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What will we conclude from the Santa Barbara shootings?
Something I wrote after the shootigs at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, CT.
As true now as it was then.
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Whenever something like this happens, we always go through the usual "Oh my, why did he do it, what caused him to do it, what could we have done to prevent this" litany. Every time. I suppose it's only natural to think those things after some horrible tragedy like this.
But wondering what we could have done to prevent it, doesn't mean there WAS anything we could have done.
Seeing this thread just now, was the first I've heard of this event, and I know nothing about it except what's in the posts preceding this one.
But I can probably predict how things will go - since they have gone this way for every other mass murder like this.
The shooter's motives will be analyzed... and it will be found that he didn't really have any "normal" motives. He didn't hate the thirty or forty people he shot. He didn't even know most of them, perhaps didn't know any of them at all.
It will be found that he was a loner who was unhappy and a little weird, but not obviously homicidal. And/or his girlfriend jilted him last week. Or that he got a reprimand on his job. Or got a speeding ticket in his car. Or that he just got back from Iraq where he was greatly stressed. Or that his parents he was living with (if he was) suggested that he get off his duff and get a job. Or he got up two mornings ago, saw a green tree with a red bird in it, and decided from that to go and kill a bunch of people. Or some other thing happened that people can point to as the "trigger" that set him off.
And nobody, but nobody, will point out the fact that the thing that "set him off", is something that happens to various people every day, by the thousands or millions across this country... and none of THEM got a gun and started blasting away at everyone in sight. Not even the loners who were unhappy and a little weird... of which there are lots, in this country of 300 million people.
Why did he do it? Because there was something broken inside his head.
Not something that caused him to lurch around, drooling and babbling and slapping himself. But something that remained pretty much hidden, until a "stimulus" that hundreds of thousands of people get every day, happened to him this time. And the broken thing inside his head caused him to react very differently from the way everyone else has reacted over the eons.
What could have we done to prevent it? Not a damned thing. Because we don't have a "broken thing detector". Nothing else could have foretold that he would do this.
Even if we did have a "broken thing detector", it would probably register on 10% of the population, or more... the vast majority of whom will still never shoot anybody. What we don't know about the inner workings of the brain, would fill books, volumes, encyclopedia sets... if we knew enough about it to write them, which we don't. The "psychologists" we will see on TV for the next several weeks, are completely ignorant of what was wrong with this guy... and the honest ones will tell you that straight out. But those aren't the ones who will be on TV.
Well, that's what will happen over the next weeks. And a few people will say that if we make some laws about certain things, we will have "done something about it"... with no particular reason to think they will have any actual effect on the next guy with a broken thing inside his head.
Here we go again. As we did last time, and the time before that, and the time before that.
Of course, this guy was a little more "obviously" mentally ill than the Sandy Hook shooter was (not that Adam Lanza looked sane). But neither of them "looked like he was about to kill someone". What does a person about to kill someone, look like anyway? And how different does he look from your average blue-haired, vacant-stare, earring-in-the-lip-with-pants-below-his-asscrack teenager that you see every day?
Rodger's therapist was saying something was wrong. But until they actually found his I-want-to-kill-everybody manifesto, nobody said he was probably about to kill anyone... and by then it was too late.
I'd feel for the guy if he didn't state he has no blame for the parents of the murderer (since they raised a wonderful human being obviously) but instead chooses to focus on one of the tools used in the spree.
Me, too, and when the media came around to hound me, I turned away from them. Not a chance was I going to make a public spectacle of myself.
As far as guns vs. knives, I would much rather die by bullet than by slashing and gorging and my bleeding guts strewn all over the place.
Yes, mine did. And yes, they did.
And the part I bolded? That's exactly why this fella should just keep his lips zipped.
This man took to the podium on his own. Nobody dragged him up there.
Guess what? People handle grief in all different ways. Just because the grieving father didn't handle it the way you approve isn't a good excuse to play monday morning quarterback and criticize someone at their lowest possible point in life.
You know what? I'm gonna give him the benefit of the doubt and choose compassion over criticism.
Guess what? People handle grief in all different ways. Just because the grieving father didn't handle it the way you approve isn't a good excuse to play monday morning quarterback and criticize someone at their lowest possible point in life.
You know what? I'm gonna give him the benefit of the doubt and choose compassion over criticism.
The father is continuing his whining. MAYBE HE SHOULD BE LOCKED UP AND HAVE A MENTAL HEALTH EVALUATION. He might shoot up an NRA office.
You call a man grieving the loss of his son that he's raised and watched grow into a man, "whining"?!
What an utterly despicable thing to say.
The man has chosen to enter the political arena. He is now fair game.
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What will we conclude from the Santa Barbara shootings?
