Connecticut Killings: It’s the Shooter, Not the Guns
Connecticut Killings: It’s the Shooter, Not the Guns - Mail Online - M E Synon’s Blog
Last Friday 20-year old Adam Lanza murdered his mother then murdered 26 women and children at a school in Connecticut and then killed himself. The first question that ought to come to mind is: what sort of person does that? Was he insane, criminal, or morally void? What sort of person starts with the murder of his mother and then just doesn’t stop killing?
It can’t simply be that Lanza had access to a gun so he used it. As of December 31st last year, the state of Connecticut had issued 165,000 permits for privately-held firearms. One of those holding a permit was Lanza’s mother, Nancy. You can assume that tens of thousands of other Connecticut citizens who hold permits also have sons.
So the next question has to be, why did this son amongst all those tens of thousands of sons take his mother’s firearms illegally - Connecticut has the fourth toughest gun control laws in the US, and any 20-year old is banned from buying or carrying pistols - and turn into a mass murderer?
News reports say he had a history of mental instability. At least one report mentioned ‘mood altering drugs.’ That is likely. The presence of legal drugs, the kind prescribed by psychiatrists, in the blood of the killers has been a feature of mass murders in America.
Both of the Columbine High School killers, Eric Harris (described as ‘a classic psychopath’) and Dylan Klebold, were on psychotropic drugs.
So was 17-year old Jeff Weise, the 2005 Red Lake High School killer in Minnesota who killed nine people then committed suicide.
So was 19-year old Robert Hawkins who murdered eight people then killed himself in Nebraska in 2007.
And on the list goes. What drugs 20-year old Lanza might have used on top of any drugs prescribed by a psychiatrist is something we will only learn from a coroner’s report.
Yet the answer to the question, ‘What kind of person carries out such a crime as this?’ the answer may be as simple as: ‘The kind of young man who would murder his mother would murder just about anyone, and in any quantity.’
Strange facts come to mind when one tries to figure out such a killer.