Stinging Sarcasm

 

But it makes the point of why guns in schools are a problem, not a solution.

While the NRA would like to make this a mental health issue, we know that Nancy Lanza was taking vacations leaving her son alone in the house, with these firearms, and no additional care or supervision while she took vacations.  Mrs. Lanza had returned from a four day vacation at a resort in New Hampshire the weekend before she was murdered in her bed.  Despite the attempt by the NRA to suggest that Adam Lanza was dangerously crazy, there is no association with violence by sufferers of Aspergers syndrome, much less mild cases, which appears to be the only diagnosis that has been mentioned specifically for her son.

What we DO know is that according to criminologists, most mass murderers are NOT in fact mentally ill, just angry, and bent on some form of violent revenge.

We also know from family and friends that Nancy Lanza was both a hovering 'helicopter mom' when her son was younger, and a right wing 'prepper', views that may have been shared by her son.  Preppers are a kind of survivalist who are paranoid that there are mobs of people at any moment ready to descend on them to take what they have, necessitating the accumulation of private arsenals, food, and other supplies. If right wing delusional paranoia is a kind of mental illness, it was one that Nancy Lanza suffered from, despite being a legal gun buyer, and probably what should be listed on her death certificate.



The NRA survives and thrives by selling paranoia, unreasonable fear.  The right wing does the same.  Some times it kills them, not by actual end times or apocalypse occurring, but by succumbing to their own extremism leading to violence.  These are the end times believers, like Michele Bachmann; these are the Mayan calendar/ God says the end of the world is (fill in the date), the one world order / anti-UN crowd, the conspiracy theorists (fill in the nutjob conspiracy du jour).  They tend to gravitate to the tea party, to believe bad things about the President that are not true, and to hold inaccurate beliefs about everything from racial and ethnic minorities to political systems and economics.  They tend to hold fears and hatred that are utterly wrong, bad, inaccurate.  Both the Lanzas, mother and son, may have literally died from political extremism combined with guns, a sort of right wing / tea party mental illness they actively sought, chose, and embraced.

That makes the sarcasm of the Michael Moore tweet the more apt, the more pointedly underlining what is wrong with the right, especially the right wing media and blogosphere; the NRA; and the gun nut culture which, as Moore so beautifully documented in his Academy award winning, Cannes film festival and other foreign documentary award winning movie, Bowling for Columbine, the gun nuts / prepper / militia movement adherents who believe that every American must be armed, and has the right and duty to 'cut out the middleman' by not turning to law enforcement to shoot 'goblins', generic vaguely identified bad guys, or just people who believe differently and more sane things than they do.
The reality is that they mostly shoot themselves and each other, family members and friends, not any bad guys.  No hordes of people looting and pillaging attacked Nancy Lanza; as with most firearms, they were not used defensively.  As the study linked above noted, data supported by other studies:

Data from a US mortality follow-back survey were analyzed to determine whether having a firearm in the home increases the risk of a violent death in the home and whether risk varies by storage practice, type of gun, or number of guns in the home. Those persons with guns in the home were at greater risk than those without guns in the home of dying from a homicide in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 1.9, 95% confidence interval: 1.1, 3.4). They were also at greater risk of dying from a firearm homicide, but risk varied by age and whether the person was living with others at the time of death. The risk of dying from a suicide in the home was greater for males in homes with guns than for males without guns in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 10.4, 95% confidence interval: 5.8, 18.9). Persons with guns in the home were also more likely to have died from suicide committed with a firearm than from one committed by using a different method (adjusted odds ratio = 31.1, 95% confidence interval: 19.5, 49.6). Results show that regardless of storage practice, type of gun, or number of firearms in the home, having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and firearm suicide in the home.