The Glade 4.0

With all of this clamor of "We need to know!" and "Why did he do this?", the real truth of it is that we just may not know. Things happen in this world and there isn't always an answer, but we search for it because it just seems to be the human thing. My brother-in-law committed suicide several years ago and we speculated on what caused it. Was it the final straw of his wife telling him she was leaving him? Were his previous attempts real attempts or just calls for help that she obviously missed? How unhappy was he and for how long? Did he give us signs that we missed? We will wonder, but we will never know. We will never have a real answer for what was the true cause of it.

People want a definitive answer as to why (name withheld) shot those innocent children, but he is dead now and so is his mother. The two people who could have shed light on his motives are no longer. There is a renewed fervor over banning assault weapons (whatever they are), and more availability for mental healthcare. All of this will be for naught as there will never be a perfectly safe society. If assault weapons are banned and free mental health care is available to all, who is to say that a perfectly sane person zealously dedicated to a cause they believe in will not sacrifice themselves in a suicide bombing of a school/movie theater/mall, etc.

I'll never understand why people demand an answer to things such as this and then try to prevent it in the future by removing/mitigating the factors that caused it. My completely speculative guess to why he did it is a combination of many factors: Mentally unstable, Lived at home, no direction in his life, played video games for hours on end, his mom finally tried to push him out of the house and he snapped. Perhaps a mentally unstable person playing a violent video game has lost the barrier between fantasy and reality and decided to play it out for real. After all, when gunned down in Call of Duty, you simply respawn and do it again.

Who knows, I certainly don't. But what I won't do is to try and place the blame somewhere so I can feel better about myself because I "know" what was the cause for this rampage. Evil assault guns did it. Violent video games did it. His mother was a gun nut and should have known better.

Why can't people accept that bad things will happen in this world that there just may not be an answer for. Trying to place the blame isn't going to solve anything and banning all the evil guns, video games, knives, bombs, baseball bats, rap music, R-rated movies, etc etc etc. is most definitely not the answer.

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This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.

Anyone who would do that is not a "perfectly sane person."

Fine, but my point is all the free mental health care in the world just may not be enough. I think you understand the point I am getting at.

Ban assault weapons - they will still be obtained by those who wish to do evil with them
Free mental health care for all - Maybe he doesn't have anyone who looks after him anymore and helps him get the care he needs.

There are no "answers" to all the ills that are out there. We can keep telling ourselves that there are, but bad things will keep happening. All we can do is deal with them and hopefully move on.

EDIT - Farsky, are hardline Islamists all insane? Those who so fervently believe in Jihad and death to the infidel that they would sacrifice themselves to murder those who don't believe as they do?

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This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.

@Foamy: There is a comfort in believing we live in a world where all problems can be fixed.

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Most suicide bombers are, in fact, perfectly sane in that they have no diagnosable mental illness. The same applies to dictators and other people that do all sort of atrocious things. Most of them are not, in fact, insane.

Willingness to do appalling things is not, in and of itself, indictive of mental defect, although it definitely indicates a great possibility.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Believing that one must be insane to do horrific things is a comforting thought.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Agree here. Dismissing anyone who would do something evil as simply crazy is arrogant at best and foolish and dangerous at worst. This was obviously a premeditated and thought out plan, not some random act in the sense it was a spurious, in-the-moment crime.

Take, as another example, the kamikazi, who weren't mentally unstable but simply dedicated to their cause. I'm not suggesting we try to understand the motive of mass murderers in order to glorify them. But we have to understand that we can't create a world of perfect order.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones