Some thoughts on the tragic and horrific shooting in CT.
This is horrible and sickening, and as a father of four kids in school, it is terrifying.
As others have noted, this can't be tagged to a singular cause.
Was the shooter mentally ill? Most likely. Do we need to deal with mental illness in a more proactive manner in this country? Absolutely.
However, looking for an easy "blame"... guns, videogames, films, media, pointing to these as "the cause" ignores some basic historical facts.
When I was a young'un (back in the 70s-80s) Most of my peers got rifles or pistols before they were 10, and had gone hunting by the time they were 12. Firearm safety was taught as an elective in middle school, with actual target shooting on a firing range. While I was surrounding by assholes and vicious fucks who would not hesitate to bully and fuck with ANYONE, not ONE of these folks ever pulled a gun on a single person, much less shot up a crowd.
Films that were popular when I was growing up? Red Dawn, Dirty Harry, Rambo, and a million war movies that all showed "Guns = power" and you can take what you want, or mete out justice with them. Again, school shootings were unheard of.
Having worked in the videogame industry, we did "controller tests" to see if using a gun peripheral made it easier for users to play combat games. For users who scored VERY well with a traditional controller, their scores dropped below 25% in using a "realistic" controller which forced them to aim down a barrel and to "reload" in a realistic manner.
It's easy to blame the media, but having been buried in crime research for a project dealing with crime and incidents of horrific atrocities in the 30s-60s, there were HUNDREDS of VERY lurid True Crime magazines on the stands, that went into more graphic detail about murders, killers, and crimes than you can find through today's news, and crime reporters were called "vultures" because they were notorious for not respecting boundaries of the grieving families, etc. This wasn't limited to Magazines. Mainstream newspapers, which came into every home at the time, would have gory, explicit details on the front page, the crime blaring from a half-page headline. While our 24 hour media newscycle makes it appear that this is a "new" factor, it isn't... it's just DIFFERENT.
The one thing that HAS changed is that, almost across the board, when the exception happened back then... and it was infrequent, it was almost a "given" that the kid in question came from a "troubled" home. Divorce was the exception, as were homes where one parent wasn't home with the kids at all times.
Families that, by this definition, are NOT "troubled" are now the exception, rather than the rule. My personal belief being that, while the "mayhem" aspect and access to guns has always been there, it USED to get balanced out by an equal portion of parenting... parents that spent active TIME with their kids (not just running them from event to event) but actually instilled in their kids a sense of obligation and duty to society. A sense of RESPONSIBILITY for actions, and consequences. Not to mention knowing that they matter as a person, and that they are LOVED.
To be "flip" the running joke has always been "show me a stripper and Ill show you a girl with Daddy issues" meaning that, because she didn't get attention from her father, she's driven to get attention... no matter how fucked up... in any way possible from men.
The 24 hour news cycle, and the rise of idiot shit like Jersey Shore and Teen Mom shows very clearly... attention in contemporary society is gotten by being a train wreck, not by accomplishing anything of worth. For a young person who may have mental issues, who feels that they don't matter... to their parents, or in society... they see the "easy" way to both get the attention, to "matter", AND to end their pain (since the majority of them kill themselves).
As I said previously, and as others have said, it's a complex issue with MANY factors involved, but as hard as it may be to do, the only hope we have of ensuring that we stop there ever being another horrific loss like this is to systematically, logically, and factually look at all of the factors involved and try to find solutions, rather than ineffectual scapegoats.
Just my thoughts, as I try to make sense of the fact that, for the population of an entire town, Christmas will never again have the same sense of wide-eyed wonder, joy, and optimism.
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