Make no mistake that the Sandy Hook mass killing functions within our society, and the subsequent politicization of the event points to much deeper problems as we bury our heads in the sand with such outrage. 

Yesterday 14,000 children under the age of 5 died from under-nutrition (UNICEF data). Today 14,0000 more died. Tomorrow another 14,000 will die. Why is this not the most important story? I guess it is because here we can only hold ourselves accountable. Of course that is not much fun. 

Of course Adam Lanza can not shoulder our problems by himself, and so we will support him in his gradual acceptance for the responsibility of his crime.

And for what it’s worth, stumbling across someone in the process of raping and murdering a loved one would result in my killing the attacker if I was able as it might allow me to save my loved one’s life if I got there in time. But if I didn’t get there in time (so far there have been two instances in my life where I didn’t get there in time, so I write from experience) and the killer got arrested and found guilty in court then their being put to death by the government or even by me if they ever got paroled wouldn’t do me or my deceased loved one any good.

Putting a killer to death might prevent a similar tragedy from happening to someone else so there’s still a viable practical argument in favor of executing them (so long as nobody pretends it has a deterrent effect), though the occasional problem of the wrong people being put on Death Row means the gov’t isn’t competent enough to handle such an option yet. So while I’d kill a killer myself if I encountered a killing in progress, I don’t want the gov’t doing it after the fact simply because they are clearly not competent enough for the responsibility.

In case you haven’t noticed, and it seems like many people haven’t, sometimes there isn’t any satisfactory resolution to a situation, just like how “justice” in the face of murder is ultimately impossible (we often conflate prison/execution with “justice” when it’d be more accurate to call it “retribution”).

One of life’s most important (and harshest) lessons is learning how to eat some shit and keep moving on regardless. No matter who we are, life’s going to feed us some nasty, dark times and anyone who can’t manage to handle them and move past them is the true threat to society regardless of any history of mental illness, a brain tumor, an abusive childhood or a lack of the pro-social variant of the oxytocin receptor gene (among other things).

It’s nothing personal, really, but comment threads or live conversations or Op-Ed articles are not where to seek professional psychiatric care so it’d be nice if violently angry or otherwise highly disturbed people spared the rest of us from hearing about their problems and instead put that energy into something that may actually help.