When a 20 year old Palestinian walks onto a bus in Israel and detonates a suicide vest, we don’t generally focus on their mental health. It has been documented that recruiters often target mentally ill or challenged people for suicide missions, but the problem is less the lack of mental health treatment than the existence of bomb makers and ideologues who are willing to use the mass killing of innocents to try to make a political point.
In Newtown, the bomb makers were the manufacturers of the Bushmaster .223 semiautomatic rifle. Perhaps the mother was the ideologue who taught her son how to use the weapon and inadvertently allowed him to gain possession of it for his own murderous use.
My point is that the reason so many people are dead is not simply because someone was mentally ill. That alone, wouldn’t have caused this carnage. He needed the bomb. He needed the suicide vest. He needed someone to make it, he needed someone to show him how to use it, and he needed someone to supply it to him.
Seems about right.
I was about to say it’s better than a fight while in line for a pizza, but honestly, it isn’t.
I find it shocking that you in any way can draw a parallel between the Newton violence and Palestinian violence. In the latter case you completely ignore the Israeli violence of the past 65 years which has depirved and continues to deprive the Palestinians of land and property. The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is all about land and property, wealth and power, greed and racism. What was the gratuitous slaughter in Newton all about? Well maybe remotely money and power. Real estate doesn’t seem to have played a part… The young man clearly had issues, to put it mildly, maybe (almost certainly) his mother too. The man had no further goal than to express himself in the horrible, horrible way he did. Boo, you don’t need to always express an opinion.
I see basically no difference between recruiting a kid for a suicide mission against civilians on a bus and giving a mentally ill kid a gun which he uses to kill innocent civilians in a school.
If I saw suicide bombing of civilians as justified in a way, in any context, then I might not like the comparison. But, I don’t.
I’ve never been shy about criticizing Israel. I am not defending their policies here. I am making a point that right-wingers don’t say, “Don’t blame the suicide vest, blame the mental illness.”
They argue differently when they really shouldn’t.
It is bizarre to draw the Palestinians into this. They have nothing to do with it and the their plight and the situation in Newton are worlds apart. No one enlisted Adam Lanza, he was not fighting for a ‘political/nationalistic cause’, no one gave him a gun, he took it from his mother. He was not the victim of violence by the people in the school he shot up. What are you talking about? What’s the point of your comparison? The situation is Newton and the US is general is so screwed up it might be better just to stick to home ground. This is home-grown horror.
Apologies. o/t but it would seem Petraeus’ lack of judgment included advisors
Stunning. No wonder the MSM has labeled Petraeus the intellectual general — he does what right wing think tanks tell him to do.
And poor General Allen following Petraeus at CentCom and then Afghanistan and inheriting his camp followers, the Kagans and that FL party planner.
I don’t disagree with what you’re saying, Boo. I just want to point out that people’s idea of “normal” differs. Some people’s idea of normal is crazy, it’s craziness sanctioned by their social group, and I think that’s what we’re dealing with here.
Just google “women AR-15”. There is a whole subculture of women in this country taking up the AR-15 as a hobby, and a whole sector of business promoting it to them. This is just one assault weapon and one sub-clientele. Theoretically there’s nothing wrong with it, except that they have no realistic sense of the danger.
It’s a series of partially overlapping “counter-cultures”, all aiming to give a great big “f-k you” to what a whole lot of other folks regard as normal. These counter-cultures are more concerned with sporting the SIGNS of opposition (for example, belief in birtherism) then with the real-world effect these beliefs might have on them (making themselves stupid,going against their own economic interest, engaging in highly risky behavior). If facts have a liberal bias, they don’t need no stinkin’ facts.
What do you want to bet that the late Mrs. Lanza believed that learning to shoot was a healthy activity for her maladjusted child? Something that would help him feel more like a normal young man? Something that would teach him responsibility, sportsmanship, etc.? Mot of all, something that would protect him? All the NRA bullshit (much of which wouldn’t necessarily be bullshit if it maintained some sense of proportion). To say nothing of the survivalist ethos that she supposedly shared.
There’s so much of this story that we don’t know yet. But aside from the horror of the crime itself, I think this is one reason why the gun lobby is running so scared. This was a normal, gun-shooting family, except that in reality, somebody’s idea of health and safety led to her death and that of 30 other innocent people..
That’s a good point, but the problem with that line of reasoning is that the making of suicide bombs, or bombs of any kind, is already highly illegal and very aggressively prosecuted everywhere in the world, especially in Palestine, where such activities can even get you assassinated by your government, or a another government, without a trial.
Yet people still make such bombs and recruit others to use them in mass murders, nonetheless.
Ideas other than bans and criminality have to be explored instead.
As you say, suicide vests are illegal everywhere. However, a well-concealed semiautomatic pistol with a large capacity clip can do the same job in most locations just as well. The only difference is people don’t go to suicide vest-ranges to blow themselves up for fun.
Has it been factually established that the Sandy Hook shooter was “mentally ill?” Diagnosed as such and not simply assumed that a mass murderer or any murderer for that matter must be “mentally ill.” If not, why repeat this NRA approved talking point?
wrt the analogy — it’s very weak on many levels.
Well, this story has been poorly reported from the beginning, so I suppose we should be cautious about declaring him mentally ill in the sense that people were well aware of it. I can’t imagine a sane person doing what he did, but it’s important to get the story right.
The legal bar for insanity is even higher than that for some form of mental illness which is why so few defense teams attempt to use it. McVeigh killed 168 people including 19 children under the age of six, and yet, he wasn’t declared mentally ill, but we have some understanding of his motivation based on his worldview, twisted, but all too common, though it was.
You leave the NRA out of the real causes of the murders. They just cut another 26 notches into their manly belts, their reward for their endless big-money lies and mendacious promotion of a tool made for no other reason than to damage, hurt, or destroy. There is no parallel for what they do. Companies make hammers, poisons, knives, and endless other potential weapons, but none of them that I know have organizations dedicated to glorifying the “heroism” of using those items to kill and destroy. But the NRA has no choice: that’s all their little steel gods are good for.