Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
What I'd like to know is why so many people on FB (my wife has an account) are pontificating about how some broader trend in society ("breakdown of the family," materialism, kids doing too much online gaming, etc.) is the real cause.
The evidence is clear. The kid was mentally ill. There may have been contributing stressors at work, but ultimately, a deranged mind, which none of us could ever hope to understand, pulled the trigger. Why is that an insufficient explanation? Why can't it be what we logically recognize: An unpredictable act of an aberrantly functioning brain? An outlier so unfathomable no amount of vigilance could have prevented it?
I guess people want to feel there's some way they can understand every bit of our world, all the way down to things as disturbing as this. That however unexplainable something is, it can nevertheless be shoehorned into some sort of pattern, or is part of some bigger phenomenon. It can't be. It isn't. There will never be an explanation other than "Madman kills 20 children." And thank God for that. If this were in any way connectable to some broader social or cultural shift, or trend, or neglect, it would be even more horrifying.
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We have a society in which an extraordinary number of such people choose to shoot up schools. There is a problem, and it is getting worse. You may not be able to understand one, but what about 20?
The stats on gun violence in America are also pretty damning.
Start here for some disturbing correlations. We have an organization of over 4 million Americans that supports the proliferation of automatic weaponry in our society and argues that "armed citizens" are something good in its own right - not hunters, not people shooting competitive, people whose "arming" is part of their "citizenship". That is, to my mind, a terrorist organization more dangerous than any on our various lists. And it owns one of the political parties and half of the other one.
And, think how this looks to the rest of the world.
