The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Chris Rock Was Right

Posted on | December 14, 2012 | 68 Comments

“Liberals talk about banning guns as if it’s the same as banning murder and banning evil.”
— Ace of Spades

“Gun-free zones are premised on a lie: that murderers will follow rules, and that people like my student are a greater danger to those around them than crazed killers. That’s an insult to honest people. Sometimes, it’s a deadly one.”
— Professor Glenn Reynolds

“Who to blame for mass murder? This may sound weird, but my gut hunch is it’s probably the homicidal psychotic’s fault.”
— Robert Stacy McCain

When I got up Friday morning, live-blogging a mass murder was not part of my plan for the day. In fact, at the end of a post Friday morning about labor union violence in Michigan, I promised further developments on that story. As I was researching that, however, the TV kept updating with news about a shooting at a school in Connecticut and I figured this might be a story worth mentioning on the blog.

The original 12:15 p.m. ET post relayed reports that “three people have been wounded or injured and one person, the suspected shooter, is dead,” but added the caution that “early reports on events like this can be often be confusing and/or inaccurate.”

To say the very least.

By the time I added the first update, NBC was already reporting 20 dead and next it was 24, then 26, then 27, and all these changing numbers were coming amid a welter of confusing (and, as it turned out, largely wrong) details about the shooter, about the victims, etc. And this kept going for about six hours. Everything is still pretty sketchy, but we now have the bare-bones facts of the story. The Associated Press:

The 20-year-old killer, carrying two handguns, committed suicide at the school, and another person was found dead at a second scene, bringing the toll to 28, authorities said. Police shed no light on the motive for the attack. The gunman was believed to suffer from a personality disorder and lived with his mother in Connecticut . . .
[Police] gave no details on the victim discovered at another scene, except to say that the person was an adult found dead by police while they were investigating the gunman. A law enforcement official identified the gunman as 20-year-old Adam Lanza, the son of a teacher. A second law enforcement official said his mother, Nancy Lanza, was presumed dead. Adam Lanza’s older brother, 24-year-old Ryan, of Hoboken, N.J., was being questioned . . .
Ryan Lanza told law enforcement he had not been in touch with his brother since about 2010. . . .
The gunman drove to the school in his mother’s car, the second official said. Three guns were found — a Glock and a Sig Sauer, both pistols, inside the school, and a .223-caliber rifle in the back of a car. . . .
Adam Lanza and his mother lived in a well-to-do part of Newtown where neighbors are doctors or hold white-collar positions at companies such as General Electric, Pepsi and IBM.

OK, so the Associated Press description of the gunman as having “a personality disorder” matches what ABC News is reporting:

Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old who killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut this morning, was “obviously not well,” a relative told ABC News.
Family friends in Newtown also described the young man as troubled and described his mother Nancy as very rigid. “[Adam] was not connected with the other kids,” said one friend.
Late today, police said Nancy Lanza’s body was found in the family home. According to sources, Lanza shot his mother in the face, then left the house armed with at least two semi-automatic handguns and a semi-automatic rifle.

“Obviously not well.” In other words, Adam Lanza was nuts.

Psycho, loony, bonkers, daft, zany, berserk and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

Advocates for the mentally ill discourage such colloquial terms as tending to stigmatize psychiatric patients. But we might ask whether stigma — and the consequent damage to the fragile self-esteem of kooks — is really worse than turning loose a homicidal schizo who kills 27 people.

I saw we might ask that, except that it’s politically incorrect to do so. We have been carefully taught that wackos are victims, and we’re not supposed to talk about the possibility that they might also be dangerous, lest we infringe the “rights” of murderous lunatics.

To quote Dirty Harry, “Well, I’m all broken up over that man’s rights.”

You’ll excuse me if I sound somewhat bitter about it, but this school shooting kind of spoiled my plans for the day. And also, some kids in Newtown, Connecticut, will miss the rest of their lives.

Our culture has lost all sense of perspective, of reasonable balance, so that we are unable to make common-sense judgments about risks. Which is the greater danger: That a schizophrenic might have his feelings hurt, or that a schizophrenic might go off his meds and kill people?

Common sense is quite nearly illegal nowadays and it’s certainly unfashionable in the Obama Age. So the usual liberal dingbats — including the ACLU types who assured us it was “a fearless, independent life style” for a crazy woman to defecate in public on the streets of Manahattan — are telling us we need more gun control.

And I say, no, what we need is more kook control. But no member of Congress in either party would have the guts to introduce “The Dangerous Lunatic Incarceration Act of 2013,” which would put wackjobs like Adam Lanza some place where they couldn’t kill people.

Chris Rock was right: “Whatever happened to ‘crazy’? . . . What? You can’t be crazy no more? Did we eliminate ‘crazy’ from the dictionary?”

 

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Category: Connecticut, Crime, Culture

Comments

68 Responses to “Chris Rock Was Right”

  1. Ed Driscoll » Asking the Important Questions
    December 15th, 2012 @ 4:12 pm

    […] 2012 – 1:12 pm Tweet Stacy McCain, with a video assist from Chris Rock: “Whatever happened to ‘crazy?’” Our culture has lost all sense of perspective, of reasonable balance, so that we are unable to make […]

  2. Wombat_socho
    December 15th, 2012 @ 4:16 pm

    I don’t buy the proposition that trial lawyers are doing any good for anyone but themselves.

  3. Wombat_socho
    December 15th, 2012 @ 4:19 pm

    No! The NYT wrong? How can that be, with all their layers of editors and fact-checkers?

  4. Bob Belvedere
    December 15th, 2012 @ 5:05 pm

    I must disagree. I’ve worked with a state court system for nearly thirty years and the courts are full of Do-Goody-Good-Do-Gooders who are out to fundamentally change America through the law.

  5. Leroy Oddswatch
    December 15th, 2012 @ 5:16 pm

    Reported at KGW.com, the Portland mall shooter was confronted by a ccw holder, whereupon he killed himself.

  6. Prayers for Newtown, Connecticut and Weekend Links
    December 15th, 2012 @ 5:23 pm

    […] Other McCain has up a great blog post on the recent tragedy in Connecticut and the fact that Chris Rock was right. It’s a must […]

  7. Gun-free zones are magnets for massacres — Cynthia Yockey, A Conservative Lesbian
    December 15th, 2012 @ 5:26 pm

    […] Dear Stacy McCain and Ace want to crack down on the mentally ill. I agree that it should be easier to force people who are a danger to themselves or others into care, including psych holds. But their proposals to further humiliate and enrage men whose mental illness and inadequacies may drive them to kill are disastrous. This will only push more men to kill as a means to make the world feel the hurt and impotence that overwhelm them. The carrot makes more sense than the stick: we need to find out if there’s anything we can do to give loners and nutjobs something useful to do even if it winds up being a form of semi-incarceration doing community service. […]

  8. WJJ Hoge
    December 15th, 2012 @ 6:20 pm

    What happened to crazy?

    It was elected to the Legislature.

    BTW, Connecticut repealed its death penalty statute this year.

  9. ‘He Was a Quiet Ewok, Kept to Himself a Lot. Kind of a Loner, I Guess You’d Say’ : The Other McCain
    December 15th, 2012 @ 6:53 pm

    […] film director, I’d be “controversial.” As it is, I’m just plain crazy and my advocacy of “The Dangerous Lunatic Incarceration Act of 2013” might seem somewhat counter-intuitive. But the fact is, crazy people can only get along safely in a […]

  10. Quartermaster
    December 15th, 2012 @ 10:04 pm

    There you go again. Looking for paper and Ink at the NYT.

  11. Jake Was Here
    December 15th, 2012 @ 10:49 pm

    Somebody totted it up and came to the conclusion that between murdering his mother, stealing her guns, transporting them, bringing them into a gun-free zone, and murdering 27 more people, Adam Lanza broke the law FORTY-ONE TIMES. Think he gave a shit?

  12. Guns Don’t Kill People … : The Other McCain
    December 15th, 2012 @ 11:55 pm

    […] send crazy people to the loony bin. Seems to me like this is scientific evidence in support of “The Dangerous Lunatic Incarceration Act of 2013.”Category: CrimeComments /*A Point of ViewAdrienne's CornerDaily PunditDaTechguyDon […]

  13. alanhenderson
    December 16th, 2012 @ 5:06 am

    I once witnessed a guy trying to run down his wife/GF with his car, trying to drive into the apartment laundry room after her.
    If guns could disappear, the homicidal would find ways to improvise.

  14. werewife
    December 16th, 2012 @ 7:18 am

    Well, technically, nobody is arguing that another law would have intimidated this nutcase into Respecting Its Majesty and backing off. The lefty argument is that there oughta be a law preventing ANYONE outside government from obtaining firearms, so that people like him wouldn’t be able to find one to commit crimes with. This argument is, of course, as easy to demolish as the one you just demonstrated above, starting with the William Burroughs quote that has become famous in the last day or so…

  15. Tomas Gallucci
    December 16th, 2012 @ 12:49 pm

    You go to far in frenzied attack on those otherwise innocent schizophrenics as I point out in my response to the points you make here.

  16. Tomas Gallucci
    December 16th, 2012 @ 12:50 pm

    “Gun free zones”
    Are those like Free Speech Zones?

  17. Criticism From a Friend: Can We Help Victims of Random Sarcasm Syndrome? : The Other McCain
    December 16th, 2012 @ 7:25 pm

    […] Lunatic Incarceration Act of 2013″ gets an unethusiastic reaction from Cynthia Yockey:Dear Stacy McCain and Ace want to crack down on the mentally ill. I agree that it should be easier to force people […]

  18. bggatbdl
    December 17th, 2012 @ 9:36 pm

    When I clicked it thought you were going to endorse his “price of bullets I’d shoot you if I could afford it” bit. Glad you did not.