Little-Acorn
Gold Member
Something I wrote after the Sandy Hook shootings.
As true today as it was that time.
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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.
There are a lot of questions about this shooter, that haven't been answered yet.
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.
Useful result: ZERO. Just like last time, etc.
As true today as it was that time.
-----------------------------------------------------------
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.
There are a lot of questions about this shooter, that haven't been answered yet.
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.
Useful result: ZERO. Just like last time, etc.
