If each of those kindergarners had been packing heat, this would not have happened…thats what’s wrong with this country…we need more concealed weapons at school…geeesh! Its obvious that if more people had guns there would be less gun violence. obvious. (said with as much snark as possible).

“Schools and day cares centers are no place for guns” Well, that’s apparent from this incident since in CT they are “gun free zones.” Gee, I wonder why the shooter didn’t respect this rule? I also guess the knowledge that no one at the school was armed never crossed the shooter’s mind either.

It’s truly a wonder that everyone doesn’t have “Gun Free Zone” signs on their front lawns. That would stop this type of violence overnight.

@prostratedragon: I keep going back to Taibbi’s HSBC screed I read last evening. (It’s linked in EW’s post above).

Just think if we took all the effort we currently use to round up people (and their cash) for minor drug offenses and redirected even 10 percent of that to, I don’t know, monitoring gun shows, tracking gun sales or busting rogue dealers? Erza’s piece is good, and it really is confounding why we as a country are like this — I still think it starts with the constantly manufactured and mined paranoia, which to me was actually best illustrated in Bowling for Columbine.

But these shootings are coming most every week now. It’d sure be nice to take a really big problem and actually make any attempt whatsoever to begin to do something about it.

Oh and a big fuck you to Jay Carney and his masters for saying we can’t politicize today’s events.

@angry bitter drunk: …or to mental health services.

One of the things we don’t talk much about while bitching about bailouts for the rich and screw the rest is the cost in stress as real people twist slowly, grinding ever further into debt or losing what assets they had accumulated. That does not excuse acts like today. It can help us understand that it is not just personal tragedy, it is to all of us as a society.

Would that some of our politicians would consider those costs as they talk of “bargaining chips”, trimming “entitlements” like Medicaid, mean spirited “compromise”, or refusing to tax the rich.

Old Ben Franklin had it right with “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. These days we call both the “public sector”.

@orionATL:

to be more precise:

the
nra in 2010 estimated there were 300 million firearms in the usa.

of this number an estimated 100 million were handguns.

the “let’s not politicize ______ event” is a well-established right-wing public speech tactic used to make opponents feel uncomfortable and onlookers feel irritated at those opponents.

thus, this “let’s focus on tragedy and grief” rather than talk about the terrible toll of death and grief guns take in the usa, especially in the last few years with repeated massacres, is an effort to suppress and limit discussion of the tragedies handguns repeatedly promote and an effort to control any discussion of handgun control.

i have no problem at all connecting today’s tragedy with the ease of acquisition of handguns in
the usa.

i have no problem at all believing and saying aloud that the nra’s ceo, wayne lapierre, his organization, and handgun and ammunition manufactuerers inside and outside of this country bear a direct responsibility for creating the circumstances that allowed the school shooting to unfold.

t bogg, whose caustic style of writing skewers american political inanity and insanity brilliantly, has this opening sentence on a column about today’s mass-murder:

“Understanding where Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller will be going with the Pre-Christmas NRA-Sponsored Connecticut Kid Slaughter in several screen shots (click to enlarge):…”

http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2012/12/14/tucker-carlson-is-going-to-earn-his-blood-money-today/

“a criminal bent on spreading evil”

WTF? That sounds like something out of a fucking cartoon or comic book.

@P J Evans:

p.j.,

i read katie jensen as being acerbicly sarcastic when
she wrote:

“If each of those kindergarners had been packing heat, this would not have happened…thats what’s wrong with this country…we need more concealed weapons at school…”

i think you and she are both appalled at the suggestion that more gun ownership would have averted this tragedy.

my wife and i were talking thru a scenario in which the teacher had a gun.

– she is teaching young children who are notorious for getting into aspirin, darvon, paint, kerosene, insecticide, automobile ignitions, etc. so would she not have this gun locked up?

– son shows up at classroom door. does mom intuit his intent and plug him?

– son threatens mom and looses a tirade of psychotic anger. does mom have time tp unlock the drawer, rake off the safety, snd plug son before he gets in his kill shot?

-if “public safety officer” or principal is armed, how do they determine who to shoot in the chaos? anyone who is not a student or teacher? how about a hapless visiting
parent?

– what training and protocol are required of a policeman re shooting into a crowd?

– what training and protocol are required of soldiers fighting our endless village/urban warfare? if shots are fired, do ypu kill all whom you can see or try to find the source of the firing?

and the money-chasing morons at the national rifle association believe the answer is to ADD to the stock of 300 MILLION firearms (100 million handguns) in this country?

EVERY time there is an event of this magnitude, gun shop sales go UP big time.

is it not obvious that this entire “fuck-the-nation-and-the-public” rift-and-run by the nra is all about money – gun corporations making lots of money, gun shops making lots of money, and gun shows making lots of money.

ew needs to ask what money was promised or passed hands for the passage of the MI gun rules to occur.

@P J Evans:

i don’t doubt that for a minute, p.j.

sad to say, some of those characters could have been members of my extended family.

how did good civic judgement so desert our society?

i date it to 1996 and the advent – thinking of that christmas season term – of fox news/entertainment/lying-for-fun-and-profit which opened the lid of pandora’s box, releasing the reflexive, animal nature of our political “thinking”.

anyone want to consider the glorification of violence that is a regular feature of the movie industry as feeding into this? then there are the video games and hand held games with a focus on violence that seem quite popular..

FWIW:

1927
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_Disaster

@orionATL: When you look at the amounts lobbyists give our legislators, it’s chicken feed! Our legislators will sell their soul for such paltry amounts amazes me.

@tbob:

“Handguns are designed to kill people and that’s how they have been quite effectively used for centuries…”

that is precisely their use; i wish others could see that as clearly as you state it.

I keep thinking of the scale of the trauma inflicted on the surviving children, their parents and siblings. What will it take to try to heal the survivors, their families, schools, and community?

This is direct, acute trauma that is so massive that it’s impact will be felt for decades and more than one generation. I’m the adoptive mom of a little boy diagnosed with PTSD at age 5. Yes, that’s real PTSD. It has taken 3 years only to begin to recognize his triggers, and they could be anything: a color of fabric, a smell, a texture, a certain hand motion, all things he internalized during a traumatic episode. My spouse and I have had to take so much training in de-escalation techniques and responses to avert a full-blown dysregulatory crisis. And we are not there yet at all even though we see significant and continuing progress.

So it will be for many, many of these children, and their families, and their teachers throughout their academic years. Learning will be severely challenged because of the setting of the trauma. A portion of these kids will never return to a formal school — they’ll need to be home-schooled or the equivalent because they will be triggered just walking into a school building.

Some will be diagnosed with developmental trauma, disruption of development according to the neurosequential model — where brain function “freezes in place,” at the moment of trauma. For example, our son’s vision function was “frozen” at 38 months, the exact age at which he was the victim of sexual assault. Developmental trauma affects all the brain parts: the pons, where the emotions are stored, the midbrain, which regulates the emotions, and the cortices. Learning disabilities are a common marker, concurrent with emotional dysregulation. The more severe end of the continuum presents with PTSD, dissociative identity disorder (ada multiple personalities), and/or splitting.

Developmental trauma requires sustained multi-disciplinary treatment efforts that are costly in time, duration and funds: trauma therapy, cognitive therapy, family therapy, and body-centered sensory therapy (because trauma is frequently expressed somatically secondary to the pons). Trauma is a lifelong condition, especially for a child exposed to trauma so severe,and he/she will need interventions at each developmental stage, where the child’s understanding of the trauma is necessarily reframed as his/her identity is formed.

Sadly, the American Psychiatric Assn in writing the new DSM-V, has chosen to ignore developmental trauma as a diagnosis, excluding it from the diagnosis list, despite two decades of work by Bessel Van der Kolk, Bruce Perry, Peter Levine, and Joyanna Silberg. The result is that insurance companies are not required to cover trauma therapy! Does it take a Newtown tragedy for the APA and insurance industry to acknowledge child hood trauma?

One has to wonder about the mental health care offered to the gunman, allegedly diagnosed with Asperger’s (a diagnosis eliminated in the 2012 DSM-V, btw). Was the suspect untreated? If so, why?

And consider the state of pediatric mental health care in this country. It is extraordinarily difficult to find and fund pediatric psychiatrist. In the District of Columbia alone, there are 91,000 kids on Medicaid (61% of all DC kids), of whom 12,000 have mental health diagnoses. And how many board-certifed pediatric psychiatrists who take Medicaid? There are 2 –two psychiatrists for 12,000 kids.

And how will this country pay for the trauma treatments for the kids of Newtown? Treatments that will allow these children to emerge as a acceptably functioning adult (who might pay taxes in the future)?

How about a tax on the NRA to fund psychiatry and trauma therapy?

@posaune:

the ineradicable consequences of psychic trauma are unpredictable and numerous, as with a severe head injury in football or boxing. the difference is that the trauma is “psychological” rather than “physical” – there are not yet tests or machines that allow a physician to “see” that “psychological” damage.

but we know from observation that the damage is there.

further, and repeatedly ignored by the gun violence number crunchers, is that there are others, like posaune and spouse, who are more or less permanently affected by trauma to a family member.

now multiply this number by some thousands and then extend it over, say, a decade.

the result is hundreds of thousands of traumatically scarred family members in one single decade.

@Bruno: Adam Lanza used a Bushmaster .223 semi-automatic rifle at close range to kill children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday.

“I believe everybody was hit more than once,” said Dr. H. Wayne Carver, the state of Connecticut’s Chief Medical Examiner.