TERRY MORRIS writes:

Everything you and your commenters have mentioned as factors in the Adam Lanza case all involve one, inescapable fact: parental neglect. All of it, including the drugs, the violent video game playing, and the issue of protecting him from negative consequences of his own misbehavior involve parental neglect.

As to the last in that list, watch a few documentaries about famous American serial killers and you will see that this is very common among them – their parents were always running interference for them everytime they got themselves into the slightest trouble with authorities as children, and even into adulthood. But I’m one of those no-nonsense kinds of parents who believe with all my being that even so-called “child safety locks” – those gadgets many, many parents mindlessly place on their lower cabinet doors to prohibit their children from getting into them – are, ultimately, psychologically damaging to children.

Jill Farris in the previous entry makes good points about Lanza’s upbringing that are worth repeating here: Read More »

THIS photo, posted and discussed at Galliawatch, shows a French child holding an obscene sign in favor of homosexual “marriage.” This child’s participation in the rally, and the fact that the demonstrators find it entertaining, says much about the cause this rally espouses.

At root, homosexual “marriage” is an enemy of childhood innocence. Amid all the talk of love is callousness and scorn for the child. Whoever is in charge of this boy’s life should be thrown in prison.

DON VINCENZO writes:

Who can be legitimately called a saint amongst us? What is a saint? How does the non-saint know when he is in the presence of one given the full measure of God’s grace?  Does the saint openly radiate that grace, because in the last analysis, Catholics know – or should – that only God can make a saint?

Michael Gerson, a columnist at The Washington Post, wrote of the recent vote by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) to advance the cause of Dorothy Day’s claim to sainthood. It is an interesting column about an interesting woman, but I am reminded of the Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times. Read More »

JESSE POWELL restates the rationale for chivalry in an age of feminism here. As he puts it, the abuses of feminism do not justify a rejection of masculine protectiveness, a rejection that is so often advocated by men’s rights advocates.

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THE REV. James Jackson writes:

Here is a good quote by Walker Percy which describes the horror and evil of Sandy Hook:

“I am perfectly willing to believe Flannery O’Connor when she said, and she wasn’t kidding, that the modern world is a territory largely occupied by the devil. No one doubts the malevolence abroad in the world. But the world is also deranged. What interests me is not the malevolence of man — so what else is new? — but his looniness. The looniness, that is to say, of the “normal” denizen of the Western world who, I think it fair to say, doesn’t know who he is, what he believes, or what he is doing.”

JIM GOAD at Taki’s Mag cites the medication history of killers who have gone on shooting sprees:

• An autopsy concluded that Columbine killer Eric Harris had the SSRI antidepressant Fluvoxamine in his bloodstream at the time of his death.

• Jeff Weise, who killed nine people and himself at a Minnesota high school in 2005, was taking increasingly high doses of Prozac at the time of his spree.

• Robert Hawkins, who killed eight people and himself at an Omaha mall in 2007, reportedly “had been on antidepressants” at the time of his shooting. He allegedly had taken antidepressants since he was six years old. Read More »

PAUL writes:

Last night another Christmas movie was on: The Christmas Hope (2009). The star was Madeline Stowe. It was about a couple who lost their son during the last year and were then faced with deciding whether to care for a young unrelated girl around Christmas. Madeline Stowe’s character read to the child from a children’s book one night.

This had great meaning to me.

There once was a young mother who held her infant son in her lap as she rocked him. She told him that she would always love him. When he began school, she would tell him she would always love him. When he began high school, she would tell him she would always love him, and he had become embarrassed about it by then. She continued until she was too old to tell him, which was when he took her in his arms and told her that he would always love her.

I often make sure I tell my mother that I will never leave her, which is her greatest fear. But tonight when I visited my mother (as I do every day), I took her in my arms (as I began doing when I first detected her dementia, years before anyone else did) and told her that I would always love her.

IN THE Atlantic, of all places, an Evangelical Christian writer describes how feminism nearly ruined her marriage and how she came to discover a radical solution: Respect for her husband. I can already hear the Internet-wide tantrums that will result from this piece. Nina Roesner writes:

I grew up as a product of second-wave feminism, having learned from the media that men were oppressive, foolish, and incompetent. Perhaps as a result, I spent nearly the first decade of my own marriage “fighting for my rights” with my husband. I criticized him and bossed him around. It wasn’t that he was such a bad guy, but rather I was trained to spot potential oppression and domination by the male gender. I took personally his lack of attention to detail around the home or with the baby. I made a practice of letting him know his failings on a regular basis, expecting his behavior to change.

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WRITING AT The Remnant, Christopher Gawley, who lives ten miles from Newtown, Connecticut, reflects on the school massacre. Here is an excerpt:

My heart is so full of brokenness and sorrow I can scarcely grasp what has happened. Such depravity!

As I drove home from work tonight, with a dull numbness pervading, I dreaded the fact that the liberal establishment would take this occasion to launch yet another campaign against gun rights.  Even in the sickness I felt while processing this tragedy, complete with all the remorse for the victims and their families, I was angry at the thought that this too would be politicized.  Read More »

MOVEON.ORG produced this TV ad, which has aired on major channels this past week. It is in favor of VAWA, the domestic violence law that supports the cult-like battered women’s industry. The House has yet to approve reenactment of the law, which encourages false allegations and weakens due process protections. Here is a recent report by the anti-VAWA organization SAVE on the violations of civil rights associated with the law.

YEARS AGO, I met a woman at a neighborhood pool party. She was an older mother who gave birth to twin sons in her forties. I remember her two boys. They had dark black hair and were jumping in the pool with all the normal energy and playfulness of their age. They were four years old at the time. This woman’s husband, who was not present, was in his sixties. The age of the parents was unusual and struck me as odd, but they seemed pleasant people. I occasionally saw them over the years at local events.

Two years ago, one of the twin sons, now in his early twenties, murdered his mother, his father and his twin brother with a samurai sword in their home in an otherwise normal suburban neighborhood.

For years, this son had been acting strangely. While his brother went to college, he remained home. He had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and, apparently, the family was attempting to cope on its own with this disorder. Aside from the gruesomeness of their deaths, I imagined hellish years as they encountered his increasing irrationality and paranoia. Their isolation was haunting in retrospect. Why had no one stepped in and institutionalized this young man? Did this couple, because of their love for their son, entertain false hopes? Where were the doctors to confine him to a mental institution?

In interviews after their murders, extended family members and relatives seemed detached from the situation, as was reportedly the case with the relatives of Adam Lanza.

Also, in retrospect, the age of the father of the boy who murdered his parents is telling. He was possibly  too old and effete to take care of his family and to institutionalize his son. He was one of those fathers who was more playmate and soccer coach than authority figure. See Ed H.’s excellent comment at VFR on the effects of the weak, feminized father and the “feminization of everything.”

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IN THIS entry, a reader says that lockdown drills in schools, in which teachers and students rehearse a massacre scenario, may not be harmful for children because they prepare them to face reality. I respond to his points.

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A READER from Ireland writes:

Greetings from Ireland. I wish you and yours a Happy, Holy and Peaceful Christmas plus a Prosperous New Year.

You may find this gem of some interest.  Barbara Kay, of the Canadian Association for Equality, says that there are four MILLION single fathers raising children, be they widowers or simply “normal” single fathers in North America. She said that there is NO evidence whatsoever to link children raised in single-father homes to the type of disasters that the research shows regarding children raised in single-mother homes.

Laura writes:

Thank you.

She is terrific.

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LIKE COLUMBINE HIGH SCHOOL, Sandy Hook Elementary School is housed in a typical sterile and depersonalized school building. Almost 650 children between kindergarten and fourth grade attended the school before the shooting. America sees nothing wrong with these factory-style conditions for children. Schools are as appealing as prisons, and they will become more and more like prisons as they attempt to keep out the violent predators who hate them.

And as with Columbine, the bodies of the dead children were left in the building for many hours after the shooting, in this case until late that night, so that the experts could see them from every angle. Efficiency rules.

Sandy Hook Elementary

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AT VFR, Lawrence Auster writes:

… This society has normalized the abnormal and the evil. In particular it has normalized, in the all-surrounding mass entertainment media, displays of extremely sensate, grotesque, and perverted violence, and no one in the society publicly opposes it. Therefore the whole society shares the guilt. And children share the guilt by association with their parents and with the whole society. (Note to reader: Before you decide I’m crazy, read on.) Societal guilt is not neat and precise and fair to individuals in the way it works out. Everyone partakes of it and everyone is liable to receive the consequences of it, even if, as is the case with children, they are personally innocent. Read More »

ERIC writes:

Notice the way men, women and children comport themselves in these scenes from life in Ontario, California in 1947.

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ONE OF the fundamental pretenses of liberalism is that it stands on the side of non-violence. A liberal is tolerant, accepting, open and, above all, a pacifist. Feminism, in particular, has always held that if more women were in power, society would become more peaceful because women are less prone to aggression.

However, if we look closely at the kind of society feminism creates, we see that the opposite is true. A feminist society is not a peaceful one. Feminism encourages violence.  It is no surprise that mass shootings have become increasingly common in the last fifty years.

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