In full knowledge that the next massacre is less than a year away?
“I would not favor a regime in which people with mentally ill children were subject to discriminatory limitations.”
A much tighter regime across the board it is, then.
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The picture I’ve seen of the shooter’s weapon looks a lot like the one Laura posted here recently when we talked about the assault weapons ban and I was told there was an ironclad distinction between a machine gun and the one used in this massacre. I doubt that’s much comfort for the victims’ survivors.
Our discussion here showed there are still plenty of people who favor essentially unfettered access to firearms. In a self-governing society, a share that large and that motivated will likely carry the day in making laws. But make no mistake, the free and easy access they enjoy enables death as it was dealt out in Connecticut.
Unless and until the folks who own guns and love guns decide that people’s lives, children’s lives, are more important than their hobbies, slaughters like the one yesterday will continue to occur.
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“A much tighter regime across the board it is, then.”
A third of all households in the US own firearms and 50% of the firearms on earth are in the US. Lots of luck with that. (Interestingly, 40 years ago, the number of households with firearms was 50%. I expect that has something to do with demographic changes–proportionately fewer white males, more female-headed households, etc.)
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/31/politics/gun-ownership-declining/index.html
It is still very early days on the Newton case, but a couple things jump out at me:
1. The shooter had his older brother’s ID on him. (The brother said he hadn’t seen the shooter since 2010.)
2. He used his mother’s perfectly legal guns.
3. The family was very, very well off (there had been a divorce in 2009 and the mother got around a quarter million a year in spousal support).
4. The shooter sounds like the sort of disturbed young person we’ve grown so accustomed to hearing about.
5. People who knew him in school said he was really smart.
I still don’t know how easily he got his hands on his mother’s guns. Tentatively, I think it might not have mattered in this particular case, considering his family’s financial resources, his ability to procure plausible ID that did not belong to him and his intelligence. The thing about the brother’s idea (and possibly the guns, too) demonstrates that the shooter was resourceful and pretty good at getting hold of things that did not belong to him. The shooter’s exact psychological label is also fuzzy at this point, but on reflection (and this doesn’t necessarily have any relevance to the case at hand), I’m thinking that parents of bright autistics should probably not keep firearms at home, even in a well-secured, religiously used gun safe. A gun safe might be adequate for most families, but autistic children or young adults who are 1) bright 2) obsessive 3) extremely persistent and 4) technically gifted are well-known to be able to perform really amazing feats of getting around parental limitations.
The story is still developing, though. There’s a lot we don’t know yet about this family, for instance what exactly his parents had already gone through trying to manage him. It’s rather sobering to consider how wealthy these people were and how little good it did them with the problem of dealing with their son.
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Sorry, not brother’s idea, “brother’s ID.”
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AmyP, I’m hearing you say this event was A) inevitable, and B) unfortunate, but essentially OK given the difficulty of preventing it in the future. Does that sound about right?
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jen,
Inevitable doesn’t mean OK.
I don’t know that the shooting itself was inevitable, but this particular individual’s getting a gun once he decided he wanted a gun was probably overdetermined. Maybe under different circumstances, he wouldn’t have been a free man, or he wouldn’t have wanted the gun.
I think there are some clear differences with this shooter and, say, the Phoenix shooter Jared Laughner. JL was a stupid, paranoid stoner type–I can readily imagine him getting stymied by enough paperwork.
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I could not sleep last night, thinking of this terrible, terrible attack.
I wondered yesterday if he had aged out of the system. It seems his mother chose to withdraw him. If the reports I read this morning are accurate, quite a few things happened four years ago:
Parents filed for divorce (parenting counseling ordered)
Mother objected to school’s plans for him, withdrew him from school with
plans to homeschool (house, by the way, out of sight of passersby)
Father moved to Stamford, by now has new wife
Brother moved to New Jersey
(possibly) Mother purchased guns “for protection”
Thus, after that time, the mother and son were effectively alone together, with enough money to avoid outside contact. I wonder if the diagnosis of “autism” was correct?
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Re: “Jared Laughner . . . was a stupid, paranoid stoner type–I can readily imagine him getting stymied by enough paperwork.”
There are very stringent laws regulating or prohibiting access to most psychoactive drugs, but, interestingly, stoners (almost by definition) manage to work around those pretty easily. What reason is there to think that people like that couldn’t get around stricter gun laws?
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y81,
Because you can’t get more guns by sticking one in a pot and watering it? (Sorry–that just popped out.)
Cranberry,
Another thing that sticks out to me is that the surviving brother (the one who was initially confused with the shooter) seems to have stayed away from his brother for some time. It sounds like there’s probably a lot of history there and it may be that the only two people (the mom and the shooter) who know exactly what happened the last couple years are dead. At this point, I still don’t have a picture of the internal dynamics of the family. Was the mom scared of him? Was she enabling him? What were the school’s plans for him that the mom found so objectionable?
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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/newtown-and-the-madness-of-guns.html
no mincing words.
Inevitable means ok, one is unwilling to do anything to fix the issue. OK means though we don’t like it, we weigh the benefits as greater than the cost.
When 9-11 happened, we gave up freedoms, some truly untested, some significant to save lives. The same questions need to be asked here. Our plans may not work, but we can discuss what might make a difference. We are also not trying to prevent this incident. It’s already happened, so the details only matter in the context of other mass murders.
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BJ’s right – we need to discuss giving up freedoms that we as a country clearly cannot handle, and no longer deserve.
Part of my frustration here is that I don’t see gun owners coming together to moderate the problem. The gun lobby appears to view this as an all-or-nothing thing. Because I don’t know that much about how to handle it subtly, I end up coming down on the side of vastly curtailing everyone’s access. (I’m hopeful that even if we can’t find all the guns, we could at least limit access to ammunition.)
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y81, is there evidence that countries with strict gun laws have gun smuggling problems that are comparable to their drug smuggling problems? It seems to me that this is an empircal question that can be answered pretty easily by looking at other countries. While the war on drugs does seem useless and ill-advised, I’m not sure that the experience of other countries really shows that gun prohibition would be the same.
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Here’s another good piece:
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2012/12/15/public-agrees-next-step-is-gun-control/
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Well, and one presumes that part of the difference is that guns are not actually addictive, psychoactive substances.
I’m definitely in favor of talking about the data. I’m not really interested in passing feel-good but useless rules.
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My thoughts are more along the lines of this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/16/i-am-adam-lanzas-mother-mental-illness-conversation_n_2311009.html?
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I’m in the “inevitable does not mean okay” camp, after having spent a semester teaching about religious perspectives on war throughout history, and looking at all of the extraordinarily complicated ways in which people come to hate one another and/or decide that it is appropriate to harm or kill one another. It keeps happening over and over and I do not think it will ever stop. It is inevitable but not okay.
As horrific and devastating as these killings were, the only reason they get more attention than the horrific and devastating events that occur every day – in other countries, in our own inner cities or poor rural areas, in some households anywhere a child is abused or harmed – is that it vividly shows how it can happen anywhere even to people who feel safe. I’m all for better gun control, but with so many people owning guns – some of whom do so because they are genuinely scared of other people or of the government – guns are not going anywhere. Most of what we can do involves kindness and generosity and human connection with people we don’t really like and sacrifice of our own self-interest as often and as much as possible.
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“I’m all for better gun control, but with so many people owning guns – some of whom do so because they are genuinely scared of other people or of the government – guns are not going anywhere.”
There’s at least one person from my family’s history that if I knew that he was a free man again, I would be irresponsible not to at least consider gun ownership and other serious security arrangements. The guy is in prison for a brutal murder-for-hire of an informant, a close relative is the one who turned him in, he abused her very seriously for years (he gave her repeated brain injuries and would burn her hand on a hot stove), and before she turned him in, he was threatening to kill her parents. I was just googling him (I do that from time to time) and it doesn’t look like he’s been convicted yet, which is worrying.
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y81, Thanks for the “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother” link. I’m in total agreement.
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“y81, Thanks for the “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother” link. I’m in total agreement.”
It is a good piece. I have seen it pointed out, though, that the claim in her piece that the number of mentally ill in prison quadrupled between 2000 and 2006 is pretty much impossible. It may just be some sort of artifact caused by a change in definition of mentally. However, I fully believe the claim that after deinstitionalization, the US has been using prisons as the primary tool for dealing with the mentally ill.
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http://thegirlwhowasthursday.wordpress.com/2012/12/16/you-are-not-adam-lanzas-mother/
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Yeah, well, the girl who was thursday has a political agenda to push, same as everyone. No doubt, the majority of mentally ill people don’t commit crimes. Neither do the majority of people who own guns. But if you live in social circles where there are more ACLU members and social workers than gun owners, then you think gun control is the answer, and if you know more gun owners, then you think deinstitutionalization was a bad idea. Culture is king.
There is, in any case, no need for thursday to suggest that it’s really the mother who’s crazy and mistreating her child, but that kind of heartlessness is characteristic of ideologues.
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I deny the inevitability argument. First other countries do not have nearly the issues that we do with mass murder. Second, we haven’t tried anything yet. Other countries have reacted with regulations to incidents of mass murder, and had a decrease in incidents. Prevention is impossible, but I won’t believe reduction isn’t until we’ve tried it.
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Do conservatives really want to institutionalize their mentally disturbed son? Is there a difference between liberals and conservatives in their desire/willingness to institutionalize their relatives?
I’m cynical enough about conservative thought to believe that conservatives might be willing to institutionalize other people’s sons.
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“There is, in any case, no need for thursday to suggest that it’s really the mother who’s crazy and mistreating her child, but that kind of heartlessness is characteristic of ideologues.”
Amen, again, @y81. Thank you!
BTW, commenter @Shay over there nailed it with this:
“Liza Long’s post was about her perspective, and no one else’s. And everybody else who is worried that talking about mental health issues in the context of violence will further stigmatize those with mental illness – I think you’re right, but it doesn’t change the fact that my nephew, who suffers from much of the same behavioural disorders as Long’s child, is going to end up dead or in prison, because there is no help available to him. And now imagine how my sister feels raising him. Long’s article shines a spotlight on how inadequate people with children like this feel, and how their fear (for themselves and their children) affects them and you, “Thursday” have just reinforced those feelings. She can’t even name her experience right. Good job.”
And from commenter @Manda Webb:
“You do realize that the original article was titled: Thinking the Unthinkable. It was when it was republished on other sites that it became: I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother.
Your title alone suggests you basically got your panties in a wad from the first title used by news sites but not by the author herself then went a bit overboard from there.
The link in case you are curious: http://anarchistsoccermom.blogspot.com/2012/12/thinking-unthinkable.html
Way to go.”
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I live 7 blocks from the site of the worst mass shooting in Toronto. It happened in July – 19 people injured and two dead. The reason only 2 died was probably that they were handguns, and this being Canada, a ban on handguns was called for. (By the way we have had spectacularly awful shootings.)
The root cause though was gang rivalry, and the cause after that why youth join gangs and so on. I do think limiting guns, especially semi automatic and automatic ones, helps. I think helping people get connected and rooted in society helps too. After all that, sometimes terrible things happen. My hope is that this kind of tragedy does at least create the will to work on all the fronts. We need to support families with kids with mental health issues and we need to see what measures help prevent weaponry from being easily available; they’re not mutually exclusive. And it’s not just for the spectacular killing sprees. Kids die due to guns accidents. People with mental health issues go down the drain. It’s rough.
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There were some good points made in the first few comments on the Girl Who Was Thursday post, namely that the author seemed to be ignoring the child’s pulling a knife, threatening to kill his mother and himself and terrifying his younger siblings in her critique of the I am Adam Lanza’s Mom post. That’s a rather major omission.
bj said:
“Do conservatives really want to institutionalize their mentally disturbed son? Is there a difference between liberals and conservatives in their desire/willingness to institutionalize their relatives?
“I’m cynical enough about conservative thought to believe that conservatives might be willing to institutionalize other people’s sons.”
Whoa–where did that come from?
I’ve never noticed the issue of institionalization being a particularly ideological one. Practically everybody says, isn’t it a shame that they closed the mental hospitals and left many severely mentally ill people either literally on the street or in prison. Now, you can get a good ideological argument going on the question of whose fault that was (Reagan, Carter, the ACLU, Jack Nicholson, etc.) but to institutionalize or not to institutionalize is not a partisan political question at this point.
As to your question, “Do conservatives really want to institutionalize their mentally disturbed son?” the answer is going to vary according to the severity of the condition. If you’re frightened of your adult child, if you know your adult child is homeless and won’t come in out of the cold or wear shoes, if you’ve seen them ride the psych wing carousel half a dozen times (in-out-in-out-in-out) without getting better, if you get weird texts about how the CIA has recruited them and is out to get them, if you know they can’t live alone but can’t live with you, I think the answer is going to be “Heck, yeah.”
(The CIA texts story happened a month or so ago. That’s our young paranoid, brain-damaged relative’s idee fixe. Kind of hackneyed, but I guess there are no bonus points for originality.)
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My question was rhetorical, because I don’t think there is any data on whether conservatives or liberals are more likely to put their mentally ill children into institutions.
The other comment generally reflects the liberal belief that Conservatives think of the world as us and them and are willing to enact policies they think will affect others and not them (ie The 47%, welfare recipients, .stand your ground laws, .. . ). I did mean it somewhat sarcastically.
I am getting ever more angry as I hear the defenses of the nations committment to guns — Chaffetz, gun supporter, saying, “And, I think my kids are glad, too. They know dad can fire back.”
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The discussion of mental health concerns is a mere distraction in this debate, As Chaffetz said, “I don’t want the federal government involved in any of this.” The “other side” doesn’t want to do anything, which means, as columnists stated, that they are ok with the status quo in which 20 children were killed yesterday, 2 last week, all under 8.
If mental health is the talking point, let’s talk about what can happen there.
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I want to see Mythbusters address the myth that a principal with an assault rifle could have made a difference. Is she supposed to leave it on her desk, handy? Would the amount of time it took her to get from the conference room where she was, I bet, in an IEP meeting, to her office have been enough, or should she just walk around the school with an AR-15 over her shoulder? Wasn’t she shot when she walked out of the room? Should she have run out with an AR-15 at the ready?
Seriously, what the fuck are people like Louie Gohmert thinking?
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“The other comment generally reflects the liberal belief that Conservatives think of the world as us and them and are willing to enact policies they think will affect others and not them.”
That’s kind of an us-vs-them way of looking at the world, too, isn’t it?
How do you plan to remove 310 million guns from the US from people who by and large have no intention of handing them over?
I suppose it’s possible to make it a serious criminal offense to be the legal owner of a gun that was used in a crime (in order to encourage owners to keep guns secured at all times), but there are some obvious problems with such a policy. For instance, a gun owner would be incentivized not to report the theft of a gun to the police, which would hamper police investigations. Also, obviously, it wouldn’t help in cases where the totally legal owner was the perp.
These mass shootings are actually very uncommon, as a percentage of homicides in the US. The big picture is that there are something like 15,000 homicides a year in the US, and the murder rate has fallen by half since the early 1990s. (Sorry–baby’s yelling. I can’t fish out the number of gun homicides in the US or the gun homicide rate. My understanding is that in the US, 2/3 of homicides involve guns.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Homicide
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It’s really a big mistake to demonize your opponents as inhuman monsters who hate their own children. It makes civil debate impossible. If everyone does it, it makes democracy impossible. You should always consider the possibility that your political opponents not only love their children, but also they went to just as good schools as you did, they have read just as many books as you have, and the same ones in many cases, their quant skills are just as good as yours, they know just as many poor people and just as many successful people as you, and they are just as patriotic as you: they simply disagree on certain issues.
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So are you saying conservatives are no more likely to put their children into institutions? If so, that’s my point — it’s not an ACLU principle.
Yes, I would like to see a law criminalizing those who own guns that are used in a crime. I would also like to see guns permanently labelled so that we can trace the ownership of my gun that’s used in a crime.
I’d also want to try buy-back programs. Wasn’t the father whose son was killed with his gun trying to sell it?
Mabe these things won’t make a difference. But, let’s try.
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Wendy — I love your idea. except I’d like all the congressman who are proud of the weapons they carry to try out the Mythbusters test.
Those experiments have been done, and are done with soldiers and policeman. They show that guns are terribly dangerous in crowds. It is very difficult to target the enemy without killing innocents. But maybe the congressman and principals can get training as SWAT operatives or SEALs, in addition to their teaching certificates.
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This tragedy really upset me. I’ve found it difficult to weigh in on this debate on my own blog. At first, I cried. I imagine the faces of my own children on those dead bodies in the school. Then I caught some anti-autism comments on twitter and I just turned off the internet. There was just too much unfiltered grief out there and I couldn’t handle it. I spent quality time with the kids and ignored the mass media, which is ordinarily a very tough thing for me to do.
But now I’m writing. I have a very large soapbox at the Atlantic, so maybe I can write something that adds some sense to the grief. Let me use you, my commenters, as a sounding board.
I’m writing something about the culture of violence that we live in. In part, it’s the violent video games and the airsoft guns that are so prevelent in boy land. But it’s bigger than that. It’s sometimes just the absense of kindness.
As I have written here before, I do not understand guns. I would be happy to ban them all right now, but I think it’s is practically impossible. There are 300 million guns out there right now. Any governmental laws are going to be ineffectual and silly.
But maybe we can make little changes in our own homes by encouraging our kids to be good to others, even those weird, unpopular people. We can provide support to our neighbors who have larger burdens than our own.
I don’t know. Just figuring things out, like all of you.
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I’ll forward a comment by a friend, which goes in the opposite direction of your worry about our culture of violence. Her comment is that the aggressiveness and competitiveness and, yes sometimes violence, can be a part of some, usually boy,s personalities. That, to use a phrase you wrote, asking the to compleatly sublimate that part of them, would be to “do essential violence to their personalities.” She thinks that we need to find a way to guide that behavior for good, rather than try to suppress it while praising calmness and acceptance and turn the other cheek behavior.
I’m not sure I agree — the boys at the laser tag party freaked me out a lot. But I’ve argued for a long time that accepting girls means accepting their interests, even if it’s nail polish. It seems to me that we have to embrace boys in their whole as well.
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We process this tragedy differently. As I’ve said my major emotion right now is anger that we let this happen, and by that, I mean by not doing as much as I could to prevent it. I do not regard it as inevitable. I am not hopeless — I was more hopeless about AIDS. Hopeless problems can be solved if we decide they are worth solving. Reducing gun deaths is not inventing a perpetual motion machine. Solutions do not violate the laws of physics.
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The boys inthe laser tag game were scary. But, they are not unkind boys. Running around chasing each other with the taggerrs was perfectly compatible with the, who, to use an example, “is a friend to everyone.”
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Here’s the thing: I live in Israel, where a LOT of people have guns at home (security guards, soldiers on leave, etc). Not a good thing: there have been many cases of men killing their wives/girlfriends with these guns – but not so many cases like the school shootings. What is it about American society that leads violence to take this particular form?
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By “culture of violence” I don’t just mean boy culture, which is dominated by guns. Kids who play with those toys and guns don’t end up as psycho killers. They just don’t. But those guns and games are part of a bigger problem than surrounds all of us. It’s more about the absense of kindness. And that impacts the girls, too, who feel coersed to dress certain ways and are shunned by the popular girls who demand a certain level of conformity.
I was most struck by the “Adam Lanza mother” article not by the fact that she thought her son could be a psycho killer, but the fact that she felt entirely ALONE as she grappled with a children with special needs. Where were the social supports for this family? Again, the absense of kindness.
re: Isreael v. US. There are more people in the US. These killers are one in a million and there are more millions here. Some say that there is also a higher degree of anomie here.
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y81,
“…they know just as many poor people and just as many successful people as you”
Actually, I don’t know that bj knows that many poor people (in the US–she may know more in her family’s country of origin). On a previous occasion, she’s said she didn’t know anybody without a college degree. I say that not to criticize bj, but to clarify.
I think social milieu actually does make a big difference. If you don’t know anybody smart or nice who is an enthusiastic gun owner, it’s easy to make incorrect generalizations about gun ownership in the US. My rural family members nearly all own guns without making a huge fetish of it. It’s not a big deal–it’s just normal. Likewise, in our college milieu in Texas, I know for a fact that two families we know well have guns at home. At least one family has a gun safe, which is reassuring. The dads are both professors, both transplants from elsewhere and both VERY smart. I try to imagine the circumstances under which any of these people would part with their guns, and I can’t think of any, short of draconian legal penalties (and I think quite a few would be willing to take the risk).
For people who don’t understand what other people see in guns, imagine what your feelings would be if somebody wanted to take away your iphone. (And if the comparison seems weird, remember how many deaths and injuries are caused by texting while driving.)
bj,
“Reducing gun deaths is not inventing a perpetual motion machine.”
We have reduced gun deaths–there has been a drastic drop-off in the US murder rate over the last 20 years.
I suspect that as our population ages, the gun-involved murder rate will also edge down further.
rachel said:
“What is it about American society that leads violence to take this particular form?”
There are fads in crime, as in everything else, and this is the one guaranteed way to get your name on CNN. You could adopt a dozen orphans, pick the litter off of 100 miles of highway, cure the common cold, and perfect a realistic alternative fuel and you wouldn’t get a fraction of the media attention you can get through mass murder. The incentive structure stinks.
Our media has also changed a lot. The big news networks (as far as I can tell from visits to the gym and airport) love this sort of story, because they can keep running the same material all day long with only occasional infusions of new information. Our media has gotten very lazy and very cheap.
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Laura, for when you figure out what to write for the Atlantic — and don’t hurry, do something great — here’s what keeps coming back to me from Ezra Klein’s “12 Facts…” piece: Of all the mass shootings of this kind around the world (Dunblane in Scotland, Port Arthur in Australia, Erfurt in Germany) only two countries have ever had more than one; Finland has had two; the United States has had 11.
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I assume that means our schools will soon get as good as Finland’s.
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Another point I’ve seen made about our media media is that stories that would normally be local (a shooting or a cute dead kid like Jon Benet Ramsey or a pretty dead white girl) get turned into long-running national stories. It’s often argued (I think Timothy Burke said so here recently) that public fears do not match reality–our actual crime numbers are down. Paradoxically, it would seem to me that if the goal is to reduce gun ownership, it makes more sense to convince people that they are safe, rather than telling them that there are crazed killers everywhere.
Also, for that matter, it’s across the board much safer to be a child in the US than it used to be. I was just googling up the death rate for US children, and there’s been a dramatic decrease in mortality for under 5s since 1960. I’ve heard the same is true more generally for US children.
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I can think of at least three in Canada: Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, Taber, Alberta, Dawson College in Montreal. I believe there was another one in Quebec where it was all faculty killed and another one at the University of Alberta.
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Doug,
The US is substantially larger than every single one of those countries. We have nearly 4X Germany’s population and 60X Finland’s population.
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Doug, Germany has had two mass school shootings. France has had two.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/timeline-worst-mass-shootings-globe-article-1.1220608
If you consider the European Union as a whole, they’re up to nine mass shootings.
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I feel like the elephant in the room here is the media coverage. Really the only motive I can attribute to any of these killings is the desire for notoriety – and boy have we given that in spades!
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