Adam Lanza

If the above photograph of the mass murderer Adam Lanza is at all accurate, if he looked at all like this, then he was obviously mad and dangerous, and no one did anything about it, including his mother who left several guns in the house where he had access to them.

Yet liberals never ask: “Why do we turn our eyes away from obviously disturbed and dangerous people such as Harris and Klebold of Columbine, Cho Seung-Hui of Virginia Tech, and Adam Lanza of Newtown, Connecticut, leaving them at liberty so that they bring hell on earth over and over again?” Instead the liberals self-righteously demand that our society be turned into a dictatorship in which all private gun ownership is eliminated and only the government, led by Janet “Big Sis” Napolitano, has guns. Because—please get this straight—the ONLY gun control regime that could have prevented the crime that Lanza committed would be the outlawing and confiscation of every privately owned firearm in America.

And why does liberal America leave obviously mad and dangerous people at liberty? Because its guiding principle is not the good, but equal freedom.

- end of initial entry -

James N. writes:

As I knew it would be. Gun control without nut control is meaningless.

Nut control is something we knew how to do when I was a little boy. Why has it become impossible?

LA replies:

Why do you ask this as rhetorical question when you know the answer?

Jeanette V. writes:

A comment seen at Breitbart:

We need to ensure that parents and families dealing with these issues have the support needed to raise their children with the best possible prospects. We need to ensure that adults with developmental issues and mental health issues (two very different things) have the services and help they need to be fully participating members of society. We also need to avoid judging those who are different and alienating them because their differences make us uncomfortable. The onus is on everyone who treated this kid like crap over the years because he was strange. That in itself will create issues for anyone. People need to feel accepted and loved. Changing the way that we treat other people could go a long way to preventing future tragedies. It’s not really shocking to hear that someone who spent their entire childhood ostracized and ridiculed would snap, is it?

[end of comment.]

And there you have it; throw more money, more medication, more treatment, and never ever make the deeply disturbed person feel bad or unaccepted. That will make everything better. You see it is everyone else’s fault that Adam was a psychotic killer because people weren’t “nice” to him. And most of all we should all stop judging.

My God, the fact that this came from an adult is deeply depressing. And I will bet that Adam’s mother was just like this simpering liberal.

Ben S. writes:

You often remark on the evil looks of evildoers, but are we supposed to take it seriously when you imply that Lanza might reasonably have been locked up for having a scary face? It is natural and prudent to steer clear of scary-looking people, but to deprive a person of liberty on that basis alone is unconstitutional, and in my opinion, immoral.

More generally, it may not have been possible to single Lanza out as an exception. Granted, he looks like Death in that photo, or like a creepier version of Grand Moff Tarkin, but it is also the case that the most “fitting” photo of a mass murderer gets wide circulation after the fact, while the worst photos of an ordinary person are kept out of sight as a matter of courtesy.

Supposing that you consider Lanza’s Asperger diagnosis and his antisociality, I submit that I had that same diagnosis, had severe social problems, and that I was suspended multiple times in high school for violence against classmates who taunted me. You can propose that it would have been reasonable to institutionalize me, but the fact remains that I wasn’t and that I got better, not worse.

LA replies:

No, I did not mean that a person should be institutionalized simply if he is strange and menacing looking and shows some violent tendencies. But at the very least society should be aware of the problem and do SOMETHING about him. At the very least, in a more alert society, his mother would not have kept firearms in the house in such a manner that they were accessible to him. And he would have been looked at and examined and eyes would have been kept on him. And the principal Dawn Hochspruing would not have admitted him into the school when he rang the bell.

Don’t you find that troubling, that this elementary school which had such strict security measures, including having its doors locked after 9:30 a.m., allowed an obviously troubled young man into the school who was not a pupil there?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 15, 2012 09:16 PM | Send