Unbelievable fucking scumbag!!! (School shooting in CT)

[rum_runner69]

RIP the wee ones and start forming lynch mobs and lets start by lynching LMS the FORMER ASS HOLE

[Psychoholic]

Sgath - that was an angle I hadn't really considered - thank you for your post.

I am beside myself with sadness about this incident, even though I'm not a parent or know anybody that was directly involved I had an 'interesting' run in with someone that could have used some serious mental health help and am now quite keen in seeing those who need help get help. And as a guy, I want to rationalize and try and add logic to something that is neither, but it helps in the healing process.

I believe that there are additional contributing factors here as well.

No real access to mental health - we make it not only difficult for someone to be able to afford the basics of life, much less add mental health costs to their plate. I see this as a problem of having a weakening dollar and an absolutely bloated healthcare industry.

The stigma of seeking mental health - if I asked the board openly "If you were depressed, would you go to a psychiatrist or psychologist?" I bet the answer would overwhelmingly be no. But why? I don't know how to build a transmission, I'd love to give it a shot, but in the end I'd probably be much happier just paying someone else to do it - why don't we look at mental health the same way? We barely go to the doctor when we are sick, but if you are consumed with emotion and don't know how to deal with it, why aren't we going to those trained to deal with it and can actually help us?

The 'man up' myth of masculinity - As men we are raised to just tough it out if something is bothering you or not to show weakness, we show a false ideal of what masculinity is supposed to mean on TV and in movies, and our fathers tried to teach us (I'm speaking very generically here) the things that made men respectable in the generation before even them. We are raised not to ask for help, to show weakness, to be scared, etc.. but our world has changed so much in the last 50 years that the simpler life that made it possible for the nuclear family to exist doesn't exist any more.

The stress of modern life - we have access to the most interesting technology the world has ever know, we are doubling the canon of human information every few years (interesting fact, up until 1900 the world's knowledge doubled every century, at the end of WW2 every 25 years, today it's 1-1.5 years, clinical knowledge every 18 months and in the next few years IBM predicts that it will be every 11 hours), we are pummeled with information and ads everyday, there are more rules, more people, more crowded, more societal pressures, more peer pressures, etc... The now seemingly ancient ideal of grow up, go to college, get married, have 2 kids, vacation with a station wagon, work until you retire with a gold watch, help raise the grandkids, die and leave the sum of your life's work to your family - all gone. Ancient history man. I can't even imagine the stress of being a kid right now in this world.

The video game generation - I think that my generation (I'm 35) was the first generation to truly have video games permeate their home lives, but the generation immediately after it has the internet en masse and online gaming. I remember waking up every Christmas morning hopeful of having something cool under the tree, then I'd head out to Dave's house, we'd meet up with Jeremy and head to Stacker's house to go play with our new stuff. Our neighborhood streets were alive with kids playing with their new toys and riding bikes/skates/skateboards yada yada. This Christmas, go outside on Christmas morning and look around - how many kids are in your neighborhood and how many are outside playing? Now everyone is getting the latest video game systems and upgrades and ipads/ipods/kindles/laptops/phones for Christmas and the age of their being a nice new Huffy under the tree is long since passed.

Weak interpersonal friendships - This ties in with the video game thing, but when you have friends that you SEE in person every day, and you sleep at their houses constantly or you go adventuring in the woods or on bikes and you do stuff outside/together, you build real human bonds and you know how to communicate with people. When the bulk of your interactions with people is online, you don't KNOW them the same way you would if you'd spent 20 hours this week with them after school. If you're strong enough to admit weakness to someone else online, you're only going to give them the information that you think is germain to the discussion and they don't know the lurid details of your life like an in-person best friend would.

Violence in movies and video games - people want to rote blame video game violence for when people do stupid shit, but it's deeper than that but shouldn't be discounted as a contributing factor. It blurs the lines of what is real and what isn't. What would have made someone vomit in disgust at the horror they are witnessing on screen 40 years ago is just another scene in SAW or any FPS video game.

The US government - we have been a country for 236 years, and of that we have been engaged in some kind of war for 215 years. This is a real statistic, go look it up. The military industrial complex is a very real and terrible thing too.

Sensationalist news and the ability to delivery every gory detail within seconds - turn on the TV to any 'news' channel right now and you'll find in depth coverage of what happened, you'll hear inflammatory speeches about rights, and Obama and the Right and the Left and the gays and the liberal bias and the leftist zionist media, blah blah blah. The problem with 24 hour news channels and headline news type organizations is that they have to fill time and keep people watching it. When the news was a 22 minute segment after Dallas at night, you had to tell only the most important things, not linger very long on any given subject and essentially report only the facts. Add the ability with cable TV for channels like Fox and CNN to exist, remove the Fairness Doctrine (read that, it's quick) and you have people trying to fill up 24 full hours of reporting with their agendas. Also, privately fund these organizations with advertiser money and they will report on what their advertisers want them to convey about them, remove any requirement for a 'news' channel to report on actual news and you end up with what we have today. I am not a hateful person, but Fox news makes me want to wretch at their hate filled drivel.

There is more to it - but those are some of the building blocks that I see. I see a society that is numb to violence, entire generations of people growing up thinking that it's ok to kill others as long as their not you and that since you are an American you are entitled to something special (look up American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny for more reading on that). We are completely desensitized to violence as a people. We seek out new and more perverse violence in movies to get our fill. Our media glorifies killers and works to paint a more bleak picture than the next news org so that you'll keep watching them ("she can tell you about the plane crash with a gleam in her eye" - Don Henley, Dirty Laundry). We poke fun at those who would seek mental health under the guise of 'man up buttercup, internalize that shit', and when the weight of someones anguish is too much to bear, access to that which could help them is impossibly expensive and that which isn't expensive is substandard at best. And when your family works too much, doesn't know how to communicate - they can't help you deal with what is going on without shipping you off to get medicated (that's another rant entirely about the prevalence of ADD drugs), you don't have the kind of interpersonal relationships that you could go to your best friend and just ask "hey man, I'm feeling some fucked up shit - I need some help". And as a society we have become so personally conflict adverse (which is slightly ironic for such a warring people) that parents don't want to whoop a child's ass when they step out of line, and our 'it takes a village' of discipline that it used to take to raise a child with respect is GONE (see communication and interpersonal relationships again), so nobody is getting that wedgy after class for acting the fool and your friend's mom isn't taking a belt to your ass for getting you both in trouble. Parents are scared of their kids, scared to discipline them for fear that they are going to look like a bad parent to others, so they grow up not knowing the fear that 'wait until your father gets home' had (I was always more scared of my mom going quiet in a store when I did something bad, I knew what awaited me when I got home).

Sorry for the novel, it's what I've been thinking about for a few days and wanted to get it out of my head.

[sgath92]

No real access to mental health - we make it not only difficult for someone to be able to afford the basics of life, much less add mental health costs to their plate. I see this as a problem of having a weakening dollar and an absolutely bloated healthcare industry.

The stigma of seeking mental health - if I asked the board openly "If you were depressed, would you go to a psychiatrist or psychologist?" I bet the answer would overwhelmingly be no. But why? I don't know how to build a transmission, I'd love to give it a shot, but in the end I'd probably be much happier just paying someone else to do it - why don't we look at mental health the same way? We barely go to the doctor when we are sick, but if you are consumed with emotion and don't know how to deal with it, why aren't we going to those trained to deal with it and can actually help us?

We actually had one of the worlds biggest mental healthcare systems. Eventually the public learned how badly the patients were being treated [which really was much worse than people have any clue of], closed most of the government mental health hospitals and switched to a "pill & release" program. Which presents its own problems, with so many being over medicated & so many going off their meds for whatever reason.

Baker Act only works for people who show obvious signs that they are/going to hurt themselves or others. Someone like this kid, who is legally an adult, has no violent history (???) and doesn't want to get help can't be forced to do so. This particular shooter came from a rich family. His brother & his dad are banking executives. So I doubt it was a matter of them being unable to afford care.

I think its somewhat of a copout to create a society that encourages mental illness, and then send them to a mental health care system [regardless how good or bad it is] to "fix them." Look at how angry everyone today seems to be, whether its in discussing politics, waiting in lines, road rage, etc. According to the Washington Post six of the 12 worst shootings in all of US history have happened since 2007. Gee, isn't 2007 when the housing crash started? Too many people are either struggling or upset that they're lives aren't going better than they had wanted them to. People know that if they get sick enough to loose their jobs, they're loose their homes. They know that they might not be able to find another job in a reasonable amount of time if they get fired/laid off. Wages have been stagnate for thirty going on forty years. Prices of everything people need that aren't prioritized on the CPI are outpacing inflation [or to put it another way, inflation is calculated in a way that hides the pricing of things people depend on]. QE isn't filtering down to the masses, helping the polarization of wealth. Everyone younger than the boomers believes they'll never be able to retire. We have a congress that is willing to close the post office while funding the one in Iraq.

Ever seen Falling Down?

Consider who generally commits these kinds of shootings; white males from suburbia. Now, I'm not saying this particular demographic is more prong to violence. We see violence all the time from other groups, it just manifests itself differently. Most US violent crime is gang related, which this demographic is less likely to be involved in. But when we're talking about things like school shootings, it seems to be a pattern.

[Psychoholic]

I couldn't agree more. I think that a weak dollar caused by fiat currency and QE causes more people to have that gnawing stress at home that wasn't present there at the time. I remember many times in my life when we were having to juggle what bill to pay this week and if we'd have enough food to eat that week, and there was a certain sense of hopelessness that came with that. That hopelessness is infectious and leads to a fatalist view of life. When you have no hope, no outlet and you really don't believe there are either consequences for tomorrow or that tomorrow might not come at all. I've always been rather fortunate to be surrounded by an amazing family of friends that have been there when I needed them, but I've also seen people give up completely and just give up their life. It's awful stuff no matter what.

[chestypuller]

i agree about our technology, hard to live a sheltered unknowing peaceful life anymore, easy to see whats really going around in the world and that i belive is what sets people off.. hard to pretend we are in the land of milk and honey anymore.

[60Buick]

I keep picturing the families looking at Christmas presents under a tree for a child that will never open them. I keep picturing the brothers and sisters in the 2-10 year old age range finding out they will never see their brother or sister again. I also picture the police officers, emts and funeral professionals that that will never be able to erase the images of a 6 year old that was shot 11 times.

I have to say as a society we are just to used to seeing violence. We are numb. I remember getting sick the first time I saw rotten.com. Now I can look at stuff far worse while eating dinner and it doesn't bother me one bit. This stuff is to accessable for kids with no supervision. Kids are not wise enough to understand what they are doing and even think its cool, add in the fact that they are numb to images that would keep a Vietnam vet up at night plus the desire to be known. Throw in a deathwish from depression and you have a cold blooded monster. I know people who think it is awesome they knew T.J Solomen. He was the gunman at Heritage high school. I only know who he is because of the media. The media makes these loners famous which is what they want. They want to go out guns blazzing, the coverage does nothing but increase the number of attacks. I think it should be covered but the identity of the shooter should not be made public. I think the shooter should remain confidential. Don't give them the right to go down in history. They should die as unknown and and unpopular as they lived.

This really hits home for me. I have a 6 year old in Kindergarden and he was abducted last year in Gulf Shores Alabama. A homeless lady who had a deathwish grabbed my 5 year old son and drug him into a bathroom with a knife to his throat. His cousin and uncle wrestled the the knife away and pinned her to the ground. This was in a public place and when she grabbed him his cousin started screaming, of the dozens of people all around no one did anything. This 16 year old ran ran to the car and grabbed his dad. Only one person told them which way she ran with him. By they she had barracaded hersef in the bathroom. If not for that woman telling them which way she ran my son would be dead. The homeless womans plan was suicide by cop and to be on the news so people would know who she was. My son is an innocent little boy who is having a ton of problems in school, socially problems and trouble sleeping a year later because of this selfish piece of trash. My son has changed. Her motives were the same as the school and movie theater shooters, just on a smaller scale.

I really feel for the families because the my son is alive and the nightmares continue. I can't imagine my life without him and that is exacky what they have to endure for the rest of their lives.

[LMS]

There is another reason to this, we have programmed our children to believe there are no winners and losers, that everything needs to fair. We don't want to hurt their self esteem. Hell there are even little league sports where they don't keep score. We not teaching them how to deal with failure, then when they are a little older and have to deal with life some just can't handle it and snap.
And YES I blame the liberals for this state of affairs.

[Guest]

i'm interested to see what kind of gun control laws they're about to pass.

[Haroldfromhell]

The media bloodsuckers are unbelievable right now also!! They need to pull Geraldo and the other assholes out and let these families mourn and bury their kids in peace!! The world has no need to see these people crying!

[Creepy Cruiser]

I completely agree, they all need to the hell out of there and drop the whole deal. The more they keep going on and on about this, the more it gets burned into history. Then the dumb ass that comes along and wants to make his history, has to out do the last, so he can live on forever in the history books. If they didn't give any of these shit heads any airtime, it would go back to how it was when there was no internet and mass media. If they are going to pass any law, it should be to restrict how much they are allowed to exploit and publicize this crap. Leave the families alone damn it. I would flip out if I had all those fucks coming up to me and asking "so how do you feel right now?".