Just a thought about Connecticut

Like most of you, I have been thinking of the massacre in CT last week. When we were kids we also played violent games -- cowboys and Indians, Germans and Americans, etc. We "killed" each other all afternoon, went home, then came out the next day after school and battled on. Many hammer-dumb commentators have been braying that a cause of the CT shooting is the violence of video games. I think that's only half-correct. What these talking heads fail to take into account is that video games are free of feedback. When we oldies played cowboys and Indians, we got hurt. We fell. We got hit with sticks, rocks, dirt, thrown toy weapons. We got stuck-up with thorns and nettles and burrs. We got cold. We got thirsty. Our noses ran. Our hands got cut and raw. All this is missing from video games. There is no feedback from the most horrendous violence on your TV.

We don't know the whole story yet, but I think that the root of this guys problems was that he came from a broken home. Like I said earlier, most folks that come from broken homes turn out fine. But if you already have something loose under the hood it might be the thing that blows the engine.

Excuse? No. Preventable? Not in a free society. And there's the rub.

Another piece of this puzzle that keeps jumping out at me is the way we think of the shoter as a "kid." He wasn't a kid, he was an adult man. This is symptomatic of a larger problem-the infantilization of American youth. Today many people consider twenty-year-old adults to be "kids." 50 years ago a 16-year-old was considered old enough for most responsibilities. 75 years ago the age was around 13 and the term "teenager" hadn't yet been coined. A healthy 20-year-old guy doing nothing and living on his parent's dime would have been unthinkable. But today the so-called "Millennials" aren't expected to grow up.

I loved playing Army. There were GI’s, Krauts and Japs.

One of our contrived weapons of the day (which Chris Wallace would characterize as a WMD as he did yesterday with semi-automatic weapons) was a 2-3 foot length of a 2X4 with two nails at the top that held a narrow strip of innertube rubber. Made a great slingshot for crabapples.

Those were the days.

“Paroxetine (Paxil)

Fluoxetine (Sarafem)

Sertraline (Zoloft)

Citalopram (Celexa)

Escitalopram (Lexapro)

This is the problem not guns.”
=

One of Adam Lanza’s drug according to the uncle:

Iloperidone (Fanapt)

It works by changing the effects of chemicals in the brain just like the other SSRI’s you have listed.

Here’s an alternate theory. A single, divorced mom that would not accept that the son had a REALLY serious mental disease. She thought with constant attention, extra work and discipline that she could “fix” the problem.

Dad finally had enough, son didn’t present well in his circle of executive friends and he decided to split, remarry and have another family.

Mom now has sons, one leaves as soon as he is old enough, and there is Adam who is rapidly approaching adulthood and fading away from her. Adam is put on an anti-psychotic to treat his ever increasing schizoid personality and things really go down from there.

Adam wants to borrow mom’s firearms. No way is she going to let that happen. So, he takes brother’s ID and tries to buy one himself. Didn’t work out well; but, he is determined (obsessed). To get to the guns, he has to go through mom.

Adam is pretty smart guy. He does live in the house and knows where everything is located like the keys (or combination) to the safe that holds the firearms. But, he still has to go through mom. So, he just conveniently kills her. Shoots her in the face (which is interesting). Problem resolved, no big deal and then moves on.

Obviously, I don’t know that any of this is completely accurate. Adam Lanzer was so ill that he had blunt affect and was incapable of feeling physical pain. Once he hit puberty and approached adulthood he started the slow decline into wherever these individuals go. He wasn’t part of the fabric of life or the world. Mom did admit she was “losing” him.

The big question here is..what triggered the episode of violence. Why did he cross that line?

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