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| -Land of the Free |
| The "You didn't do that" society |
| 2014-05-31 |
| Daniel Greenfield AKA Sultan Knish and his view of the Isla Vista Massacre. A taste: Elliot Rodger's parents, communicating through a lawyer and a talent agent, find it convenient to put up another layer of abstraction between themselves and the actions of their son. And the easiest way to do that is to transform it into a widespread social problem. The more that the smiling people on television talk about gun control, the less likely they are to talk about them. Even mental illness reduces a specific crime to the abstraction of a social problem. Expanding an individual act into a social problem manufactures a collective responsibility. The scapegoats are people who had nothing to do with what happened. The killer's family has successfully shifted responsibility to people who live a thousand miles away and never even knew their son existed. Guns have become a convenient cliche. The new villain is no longer the killer, but the 5 million members of the NRA who are unwilling to give up their constitutional rights because Elliot Rodger's family failed at their single most important job. Why is a gun owner in North Carolina more responsible for the Isla Vista killings than Peter Rodger? Does Peter Rodger's staunch opposition to guns free him from responsibility while dumping it on the majority of Americans who believe in the Bill of Rights? Elliot Rodger was not a social problem. He was not a gun culture. He was not a national anything. He was an individual and individuals bear responsibility for their own actions. |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #14 Dr. Steve, just one day, I'd be floored to hear family say - "We tried our best, but failed. Let it rest at that" rather than all the finger pointing. The first step in that direction is to make a real heartfelt statement as such inadmissible by tort lawyers in any claims case. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2014-05-31 15:59 |
| #13 "communicating through a lawyer and a talent agent" There's a snark in that statement somewhere, but I'll refrain for now. |
| Posted by: Mullah Richard 2014-05-31 13:22 |
| #12 He hit one out of the park with this piece, but then again, he usually does. |
| Posted by: newc 2014-05-31 13:05 |
| #11 I can't shake the feeling that a lot of this is the Rodger family attempting to distance themselves from a civil lawsuit by the victims' families. |
| Posted by: swksvolFF 2014-05-31 12:24 |
| #10 "We as a society are going to need to reimplement some sort of forced institutionalization for seriously mentally disturbed people" First we'll have to improve our prognostication abilities a bit. Predicting the future is hard. There are a lot of comments posted on the internet indicative of severe mental disturbance, I guess only an extremely small fraction of them gets carried out. Come to think of it, there is a lot of several mental disturbance embedded in popular entertainment media that never gets carried out, either. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2014-05-31 12:12 |
| #9 I'm not so sure I'd want the current regime to have the tools of involuntary incarceration for "mental illness". Didn't work so well for the citizens of the USSR. You can watch the recent PC crowd's actions to know that they wouldn't hesitate to punish thought-crimes with incarceration, using whatever tools are available |
| Posted by: Frank G 2014-05-31 11:43 |
| #8 I don't mind being in agreement with The Hammer™ :-) Mentally ill people have rights. So does the rest of society, one of those rights being the right not to be murdered by a mentally unbalanced person. We as a society are going to need to reimplement some sort of forced institutionalization for seriously mentally disturbed people, and we're going to need to ensure that it isn't politicized by people like Champ. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2014-05-31 11:41 |
| #7 Your view is the Krauthammer view as well Dr. Steve. The courts and civil rights advocates have hamstrung our ability to deal with mental illness as it should be. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2014-05-31 11:16 |
| #6 I do not blame the lad's parents. The reason is simple: the young man was insane. He was seriously mentally ill. I don't blame other people for one person's illness. From everything I've read (and notice how the MSM hasn't pressed the particulars on this line of the story) the parents, while divorced from each other, cooperated to try and get Mr. Rodgers the medical help he needed. The problem was, everything they tried didn't work. After he turned 21 they couldn't even force him into medical care because of current laws on privacy. That means that he didn't have to take medication, and when he decompensated the parents (and the therapists) didn't know until too late. No, it's not the parents' fault. Mr. Rodgers was seriously, destructively, murderously mentally ill. That's not the NRA's fault either. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2014-05-31 11:10 |
| #5 Living in a lawless, anarchistic society requires a degree of readiness. Had the students been armed, they might have been able to at least return fire. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2014-05-31 11:02 |
| #4 More weak minded democrat shit. |
| Posted by: newc 2014-05-31 10:47 |
| #3 The usual community that wants power over other peoples lives who can't run their own. A life without mirrors. Why should they feel any shame when they feel confident enough that they can exorcise the crap of their lives on others. Life and power without responsibilities. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2014-05-31 08:04 |
| #2 Your rights mean nothing to these people, only their perogatives. He's busy making movies about teenagers killing each other. |
| Posted by: ed in texas 2014-05-31 07:51 |
| #1 The BMW was the problem. One look at the punk's photo will tell you that. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2014-05-31 06:45 |