Some Reflections On Mass Murder

I can finally get my left hand up on the keyboard.... that one handed stuff is for the birds.

What can we say about the soulless killer of the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Devin Kelly? His ex-wife says ""He just had a lot of demons or hatred inside of him," which automatically puts him on the eligibility list for running for office on the Democratic ticket.

It's not like he hid these demons from everyone around him.

His high school classmates voted him "Creepiest Creep" at the Senior Prom. He wore Eau de Creepy Goosebumps aftershave to school and carved the names of girls he liked into his pet hamster. He tried to marry his father's chainsaw.

Okay, okay - I wandered off the reservation a bit.

In 2012 the Air Force bounced him out of the service and locked his creepy ass up for a year after he assaulted his first wife and nearly killed his step child. Guess the kid had red hair. Unfortunately the Air Force did not practice due diligence (piss on that, we're the Air Force) and failed to notify the FBI of his arrest and conviction so it could be entered into the NCIC (National Crime Information Center) databases so that law enforcement officers throughout the galaxy could be warned that a serious offender had just shown up on their radar, kill him.

Less than a week before the Texas church massacre, Kelley showed up at a festival dressed in black and acted so strangely that people kept a close eye on him, two longtime parishioners said Friday. Kelley "was completely distant and way out in thought," recalled Judy Green. She and her husband said Kelley often exhibited troubling behavior. At the fall festival held on Halloween night at the First Baptist Church, Kelley "didn't even blink -- he just stared," she said.

Was this enough to alert local police so he could be checked for weapons? Sadly, the answer is no. He should never have been allowed to purchase any firearm because of his history of domestic violence; this has been part of our federal laws for about twenty years. He escaped from a mental health facility, police recieved complaints of more domestic abuse after his release but failed to follow up. To "Serve and Protect" is easily defeated by incompetence and gross neglect.

People noticed that this man was spacing out, he posted pictures of his AR15. Kelly bragged to people about being armed. Didn't his send wife know about his past and his weapons? No one knew about his DV history? His mother-in-law attended the church and could have warned others about his violent tendencies. More and more is being uncovered about Devin Kelly, but learning about his demons is not productive. Fixing a broken system is.

If there is anything we should have learned from the past, it is that we cannot depend on the government to protect us. The government will show up after the fact and clean up the mess and then we'll hold vigils. That is not satisfactory. We must pick up the responsibility of self defense and become more proactive. I am not espousing a vigilante response, just a well-reasoned attitude that if someone is acting strange and has access to weapons, perhaps the authorities should be notified.

Because of the government's failures, the only answer to this is to develop situational awareness of possible threats. And develop competency with the firearm of your choice.

More here and here.

Ample Make This Bed: The Newtown Tragedy

The jackals and hyenas have been circling tiny Newtown, Connecticut since the first moment the world came to know that something horrible was going down.

It can be argued that some are there in Newtown to dig up the truth about Nancy and Adam Lanza.  It can also be argued that many more are there to champion tighter gun control.

All of this is going on as not one murdered first-grader has been laid to rest.

Friends and family portrayed Adam Lanza’s mother Nancy as a paranoid ‘survivalist’ who believed the world was on the verge of violent, economic collapse.

She is reported to have been struggling to hold herself together and had been stockpiling food, water and guns in the large home she shared with her 20-year-old son.

Mrs. Lanza, 52, was a ‘prepper’—so called “doomsday preppers” are preparing for a breakdown in civilized society—she apparently became obsessed with guns and taught Adam and his older brother, Ryan, how to shoot, even taking them to local ranges.  She had an imposing firearm collection.

Each firearm was legally purchased and owned by Mrs. Lanza.  But it is the fact that she had the weapons at all that is the subject for the firestorm swirling in our country tonight.

The mass shooter’s mother divorced her husband in 2008.  The reason for the split is not yet known, but rumors point to a heavy strain on the marriage because of her troubled son.  She recently took time off from her job in finance to spend more time with him.

Adam spent countless hours on his computer, much of that time devoted to playing violent games.

Police say that young Adam Lanza suffered from a form of autism known as Asperger’s Syndrome.  They are careful to say that the disease on its own would not be responsible for the homicidal shooting spree on Friday morning.

That said, the experts note that if he had mental problems, these, combined with years of social isolation, inadequacy and the easy availability of an arsenal of firearms, could have been a recipe for disaster.

The Daily Mail, not unlike other news outlets, is playing on a statistic that shows that there are 300 million firearms in the United States.  Fifty percent of gun ownership worldwide is in the US.

These are the facts as we know them now, but that hasn’t stopped the hair-pulling and the gnashing of teeth by the anti-gun proponents on the Left who take the path of least resistance by seizing on new gun rules rather than admitting that “mainstreaming” the mentally ill has been and continues to be an abject and utter failure.

The anti-gun advocates think only about the senselessness of the act of killing.  They don't think about the individual. They think solely about how they can gain control of those of us who follow the rules. These unbalanced, disturbed shooters do not follow rules.  They have and will step outside the system to kill and will find a way to do it.

Ample make this bed, dear friends.  Ample make this bed.  There are many factors at play in this unthinkable tragedy.

As is our wont, no one would choose to return to the days when mental institutions, also known as lunatic asylums, were the bane of our society.

In the latter half of the 20th century, the invention of anti-psychotic drugs like Thorazine triggered a movement toward "deinstitutionalization".  So pervasive are the psychotropic medications’ availability, that by 2000 the asylums we built to house the criminally insane were either abandoned or downsized.  The horrors they housed remain to this day.

Putting aside the accounts of those asylums, we must not fall anymore deeply into the trap we have set for ourselves by refusing to “institutionalize” those who are obviously and incurably psychiatrically disordered.

I believe that the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree.  I believe that Nancy Lanza was inordinately terrified of that “violent, economic collapse” she was preparing for.  A fact which Adam, most assuredly, was all too aware.

Further, it seems that Mrs. Lanza may have been too proud or too stubborn to seek honest help for her sick son.  Her decisions were fatally flawed and now a nation must wrestle with what price we must pay for our freedom.

In this evening’s prayer vigil speech, President Obama said:

“We will be told that the causes of such violence are complex, and that is true. No single law, no set of laws can eliminate evil from the world or prevent every senseless act of violence in our society, but that can’t be an excuse for inaction. Surely we can do better than this.”

          [SNIP]

“In the coming weeks, I’ll use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens, from law enforcement, to mental health professionals, to parents and educators, in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this, because what choice do we have? We can’t accept events like this as routine.”

Liza Long, the mother of a son whom social workers have diagnosed as being Oppositional Defiant and suffering from Intermittent Explosive Disorder, pleads to the nation:

“I agree that something must be done. It's time for a meaningful, nation-wide conversation about mental health. That's the only way our nation can ever truly heal.”

“God help me. God help Michael. God help us all.”

Yes, Liza, God help us all.