I've never strayed from the tough subjects, whether on the blog or in my writing, simply because they are tough or hard to swallow. This post is no exception to that rule. Proceed with caution.
The tragedy at
Sandy Hook
has weighed heavily on my mind since I first heard the news on Friday. I cried
when I heard what happened on Friday, and I haven't stopped crying yet. Every
time someone brings it up, tears well in my eyes. My heart is broken for the
families who have lost their children, for the community that has been torn
apart, and for a nation that has grieved over far too many of these devastating
tragedies already.
Yesterday, in an effort to understand why this happened, a
family member walked up to me and said, "You're smart. You know about this
stuff, why do people do things like this?"
Like most of you, I didn't know how to respond right away. I
didn't know the person responsible for this. I never had a conversation with
him. Until Friday, I didn't even know this person existed. But the sad fact is
my family member was right. I do know about this stuff.
I grew up not far from Jonesboro,
where two thirteen year old kids gunned down their classmates. I had a friend
in Pearl, Mississippi
when his classmate gunned down his friends. I knew students at Virginia Tech
when their friends were gunned down. I went to school with a thirteen year old
who went to prison for murdering a stranger. A former classmate is in prison
for murdering her child. Another is in prison for murdering his girlfriend's
child. My mom's best friend's 12-year old son went to prison for killing his
stepfather. I've held the hands of parents whose children were shot or stabbed
by complete strangers. And I've hugged parents whose babies were dying because
of the abuse of babysitters and family members.
But I'm no different than any of you reading this because
you know this violence, too.
You've seen it. You've lived through it. You may have even
lost someone to it. And you may never be able to point to a single factor and
say with absolute certainty that "this right here is why" these
things happen. I have a degree in Forensic Psychology and another in Criminal Justice,
but I can't point to a single thing and say "this is why" either.
Perhaps it is, as many have lamented this weekend, because
our nation's response to mental illness is to pretend it doesn't exist. Two
hundred years ago, we tossed the mentally ill into prisons and left them there
until disease or violence claimed their lives. Fifty years ago, we placed them
into state hospitals and institutions and experimented on them. Thirty years
ago, we closed most of our mental health hospitals and tossed our mentally ill
out onto the streets or into homes with caregivers incapable of meeting their
needs without help we didn't offer. We let insurance providers decide who
qualified for help, and those who didn't were tossed right back into prisons.
We deemed the mentally ill "criminal", and we
haven't stopped since. We were outraged at the possibility of someone being
"let off" by pleading insanity, so we made that plea all but
impossible. Never mind that such a defense is used in less than one percent of
criminal cases, is successful in less than .002 percent of cases, that defendants are more likely to deny mental illness than fake mental illness, or that psychologists can successfully determine in 95% of instances when mental illness is faked. Never mind
that those who successfully use such a plea spend as much time or more in a mental
health facility (often a maximum security mental health hospital) as those
found guilty without an insanity plea attached. And never mind that many of
those with a legitimate mental illness who cannot use the insanity defense, those who don't always know right from
wrong or are easily influenced or prone to uncontrolled outbursts, now languish in prisons and learn from hardened
criminals before they land right back on the streets.
Perhaps, as others have said this weekend, it's because
we've decided that guns make us safe. We've decided the Second Amendment
guarantees us the right to as many weapons as we want and as many bullets as we
want. We've decided our right to the feeling of safety owning a gun provides
trumps the right of safety for those who don't feel safe with so many guns
floating around out there. We've decided our right to own weapons to see to our
safety has absolutely nothing to do with the 9,000+ homicides a year in which
guns were the weapon of choice. We've decided the only way to safely protect
our stuff from a criminal is with a weapon. And we've decided that we can
police our weapons ourselves and don't need strict regulation.
Never mind that having a gun in the home is more likely to
result in an accidental fatality than in the prevention of a crime, or that
guns were only used in defense successfully in two out of every 1,000 criminal
incidents in a ten year period. Never mind that a child in the United States is more likely to die by gunfire
than a United States soldier
serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Never mind that only 28% of incidents in which a gun was used as self-defense
involved an offender shooting at the victim (or that nearly 20% of those
self-defense incidents involved police officers). And never mind that in many
areas of the nation, you aren't even required to report if your weapon is
stolen.
Or perhaps, as we've also heard this weekend, this happened
because our culture thrives on violence. We love horror and gore. We cheer when
the good guy starts blowing things up. We want our video games and movies to
have realistic violence, and we get testy when that violence doesn't live up to
our expectations. We want criminals to die violently and painfully. In fact, we
often demand their violent and painful deaths.
Never mind that kids spend hours in front of these games we
demand. Never mind that many of those whose executions we cheered were
exonerated after death. And never mind that those gory movies we're watching
often have some grain of tragic truth in them.
We've seen the real-life victims kept in dungeons. We've
found the real-life bodies of those who were chopped to pieces. We've found the
skin-suits worn by the real-life Hannibal Lecters of the world and the torture
instruments and chambers used by the real-life John Kramers of the world. We've
sat in front of the news for hours, soaking in every detail of these horrid,
real-life crimes. And we've watched with as much fascination as horror and
revulsion.
So, perhaps, the problem isn't any one of these things.
Perhaps, and more likely, the problem is the combination of all of these things.
Things like the heartbreaking tragedy at Sandy Hook
happen because our response to mental illness is subpar. Our right to protect
our stuff from criminals trumps the right to life. Our desire to know what
happened to the Jaycee Dugards and Elizabeth Smarts of the world allows us to
badger them for answers until they cave and relive all the sordid details to
sate our curiosity. Our love of violence and gore desensitizes us to the point
where it takes a tragedy like the murders of twenty first-graders to truly shock
and horrify us.
Don't believe me?
How many of you have heard about Vincent Ajeh? Deonte
Judkins? Mikias T. Tibebu? Mark La Bonte? Christiaan Oldewage? Kayla Campbell?
Khan Ash?
How many of you are truly surprised to learn that every one of
them is a murder victim? Or that they were all under 18 and were killed within
the last two months? Or that every single one of their deaths was on the news,
either state or national? That two of them were killed by their parents? Four
of them were shot? One of them was abducted?
What happened at Sandy Hook
is absolutely devastating. The loss of the seven above should be equally as
devastating to us as a nation and as individuals, but it isn't. Because we've
become so used to parents killing their kids, or people abducting and killing
kids, or kids being shot and killed on the street, that we no longer grieve as
a nation for those children. When we hear about them, we get sad, and then we
forget their names and their faces, just like I did. Until tonight, I knew only three of their stories, but I didn't remember their names. Like everyone else, I moved on to other things, and their names escaped me. This bothers me more than you know.
As a society, we only
stop to feel the horror when twenty babies are gunned down in their classrooms
on a busy Friday morning. We cry and scream and say the man who murdered them was
evil. He was disturbed. He wasn't like us. But the sad fact is that he was one
of ours. He was raised in our society, by members of our society, on the very
same things that fuel the rest of our society. And that's a damn tragedy in and
of itself because we're supposed to be great. We're supposed to protect the
innocent and punish the guilty. We're supposed to be a nation moving forward
and overcoming incredible odds together.
Instead, most of us don't know our next door neighbors. We
don't even realize that the woman we've sat next to on the train every day for
the last two years is suicidal. Or that the horror movie we're soaking up like
sponges is based on a person who destroyed real lives five, ten, thirty years ago.
We don't remember the name of the baby whose mom shook him to death two towns
over, of the teenagers killed on street corners in our states last month, or of a single
victim of a school shooting that happened more than a year ago. I'd met one of the little girls who died in Jonesboro, but I don't remember her name now.
And that's heartbreaking. Because those kids we swore we'd remember,
the ones we cried for as a nation…we moved on and forgot. We forgot their
names. We forgot their faces. We forgot why they died, where they died, and
when they died. We lost the belief that it didn't have to happen and that we
could have stopped it.
Maybe owning a gun will keep you safe. Maybe strict
regulation won't stop criminals or the determined from getting their hands on
guns. Maybe Adam Lanza would have stolen a gun had his mother not owned a single one. Maybe more equitable access to mental healthcare wouldn't have stopped
this. Maybe he didn't have a mental illness at all. Maybe he never played Black
Ops 2. Maybe he never saw The Expendables. Maybe he was born evil and couldn't
have been saved no matter what we did. I don't know. I don't know if the police will
ever figure out why he did what he did. But I do know that we made it easy for
him, because we forgot our vow not to let it happen again when it was a theater in Aurora, or a campus in Virginia, Ohio, Mississippi, Arkansas, Illinois, or Minnesota.
We could have stopped this, but we didn't. We let this happen. We keep letting it happen. And that's why we lost twenty, innocent little kids on
Friday. We forgot how much we've already lost to apathy and division, and we failed them because of it.
That is devastating.
Ayden
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