Is this the right story John?

Thanks John. Your title made me think it was about the Conn school shooting but the story was from Wyoming. My bad for not reading more closely.

He sounds like a policy director for the left.

All killers are driven by easy access to guns.

Lamonster, you’re not wrong. But I believe the subject here is a killer whose weapon of choice was a gun, is it not? That seems to naturally exclude non-killers who have guns and killers who use, for example, rat poison or a baseball bat, a hammer, frying pan, car, meat cleaver, anvil, bear trap, bow and arrow, catapult, 2X4, train, assorted bombs, rockets, rocks (I think that’s most of the arsenal the coyote used with the roadrunner), and so on, rather than a gun. Since the topic is about killers who use guns, you can assume that’s who I’m referring to as well. There’s a direct correlation between being killed by a gun and someone pulling the trigger of a gun. It’s true every single time and that makes it pretty clear that the killer’s access to that gun was assured. But you’re right. It never hurts to check just to make sure.

Again, you’re not wrong. I’d draw a different interior dialog, more along the lines of an angry kid who felt powerful with a gun in his hands. Kids push their parent’s emotional buttons and they can wear them down. We just don’t know if that was the case or if this boy recognized that he could easily overpower his mother and take the guns, or even if he recognized that his mother wasn’t vigilant about securing them and took advantage of that inattention. Maybe she was vigilant and had them in a locked case with a glass front that he knew he could break. Maybe they had locks on the triggers and he kept careful note of where his mother secured the key. Some kids are slugs and can’t tell you the time of day. Other’s can be obsessively observant and know their parents habits better than the parent does. He seems to have at least understood he didn’t have to go buy or steal a gun. We cannot even rule out that he feigned disinterest to get his mother to drop her guard. Somehow he found his access. But I speculate.

“skyrocketing incidents of Aspergers syndrome and other mental illnesses”

Aspergers is not a mental illness. It is a lower level form of autism and cannnot be attributed in any way to violent behavior. Mental illness is a very REAL issue that is deserving of just as much attention as cancer. It isn’t anything new. Some of the greatest minds in history had documented mental illness; Howard Hughes and Abraham Lincoln-just to name a few. The difference is that it is just now getting some of the attention it deserves; and some attention it does not deserve. Back even a generation ago, it was considered a ‘private matter’ and a matter of character weakness or even spiritual illness. Considering that it was either a matter of poor character or ‘demon possession’, it didn’t receive much attention from the medical community and the attention it did receive was just plain wacko (labotomizing, for example). We just locked these individuals up, brushed them under the rug, and didn’t talk about it. What’s happened in the past 30 years since Regan shut down the mental hospitals and forced integration is nothing short of remarkable. On a side note, one should understand that despite what the media focuses in on, mentally ill individuals are NOT inherrently violent. To the contrary, statistics substantiate that mentally ill people are more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrator. Since shutting the hospitals down in the 1980′s, the mentally ill have integrated themselves among the general populace which has forced the medical community to treat mental illness differently. We cannot simply ‘lock them up’ anymore. We, evidently, have a lot still to learn about treating what is a very real illness; not just a symptom of ‘Generation Whine’. The mentally ill are also up against integrating into a very dangerous environment for them. The challenge is not just treating the mentally ill, but treating social ills that plague the environment we live in. Life is difficult for those of us with sound minds. The reality is, that people with otherwise sound minds do occasionally ‘crack’ and resort to irrational behavior. Not all crimes such as Sandy Hook are committed by mentally ill individuals. The media needs to make that more abundantly clear. Sound minded people can do horrible things when left in a situation of desperation. If that’s the world you and I live in, imagine what the world must look like, smell like, and sound like to someone struggling with mental illness. And with all of that said, we hear of maybe a couple of instances a year of tragedies where the perpetrator may (or maybe just ASSUMED) have a mental illness. There are millions of people in our nation battling with mental illness. Many of them, to a degree, integrated among us without serious incident. The media needs to tell the truth. And we all need to concede that truth, rather than demonizing this illness.