Hendrix's Eccentric Commentary

12/14/2012 After Sandy Hook

What is worse, if anything could possibly be worse than the shootings, is that we already know so much of the story.  The shooter is almost certainly male, white, and between about fifteen and forty years of age.  His mother (one of the victims) was worried about him and tried to deal with the situation.  He is a bit of a loner.  He has deteriorated a bit lately — there might be an immediate trigger, but at some level he was preparing for something like this for a while.  He has a bit of a a fascination with weapons, and probably owns more than one.  His motives, to the extent we will ever be able to find them out, or understand him will fall into three broad categories:  he might be genuinely insane, literally in a different reality, hearing voices or something like that (uncommon but it does happen);  he might be someone with mental issues (depression, anxiety, alienation, social isolation) who decides to act them out;  or, he might be a sociopath and genuinely evil.  There will be the tantalizing possibility that if someone had recognized his issues earlier an intervention might have been possible, but that didn’t happen as he was isolated and the people who knew him saw him as something of an oddball, but didn’t see anything to indicate this was coming.

We know that people will be bereaved and shocked.  We also know that the NRA will tell us that nothing that has happened here justifies the remotest hint of a smidgeon of a vestige of a suggestion that we might even think about gun control.  We know that politicians will deplore what has happened but will not be prepared to take on the gun lobby and do anything effective.  Oh, and we know that in about three months we will hear about another story just like this one.