The shooting in Sandy Hook was a horrible event. When a son kills his own mother, right there you have an incredibly disturbed individual or an incredibly dysfunctional situation. I’m sure a lot of people at one time or another have said they hate someone or may have gone as far as to say they like to see someone dead. Few do it, and even fewer kill their own parent, the person that bore them. But Adam Lanza did it, then drove 20 minutes away, killed 26 more people and took his own life. 20 minutes: that’s like a morning commute, roughly 6 songs, almost a half hour—plenty of time to cool off and change his mind. He didn’t. That’s determination; that’s uncontrollable rage, that’s… well, insane and unthinkable for me.
The fact that it was so out of the blue affects us the most; we as humans like order. We try and organize everything around us and some try to organize others. We look at how this situation may have been controlled or prevented. There are many ways it could have been— many. What should have been done, what could have been done and what will be done in the future doesn’t really matter, though. Life is chaotic. That’s what the natural world is, chaos. Humans are the only living beings on this Earth that think they can control nature. Sure, you can pave straight lines all through the city, but that ain’t gonna stop an old live oak from busting up a street. That’s the natural world. Adam Lanza was chaos. Do we blame his mother, Nancy? Sure we could; we could say she shouldn’t have had guns if this kid was violent; we could say she should have had those guns locked up. Even if they were properly locked up, would a 20 yearold kid that had genius level IQ have any problem getting them unlocked? Do we blame gun laws and change them? Why, to curtail the potential of random, completely insane and unpredictable acts? Adam Lanza stole his mother’s legal, registered guns and killed people. Criminals get a hold of illegal guns all the time. We should not penalize others for this. His mother, if you may find her responsible, paid the ultimate price for it. How do parents look at their own children who may be “troubled” and expect the worst? They probably don’t. You hug that kid, you cry to yourself, you wish you could help them and you hope for the best. Do we ban assault rifles for the general public? Nope. Sorry, I don’t agree with this. If I want to own a gun for collecting purposes, then I should be able to. “These things can kill lots of people!” Guess what? Where there’s a will there’s a way. I could be a mentally unstable chef at a banquet hall and poison a lot of people with off-the-shelf chemicals. I could drive a car real fast through a farmer’s market. I could kill a room full of children at nap time with my bare hands if I happen to be a lunatic daycare owner. That’s a far-fetched scenario, but it’s totally possible. Ban hands!
Yes, the Aurora, Senator Gifford and Sandy Hook shootings were horrible events and all had similar traits. Multi-shot clips, assault rifles, unstable individuals, mind-altering drugs. So what do we humans immediately think needs to be controlled? What are we divided on? Guns. Why? Because they know that trying to deal with mental illness is harder to handle, and it is. The emotional baggage of dealing with the mentally ill is immensely heavy. They’re our fellow humans, but we can’t just lock them all up and throw away the key. Incidentally, prisons are the new insane asylum, since the number of mental hospitals has been on a steady decline since the ‘80s. If some entrepreneurs could figure out how to profit off of the mentally ill like they have convicts, they would have… oh they have, it’s called the pharmaceutical industry. I find it quite startling that some antidepressants and psychotropic drugs’ side effects include violent behavior and this gets OK’d by the FDA *cough, cough* huge bags of money *cough, cough* big pharmaceutical lobby *cough, cough* our government is a bunch of money-whoring prostitutes *cough, cough*… That’s what has become the norm to fix things: methadone to get off heroin to get off morphine. Pills for problems. Use the quick fix. The ways we deal with the mentally ill and depressed and those that care for them need to drastically be investigated. The stigma, the understanding, the medication of, the care for and the institutional funding all need some serious re-education, modification and legislation. We will never be able to prevent the unexpected and we can never predict chaos.