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.
