Sometimes when one uses the word "inconceivable" that is exactly what one means.
Murder in Connecticut
31 responses to “Murder in Connecticut”
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Yes. I haven’t been this disturbed by anything in a very long time.
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It’s terribly tragic, Maclin. What can one say? I will pray for the victims and their families.
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I see this morning the Simple Answers crowd is out in force demanding more gun control. I sympathize with the impulse, but it really isn’t that simple.
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It isn’t that simple, as I like to point out to my fellow Aussies. I believe Switzerland has very liberal gun laws but doesn’t tend to have much problem. (I can’t verify if that’s the case).
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I’m at work so only read the first few paragraphs of that, but it looks pretty on target.
I think there is an overall pattern or tendency in the U.S. that’s quite clear: a people who cannot control themselves will have to be controlled by others, and many of them will welcome it. A syndrome observed and predicted many times in history.
I foolishly got into an argument on Facebook about the U.S. and gun control a while back. I was trying to make the point that we’ve always had guns but we haven’t always had these massacres. It was not received well.:-/ -
I really don’t want to think about this terrible act. I agree with you, Mac, that looking to gun control legislation to stop such things is a simple answer, but surely it is, or at least might be, a factor?
The argument that such crimes point to a deep problem needing a deep solution (“Change the culture”) may be correct, so far as it goes, but surely changing the laws can be a step toward changing the culture? One sometimes encounters a parallel argument about abortion: “we need to change the culture, not the laws”. I think this argument is wrong in both cases; the first phrase is correct, the second is not.
Anyway, the gun ownership regulations in the US sometimes strikes those of us from elsewhere as kind of crazy. -
Arguably it is, but it is part of the national psyche. It’s hard to see a feasible gun control law that would have prevented this crime. A complete ban is unworkable, and nothing less would have much effect on crimes like this. The “assault rifle” designation is more a matter of what the gun looks like than its functionality. There is a widespread perception that it means “machine gun,” and the combat models of these guns are, but the consumer variants are not. With the possible exception of magazine capacity, they are not more deadly than ordinary hunting rifles.
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I actually don’t know what weapons were used in this latest enormity. I assumed they were automatic/semi-automatic weapons because of the number of people killed.
Gun ownership is legal up here — we always had a few around the house while I was growing up — but one has to have a license, and one has to notify authorities when transporting weapons from place to place. I don’t have any evidence, but it seems reasonable to suppose that some regulation might have a positive effect, even if, as you say, that would not have prevented the awful events in CT. (And this kind of thing is not unknown in Canada — we had one at a university in the 1980s.)
I just can’t help thinking about all those families who are grieving. Lord, have mercy. -
Yes, it’s truly horrendous. I just can’t imagine it. And naturally everyone feels like something must be done to keep it from ever happening again. And I’m not trying to throw cold water on that impulse, but the solution needs to be a solution.
Licensing is another thing that would not have helped in this case. The boy’s mother owned the guns legally, knew how to use them, and would have raised no flags in any licensing scheme.
They were semi-auto, but there is a world of difference between auto and semi. A pump or bolt-action rifle or shotgun, or a revolver, can be fired pretty quickly, quickly enough to do just as much harm to unarmed people. The extra time–a second or so, I guess?–between rounds might give an unarmed but resisting person a better chance at subduing the gunman, I guess. -
There have always been young men running amok. With axes and knives if not with guns. They do do a lot more damage with guns. What there hasn’t always been has been global media that treated it as headline news.
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Or immersive entertainment that feeds the impulse.
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Thanks for the historical persective, Paul. You are undoubtedly right about the headlines etc.
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The role of entertainment is a tricky one. If you read 16th and 17th-century chronicles and murder pamphlets (there was media – just not relentless media, and they didn’t treat motiveless killing sprees as more important than other news, even though they were certainly part of the news) then it’s hard not to think that certain personality types might just be in danger of going over the edge into this type of behaviour regardless, and any number of hard-to-predict and hard-to-regulate things might be the trigger.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Scottish and Northumbrian ballads recently, and I can’t help thinking that when popular entertainment amounted to no more than cock fights, dog fights and bear-baiting, and songs about battles, betrayals and bloody murders, motiveless killing sprees still happened but still happened very infrequently.
Medication is a factor I’ve seen mentioned, but it seems to me that could cut both ways: many young men going on killing sprees had been prescribed mood-altering drugs; but that may just indicate they had been successfully diagnosed as psychologically vulnerable/dangerous. And things like this were happening centuries before such drugs were available.
Having said which, when I broke the little finger on my right hand I was prescribed an anti-inflammatory, one of the known side-effects of which (I discovered rather late in the day) was paranoid delusions, as a result of which I was privileged to have my very own Pinfold experience. I don’t think I’d have given any “warning signs” prior to the delusions actually kicking in, and while I think it took about 6 months for my mind to clear completely I haven’t experienced any lasting negative effects. I was however in a dangerous state for perhaps about 36 hours, maybe much less. Within that time I don’t know what mischief I might have done to myself or others if my good hand hadn’t been in plaster. Even with that disability, I caused over a thousand pounds worth of property damage (no physical harm to anybody but myself, and that only temporary).
Prominent in the paranoid delusions I was experiencing was a conviction that a powerful occult figure wished me harm, and that several of the people around me were knowingly or unwittingly doing his bidding. I recognise in retrospect that the mental images afflicting me drew quite heavily on fantasy literature, films and games, but also on Renaissance drama (Macbeth, Dr Faustus, Hamlet, the apothecary scene in Romeo and Juliet). So the formation of the imagination is clearly an element when the imagination literally runs wild, even if it’s not necessarily in itself what sets things off.
From that point of view, I can see that an imagination fed on gun-toting video games, or indeed films, or novels and ballads in which shooting people is the solution to a problem, might be more inclined to go in for gun-toting when running wild. To the extent that my imagination was, it seems, trained to regard the best response to powerful occult figures to be scepticism and stoicism, rather than shooting anything that moved, I may have been rather well served by being more addicted to Tolkien and Shakespeare than to something like “Call of Duty”. But had it been (say) my left hand in plaster, or had I been physically fit and tipped into paranoid delusions by something other than these particular pills (by some mental disease, say, that made it a semi-permanent likelihood), things might not have worked out so well.
But of course, my experience is probably not repesentative, and may not be relevant at all. -
I didn’t realise until it was posted that that was such a long comment. I apologise.
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Well, I thank you for your comment, Paul. I’m very glad you shared it.
Surely mental ill-health and/or mood altering side effects of medications/drugs are very difficult to live with and can really change a person, as I have seen in recent times.
I remember after having the last two babies, but particularly after the second last one, I was almost totally overwhelmed by a terrible sense of Evil. I’m sure it was a combination of hormones, medication and spiritual/demonic oppression. And of course, I was too paranoid to tell anyone. And I was in sole charge of my baby 24/7. So scary, looking back on it.
In fact, I decided, before going in to hospital to be well armed against such a thing happening again. First of all I took in lovely classical music to listen to and a bit of knitting (not that I did much) and determined that if I felt paranoid again I would at least have my then 14yo daughter come in to stay with me to help out and keep me company. Just knowing I had that option helped keep the Evil at bay I think. And of course I prayed. -
Peter Hitchens wants to see a national enquiry into the use and effects of anti-depressants. I have seen them work exceedingly well, in a member of my own family recently, but I have friends for whom they made everything 100 times worse. There are different types of course, but my question for Hitchens is “is the link between violence and anti-depressants really just b/c of the depression itself?” Honestly, it’s such a horrid thing, almost nothing would surprise me, especially if there were some kind of psychosis etc. Not that I have any objection to further and extensive studies made of anti-depressants.
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I should also say, my own experience was very shortly after some genuinely upsetting real-world developments. The emotional state that put me in may well have made me more susceptible than I would have been otherwise to the paranoid-delusion-inducing side-effects of the pills prescribed (which naturally distorted and magnified the real-world emotional distress, as well as refracting it through total fantasy).
I don’t think there is one single answer: something like this results from an unpredictable and volatile mixture of ingredients.
My own view of guns is that I am quite as free as any American, even though it would take a few days longer for me to get hold of a firearm if I decided to take up shooting as a hobby, and I wouldn’t be allowed to carry it around the streets loaded. I have no sense that my freedom depends on ready access to firearms. It depends on the rule of law. I am unconvinced that those most vociferous that their freedom necessitates going about armed are actually the people who most reliably uphold the rule of law.
If guns were harder to come by, young men running amok would make fewer victims. It still wouldn’t stop things like this (which took place a 20 -minute drive from where 2 of my children go to school).
A less prodigal use of drugs might reduce the occurrence of (some forms of) madness. Less violent entertainments might reduce the chance of madness finding violent expression. People being kinder to one another might reduce the emotional alienation or distress that could trigger episodes of madness and/or violence. More of an effort might be made to identify and restrain young men with real psychosis. But even in optimal conditions, things like this would not be entirely preventable. And really, I can’t help thinking it would be more profitable to look into how to prevent this sort of thing. -
Definitely no need to apologize, Paul. That’s very much to the point, and very disturbing. In reading comments on the Connecticut shootings I’ve come across other anecdotes of that sort, and someone posted on Facebook a list of the various drugs being taken by various young men involved in mass shootings.
More later–must work. -
Going back to Paul’s remarks about entertainment and levels of pre-modern violence, I speculate–that’s all it is–that the sort of alienated-young-men-running amok thing might be more common now. But the general level of violence in pre-modern times certainly seems to have been higher than now.
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I have seen anti-depressants work for both tremendous good and tremendous ill. A big part of the equation is adequate monitoring, and I think that frequently doctors don’t take that seriously enough–or maybe insurance companies won’t pay for it.
AMDG -
A friend recommended that I try something along those lines 10 or 15 years ago when I was fairly depressed, though not the full-blown clinical kind. I didn’t think I was bad enough off to warrant it and am generally resistant to the idea unless it’s really necessary. I wonder if many people take them in similar circumstances, though–for just more-or-less normal blues, the way we tend to overuse other medicines. That would increase the number of bad reactions just by increasing the number of people taking them.
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True. And, of course, I’m talking about some serious cases. Sometimes it takes a while, too. I had a friend who eventually was really helped by Prozac, but the first three weeks she was calling and telling me awful things. She was 1500 miles away and it was scary because I couldn’t do anything.
AMDG -
Scary indeed. I’m glad it ended up helping her.
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The stuff I was prescribed (oxaprozin) isn’t even supposed to affect mood – just stop joints from swelling. And if everyone it was prescribed to reacted to it the same way I did, I don’t imagine it would still be on the market. That’s one of the reasons I don’t see there being a single, simple solution.
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Definite agreement with that. Unfortunately a single, simple solution is exactly what a lot of people seem to expect.
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Sometimes it takes a while, too. I had a friend who eventually was really helped by Prozac, but the first three weeks she was calling and telling me awful things.
My family member was on prozac and he definitely needed it b/c the depression itself was creating thoughts of suicide and paranoia etc (to the point where he was making life very difficult for his close family). Anyway, in the first few weeks on a low dose, he was feeling worse, not better, but not so bad that he had to change meds. His doc seemed to think that was just the depression itself, since it takes a few weeks for therapeutic levels to be reached, or so they think. Afterwards, however, he was almost fully recovered and is now almost back to his normal self. I thank God. -
Deo gratias.
I wonder if this kind of condition occurred as often in pre-modern times as now, and if it did what the effects on history have been. -
I wonder this too.
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Golly.
Light On Dark Water 
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