PLEASE READ THE COMMENTS!
Nancy Lanza, a mother tragic and infuriating
When I saw the TV news segment on the official report a few nights ago, I tried to recall what had become of the mother.
Oh, yes. He killed her first.
I have to believe there were resources and expertise available that she did not avail herself of, in her decades of dealing with this difficult child.
I still do not understand those who oppose any limits at all on how many guns a person can own.
I strongly suspect karma plays a big role in what happened.
Ultimately, she shares culpability.
Recall that this is the story that made most of us aware of the term “crisis actors.”
Related: Conspiracy Theorists: America’s Lost Sheep?
(Reblogged 08/03/17.)
The Homeless Blogger 
“I still do not understand those who oppose any limits at all on how many guns a person can own.”
Just what the hell does how many guns a person owns have to do with whether they will use some few of those guns in a crime? There are tons of people who own tons of guns because they like guns – for whatever reason – and are absolutely no threat to any other law abiding citizen. You are brain dead focusing on how many guns a person owns. It is not how many guns a person owns. It is what is in their head and heart.
Brain dead.
lwk
I appreciate your good comment and would like to find some way to incorporate it into the body of a post, since people sort of have to jump through hoops to read comments on this blog.
It would be good for you to get familiar with “Free Speech Handbook“, particularly the portions “What this is all about” and Guidelines 1, 4 and 5.
Bottom line: How would you prevent another Sandy Hook?
Nancy Lanza strikes me as a perfect example of someone who possessed altogether too many guns and for the wrong reasons.
“Bottom line: How would you prevent another Sandy Hook?”
Well, first I would ask myself a simple question. What has changed since the 1950s when guns were dead easy for anyone to get, including surplus, extremely high power battle rifles like the M1 Garand or German Mausers collected off the battlefields of Europe after WWII. I remember ads in the back of comic books where I could buy Mausers and ammunition by mail order – the only “check” was whether my check would bounce, or not.
Again, loaded M1 Garands and M1 Carbines in the closet were not all that unusual in those days and kids could bring a .22 rifle to school (in urban schools they might be involved in the rifle team and in country schools they might be planning on hunting on the way home after school).
But we didn’t have school shootings like Sandy Hook. We also didn’t have a high percentage of kids on prescription drugs for ADHD (which had not yet been recognized as a problem).
So that would be the first question I would ask. Why? I don’t claim to know all the answers, but the easy ability for a mentally unstable person to acquire a gun is obviously not one of them given the very easy availability before the GCA68 (Gun Control Act of 1968 inspired by the assassination of Pres. Kennedy, with a mail order surplus rifle).
So having asked that question I would start looking for answers to that. In the meantime while I was trying to figure that difficult question out I would asks myself a few other questions like what things in society do we protect with guns?
For one we protect our money in banks. Was outside a name brand store and saw armed men in a Brinks truck picking up bags of money. I was in a upscale jewelry store the other day before Christmas and there was an armed guard in the store to protect the jewelry. If I happen to see the President on TV there are all sorts of guys standing around him with sunglasses and little tiny earphones in their ears – Secret Service and you can bet they have lots of guns just out of sight to protect him.
Same thing for many politicians and VIPs around the country – they are protected with people carrying guns. Sen. Diane Feinstein, one of the all-time proponents of banning various firearms is protected 24 hours by armed people. Back before she was a Senator and just a VIP in California she was able to get a concealed carry license to protect herself – she could pull the strings to get that when the vast majority of ordinary Californians could not.
So apparently there are a lot of very important things and people we feel compelled to protect with guns. But kids apparently are not one of them.
Congress passed a Gun Free School Zone Act a while back, apparently – if you are rational – because kids are not important enough to protect with guns. Apparently some people hate guns more than the love kids. But a lot of slimy politicians, no problem, protect them with guns.
So my answer again is twofold.
1. Find out what has really changed such that mentally ill people are attracted to schools and other places where they feel there is likely to be no armed opposition to their murders.
2. Resolve that kids are as at least as important as money and resolve to protect them with guns, whether it is armed resource officers or teachers trained and permitted to carry concealed handguns, and maybe like one school I read about the other day that decided to put a couple loaded AR-15 rifles in a locked cabinet in the school for designated people to used to defend kids.
We need to know what has changed (and may un-change it) and in the meantime we need to protect what is valuable to us, and if kids are not valuable enough to protect, then we don’t deserve to continue to exist as a civilization. But banning guns to law abiding people is not the answer.
regards,
lwk
Good work! Within minutes, you composed a thoughtful, well-reasoned statement of — basically, the NRA position — but much better than the highly oversimplified presentations we get on the network news.
I have more to say, but given my very limited Net access and need to conduct job search, and the fact that I want it to be as good as your comments deserve, I plan to put it in a new post, “Nancy Lanza, chapter 2,” for release Monday 01/13/14.