Navy veteran Aaron Alexis, who killed 12 people at a Navy building in Washington Monday morning, had been suffering a host of serious mental issues, including paranoia and a sleep disorder, law enforcement officials told the Associated Press.
Alexis had been hearing voices in his head and had been treated since August by the Veterans Administration for his mental problems, the officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the criminal investigation in the case was continuing.
To no one's surprise, the fact that the DC gunman was suffering host of mental issues prior to shooting squares with what I wrote back in December, in an extensive and dispassionate in-depth post, that the blame for mass shootings does not originate with the right to bear arms (nor has anything to do with racism) but with something quite distinct:
…back to the massacres of the past half century:Update: thanks to Instapundit for the link…
Unless I am mistaken, there was not a single occasion of a shootist over the past 50 years, whether underage kids or grown-up adults, who did not previously show warning signs — if only the fact that they were described as "remote" — warning signs that were deliberately and repeatedly ignored, by family and friends as well as by professionals and people in authority; and that, for fear of the left's PC police.
(This is true even in the military; think only of the warning signs concerning Major Nidal Hassan, universally and persistently ignored, prior to the Islamist's 2009 Fort Hood massacre.)
Indeed, writes Dr Keith Ablow, in Adam Lanza's case, there is every probability that he expressed very concerning thoughts or feelings to more than one person before Friday.
After a shooting spree, as William S. Burroughs once said, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it and who, (not at all) incidentally, would never do anything remotely like it.
Of course, contrary to what the iTélé guest said or implied, the presence of guns alone does not ensure that massacres such as that in Sandy Hook will become more and more common or simply commonplace.
Indeed, had an armed American — had the average armed American — been present at the school or at the university, he (or she) would have used his (or her) weapon to start firing back at Adam Lanza, and either hit the gunman or forced him to take cover, preventing him from continuing his deadly spree. (Could an armed teacher or an armed firefighter from the fire station next door not have intervened much earlier?) Besides writing (in The Atlantic) that "We must find a way to make it more difficult for the non-adjudicated mentally ill to come into possession of weapons,"Jeffrey Goldberg points out that
Mass shootings take many lives in part because no one is firing back at the shooters. The shooters in recent massacres have had many minutes to complete their evil work, while their victims cower under desks or in closets. One response to the tragic reality that we are a gun-saturated country is to understand that law-abiding, well-trained, non-criminal, wholly sane citizens who are screened by the government have a role to play in their own self-defense, and in the defense of others … it seems fairly obvious that there was no one at or near the school who could have tried to fight back.
Oh, and do not forget this unwelcome fact:
It is easy — for a foreigner as well as for an American (of the liberal bent) — to tout the success of the gun control laws in the rest of the Western world when you ignore the 1996 massacre of 16 children at a Scottish primary school; the 2000 killing of eight kids in Japan; the 2002 deaths of eight people in Nanterre, France; the 2002 killing of 16 kids in Erfurt, Germany; the 2007 shootings to death of eight people in Tuusula, Finland; the killing of 10 people at a Finnish university less than a year later; the 2009 killing of 15 people in Winnenden, Germany; and, needless to say, Anders Breivik's 2011 mass murder of 77 Norwegians, most of them teenagers.Update: Crazier than liberals
It is easier — much easier — to condemn gun violence in America when you ignore, or downplay, gun violence in a foreign country, including not giving a second thought to things such as, say, the widespread presence of Kalashnikovs among France's thugs and criminals.
… here’s the problem:
Coddling the mentally ill isn’t even helping the mentally ill. Ask the sisters of crazy homeless woman “Billie Boggs” how grateful they were to the ACLU for keeping Boggs living on the streets of New York City. Ask the parents of Aaron Alexis, James Holmes (Aurora, Colo., movie theater shooter), Jared Loughner (Tucson, Ariz., mall shooter) or Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech shooter) how happy they are that their sons weren’t institutionalized.
… Something seems to have gone horribly wrong right around 1970. What could it be? Was it the introduction of bell-bottoms?
That date happens to correlate precisely with when the country began throwing the mentally ill out of institutions in 1969. Your memory of there not being as many mass murders a few decades ago is correct. Your memory of there not being as many homeless people a few decades ago is also correct.
But liberals won’t allow the dangerous mentally ill to be committed to institutions against their will. (The threat of commitment is very persuasive in getting disturbed individuals to take their medicine.) Something in liberals’ genetic makeup compels them to attack civilization, for example, by defending the right of dangerous psychotics to refuse treatment and then representing them in court after they commit murder.
… The disastrous consequences of the deinstitutionalization movement is described in E. Fuller Torrey’s book, The Insanity Offense: How America’s Failure to Treat the Seriously Mentally Ill Endangers Its Citizens. Torrey’s book reads like a compendium of America’s most heinous murders since the early ’70s — all of which could have been stopped with involuntary commitment laws, and none of which could have been stopped even with a complete gun ban.
… Liberals will pretend to have missed the news that the Washington Navy Yard shooter was a paranoid schizophrenic. They refuse to acknowledge that the mass murder problem — as well as the homeless problem — only began after crazy people were thrown out of institutions in the 1970s. …
Only after a mass murder committed by a psychotic with a firearm do liberals spring to life and suggest a solution: Take away everyone’s guns.
Taking guns away from the mentally stable only makes us less safe: Even psychotics know enough to keep choosing “Gun-Free Zones” for their mass murders.
