A couple of months ago a fellow walked into a theatre and started shooting people.
The other day a fellow walks in a mall and starts shooting but luckily his gun jammed and only two people were killed.
Today a man walks in an elementary school in Connecticut. And 27 are dead, including children. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5569025c-4613-11e2-ae8d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2F3FPan2u
I think there is a lot left to be learned and the cops say they have vital information but of course they also said it may be months before it is all disclosed. There are many bits and pieces that have come forth, and others that I personally have wonder about………
- The mother was an interesting person. She seems to have been well liked by neighbours and friends, but yet here we have a school teacher, a kindergarten teacher who not only likes guns but also owned an assault rifle. Maybe that’s not unusual in the US, but I find it rather a stark contrast.
- Also the mother was described by her sister-in-law as a ‘prepper’. I had to look up what that meant. It seems it means that she was part of a growing group of people who believed that something ‘terrible’ was going to happen and she was stockpiling food and assembling an arsenal of weapons. Basically, she was a devout survivalist.
- At one point her son Adam was having problems in school and she took him out of school for a few years and home taught him. Based on media information this was already a kid who was having problems fitting in and then he was taken from the companionship of others and experiencing others and actually made even more isolated.
- Neighbours have said that the mother was a very nice woman, but also very strict.
- Then we have the 2008 divorce of the parents, initiated by the mother. Maybe this dissolution of the family instigated by the mother for whatever reason created a lot of resentment in Adam. A resentment that festered.
- There are many people who seem normal on the outside but inside and privately they are much different. I know a couple with children who could be classed as survivalist in a sense. They are very self-sufficient and there is nothing wrong with that. They have a house full of guns, lots of guns, and there is nothing wrong with that. They are pillars of their community and especially their church. Nothing wrong with that. What is wrong however is that they keep very much to themselves on their beautiful rural property. The children are home schooled and they are also taught about mistrusting anyone who is not of their Christian faith and not of their race. The children do not participate in area sports but do everything with their parents. It is for the most part a very isolated world they live in.
There will be a lot of speculation about what brought Adam to do what he did, but it is interesting that he killed his mother at home and then went to the school to commit more murders of children who maybe to him represented something his mother enjoyed. Maybe he felt he had to destroy everything that may have mattered to his mother. Maybe he felt she loved them more than him.
Adam’s act stemmed from both anger and revenge and it seems to have been aimed at his mother, not his father or brother whom he could have just packed up and driven to and taken his revenge there. The answer to why this happened was between the mother and son.
I hope they do find out what triggered Adam to do what he did. Maybe a psychological profile will help others to help someone else down the line and prevent this in the future.
Well I guess we will have to wait for the media post mortem of information. There’s a long list of media contradictions which makes one wonder about the qualifications of a lot of the reporters. At first it was said Adam went into his mother’s kindergarten class and did the shooting and then later the media said it wasn’t her class and now it seems she wasn’t a teacher at all. The old days of getting three verifications about any information seems to have passed away in history for reporters.
I can see a certain use for home schooling, but I can also see it may have problem points. It is probably understandable that some parents may not want their kids going to an inner school with a lot of problems and violence in a metropolitan city for instance. I suppose it’s all about ‘balance’ and what is taken away, things like interaction with other kids, that has to be replaced in other ways. Interaction is part of being human and part of joining the herd.
In the case of Adam Lanza however it ‘seems’ by all information that he needed ‘very special’ help and maybe he should have been going to a school for children with those problems.
However there still seems to be something missing from the equation of this family. Something dark that no one knew about. Interviews with family friends, associates and other kids who knew Adam said he was very quiet and introverted to the point of being overly ‘shy’ and avoiding people…..yet some say he was borderline genius. Many people said they had never seen inside the expensive home and the mother who played a weekly game with friends that rotated from home to home….when it came time for the game to be at Mrs Lanza’s home, it was always cancelled.
There will be a bit of information during the holiday season but mostly it will be set aside to keep everyone in the spirit of the season. Probably a resurgence about mid January and then it will fall off the radar until spring when some information will emerge and by mid summer……it will be all but forgotten. ‘Reports’ say that the kids will never go back to that school again, so it will probably be torn down at some point and Obama will be on the hook for the money to build a new school with no memories. He did offer to give them any help they needed.
I guess we will just have to wait and see.
The technology available to the potential despots and megalomaniacs out there goes way beyond whatever a gopher hunter has in his basement.
Many of those gopher hunters in the US have an arsenal of more weapons than is ever reported and the weaponry will not only take out the gopher, but also what is within a hundred feet around him.
Most survivalists aren’t worried as much about an attack from some other country. From that perspective and especially when it comes to the USA, anyone who attacked the country would have to face a gun behind nearly every blade of grass. That would be the positive side of gun ownership.
A majority of survivalists look at catastrophes such as a crash in the economy, or sudden destruction by weather, or a civil war, and some even contemplate the idea of an asteroid hitting earth. All of these scenarios would bring on a collapse in the civilization and the need for food and water and transportation and gas, and at that point the people they will be afraid of……..are their own. Then the only law would be personal survival.
The American psyche is an interesting one. It comes from a history of fighting for the belief in freedom. From the days of the Revolutionary War to Iraq and Afghanistan their lives have been about fighting for that freedom and honour. Even when they lost, even when decades later it was proven that certain wars were ‘invented’, they discard those and look at the dedication and bravery of their soldiers, their people. In the end, every war has been about freedom in the minds of the US people.
To this day they still cherish that freedom and part of it is the Constitution and the Second Amendment,…… ‘’the right to bear arms’’. It is a religion to them, a god given right. To them the gangsters with guns and the nutcases who show up at a theatre or a university or a school are just traitors to the religion, or misguided sick individuals and the victims are ‘unfortunate’. Freedom however, is sacrosanct.
I read about a shooting club outside Newtown and after the shooting at the school there was some discussion about cancelling the gun club activities until the situation at the school was under control and all the people who died were put to rest. Sounds of the shooting at the gun club about 3 miles outside of Newton can be heard in town. However, a majority vote decided that the gun club activities would continue, because that is their right and freedom to do so.
Adam Lanza’s mother may have been part of this gun club where she did target practice and also took Adam to learn to shoot. She was a woman in a well-to-do neighbourhood, reasonably wealthy herself, highly respected and admired by many. She was also a woman with two handguns and an assault style rifle. Ms Lanza was you’re A-typical American and despite the grief of incidents as happened at the school, no one is going to change that American religion any time soon.
Ms Lanza was also a ‘survivalist’ and one of the reasons many people in the US enter groups like that, or do not enter groups but still have their same private beliefs and feelings is because they do not trust government……even their own, past and present.
Their revered writer of the Declaration of Independence said:
"What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them."
--Thomas Jefferson 1787
Is all of this ‘crazy’…..well not necessarily.
A gun is power and also in a sense…. freedom. There’s an old saying ….”God created man…..Colonel Colt made them equal”. There is truth to that because no matter who you are or how weak you are, a gun gives you that equality in survival.
The real question in the USA is how to keep that freedom and at the same time protect others from those who go off the deep end, or the gangsters? Is it doable? I doubt it. You could lessen it by in some way finding and removing from the hands of gangsters as many guns as possible. You could enact laws that make using a gun in the commission of a crime not worth it. You could enact laws for storage so that the wrong people could not easily get their hands on the firearms in a house. But how do you define the ‘wrong people’? Some are easy to see, others are not, because anybody can for whatever reason just….lose it mentally.
Maybe the best that can be done is to try and find these answers but in the end, maybe the loss of life is just going to have to be accepted as part of life. It’s either that, or you will have a revolution in the USA, because it is very difficult, if not impossible to take rights and freedoms away from people who cherish them.
