The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Guns Don’t Kill People …

Posted on | December 15, 2012 | 48 Comments

. . . people we don’t like (and who actually have nothing to do with the crime) kill people:

Michael Graham actually did a very sensitive and thoughtful column about the Connecticut shooting, but the idiot liberal troll who hates Graham — a popular Boston talk-radio host — decided to blame him anyway, because that’s how trolls are.

Their hatreds define their existence.

Meanwhile, the New York Times has a story about the shooter’s first victim, his mother. Something that crosses my mind: You start your murder spree by shooting your own mother in the face, and end it by killing yourself — why kill 26 women and children in between?

Evil.

Adam Lanza wasn’t “autistic” or suffering from an “illness.” He was evil.

UPDATE: Ann Althouse cites research by Clayton Cramer that shows — unexpectedly! — there were fewer crimes committed by crazy people when it was easier to send crazy people to the loony bin.

Seems to me like this is scientific evidence in support of “The Dangerous Lunatic Incarceration Act of 2013.”

Category: Crime

‘He Was a Quiet Ewok, Kept to Himself a Lot. Kind of a Loner, I Guess You’d Say’

Posted on | December 15, 2012 | 49 Comments

“Adam Lanza has been a weird kid since we were 5 years old. As horrible as this was, I can’t say I am surprised . . . Burn in hell, Adam.”
— Tim Dalton, neighbor quoted in the New York Daily News

Let’s face it, if I should die in headline-worthy fashion — losing control at 110 mph while being pursued by state troopers on a two-lane country road with seven cases of illegal fireworks in the back seat of a rented Mustang GT — my friends will say, “Yeah, he was always crazy.”

If I were a software mogul, I’d be “eccentric.” If I were a big-time Hollywood film director, I’d be “controversial.” As it is, I’m just plain crazy and my advocacy of “The Dangerous Lunatic Incarceration Act of 2013” might seem somewhat counter-intuitive. But the fact is, crazy people can only get along safely in a world where there are clear and understandable rules, written and enforced by sane people.

That’s why letting kooks like Maxine Waters and Alan Grayson into Congress is so dangerous. With kooks and dingbats writing the laws, the insanity could escalate beyond anyone’s mad imagination.

A society can tolerate a certain amount of craziness without endangering public safety and jeopardizing the continued existence of society itself. Unfortunately, the police in Livonia, Louisiana, weren’t interested in a philosophical discussion when they clocked me doing 82 in a 45 mph zone that night in March when I was desperately trying to make it to the next day’s Rick Santorum campaign event. So the law was enforced, my rental car was impounded and, all things considered, I was lucky they didn’t arrest me.

The Rule of Law is a magnificent thing, and the discretion left to law enforcement officials — who can exercise their judgment about whether a campaign correspondent’s deadline frenzy justifies extreme speed — has occasionally allowed me to plead my way down to a warning citation. If the cops never really brought the hammer down and fined the hell out of me, however, dangerous vehicular anarchy might ensue.

If everybody drove like me, your morning commute could turn into a cross between a demolition derby, the Talladega 500 and Mad Max.

That’s just one kind of crazy: The daredevil thrill-seeking extrovert, the sanguine id-monster who transgresses boundaries as a kind of sport.

And I’m pretty sure my kind of crazy is ultimately less dangerous than the other end of the extrovert/introvert spectrum: Moody loners, who quietly nurse their resentments and conceal their twisted insanity behind a facade of silence. Ace of Spades on Adam Lanza:

What we have here, it seems, was a Strange Young Man.
What do you do about Strange Young Men? The state can attempt an intervention, but that’s a nice, euphemistic way to say “interfere with their lives for no better reason than the fact that they act oddly.” Most people who act oddly or are socially inept are perfectly nice and law-abiding. (I’m one of them.)
On the other hand, you can strictly observe their freedom to be odd ducks, and suffer the occasional calamity when it turns out that this particular odd duck was the one you should have checked on.

Indeed, and Ace’s self-recognition of his own “socially inept” qualities is what prevents him from being dangerous, unless you’re a douchebag who should stray within range of his withering sarcasm. (Just ask Jackie Mackie Paisley Passey what that’s like.) Ace knows who he is, and has found ways of coping with it and — here’s the key insight — he doesn’t blame other people for his own unique situation.

Which really isn’t all that unique, after all. We’re all kind of crazy in our own way, and our patterns of craziness are not so distinctly individual that they cannot be categorized and labeled by diagnostic experts. But if you think back on your college days, every psychology major you ever knew was crazy, so why should we trust their expertise?

Sometimes, you just have to trust your own gut hunch about this stuff, and err on the side of caution insofar as your own safety is concerned:

“A deeply disturbed kid . . . He certainly had major issues. He was subject to outbursts . . . one of these real brainiac computer kind of kids . . . Adam had a lot of mental problems . . . a gamer who ‘rarely spoke.’ . . . He was weird . . . He was quiet.”

Doesn’t it seem like a lot of people had gut hunches about Adam Lanza, but for some reason didn’t feel like they could do anything about it? What is it about our culture that inhibits people from exercising common-sense judgment that might prevent a “deeply disturbed kid” from killing 27 people before killing himself?

In a word, liberalism. Read more

Category: Fear. Loathing.

Death Porn Media Victim Unexpectedly Negative About The Encounter

Posted on | December 15, 2012 | 26 Comments

by Smitty

Read the whole post from Mama by the Bay. A sample:

But you know what I do remember?
YOU were there. YOU, with your enormous video cameras. YOU, with your microphones poking into the bubble of grief that grew bigger as we waited for our parents to find us. YOU, with your horrible questions about what had happened, had we known Mike, had we seen anything? No parents there yet, just children. No teachers, just children. And you.
Some of us screamed at you to leave us alone. Some of us answered your sick questions, because you were the grown-ups, and we were the kids. I don’t even know how you got there so fast, before our parents, before anyone else could swoop us back inside and ask you to leave. But there you were, with your vans and your lights, asking us how it felt to know that another child had been killed. How it felt to be scared. How it felt to wonder about the names of everyone else, to be desperately hoping for more information, while feeling terrified about what the truth would really be.
I remember you. I remember your names. I remember what channel you were from. I remember that you filled the parking lot at Mike’s funeral. You stood in a line outside of the door, devouring the footage of crying football players running away from the service, like rabid hungry wolves. You replayed the video of Mike being loaded into the ambulance, over and over and over again, even when people wrote to you and asked you to stop.

In defense of the Death Porn Media, if we don’t cram some sand in everyone, the seed pearls of the next atrocity may not be sufficient. Picking up the pieces may be hard, but fomenting the next round is harder still.

The media always gets a pass, unless they form a heavy metal band, which can bring them under attack for inciting violence. Rap music still gets the raaaaacist pass, however.

via Beregond

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

 

Category: Crime, Culture, Journalism, Media Bias

FMJRA 2.0: I Can’t Stay Long

Posted on | December 15, 2012 | 7 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Accuse the Accusers: @scrowder Gets the Left’s ‘Plate Glass Window’ Treatment

BREAKING VIDEO: MI Union Thugs Greet Right-To-Work Law With Thuggery And Cupcakes, But Mostly Thuggery

CONNECTICUT SCHOOL SHOOTING UPDATE: Death Toll 27; Gunman Now Identified as 20-Year-Old Adam Lanza

‘Through a Plate Glass Window’: How Liberal Media De-Legitimize Dissent

Fiscal Clif Bar

‘They Should All Be in Prison’

They’re Still Hating Breitbart

June 3: Bill Schmalfeldt Begins Cyberstalking Aaron Walker

Sen. Rubio Weekly GOP Address

In Case Our Orwellian Reality Had Eluded You

‘At a Time of My Choosing’

FMJRA 2.0: Day Late & A Dollar Short II

LIVE AT FIVE: 12.10.12

Two Weeks Until Christmas and
Three Weeks Until ‘Fiscal Cliff’

Obama Has Consequences

REPORT: @NadiaNaffe’s Lawsuit Against @Patterico Flounders in L.A. Hearing

LIVE AT FIVE: 12.11.12

No, We Can’t.

SHOOTING AT OREGON MALL UPDATE: Eyewitness Tells TV Station Shooter Was Teen in Hockey Mask

Rule 5 Tuesday

LIVE AT FIVE: 12.12.12

#WarOnWomen Democrat Congressman’s Son Pleads Guilty to Assaulting Girlfriend

AFL-CIO OMG WTF?

2022 Election Results

LIVE AT FIVE: 12.13.12

Mad Scientist Calls for ‘Murderous Rampage’ Against Watchdog Group

On Journalism and Walter Duranty

Naked Celebrity News Update (Or, the Parable of the Prodigal Upskirt)

LIVE AT FIVE: 12.14.12

Left’s ‘Tent Truthers’ Claim Union Attack on AFP in Lansing Was an ‘Inside Job’

Top linkers this week:

  1. Rick’s Rants (10, the hard way)
  2. (tied) Lonely Conservative and Daley Gator (7)
  3. Hogewash (6)
  4. Jackie Wellfonder (5)

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links for next Saturday’s FMJRA will be Friday, December 21.

 

Category: FMJRA Award

DeMint Hasn’t Departed Senate Yet, Already Placing Markers

Posted on | December 15, 2012 | 8 Comments

by Smitty

Breitbart talked to Jim DeMint on the cusp of ejecting from the Senate.

The Republican Party used to be very good at targeting voters. We asked the Senator what he thinks happened to the party’s ability to do this well:

Well, I think we tend to put political people into positions where we should have CEOs who know how to run things. When you’re running a big organization its not the time for red meat for the grass roots. Its the time to make good people around you with good data. And, there are some groups out there beginning to do that…the expertise is out there.

In general, and the Sandy Hook reporting fits my amorphous theory: appeals these days are purely emotional, as though our leadership has either

  • lost faith in the ability of the people to reason, or
  • is deliberately undermining the ability of people to reason, as this may make them more docile.

So, what I crave from Mr. DeMint at Heritage is a renewed emphasis on reform. Put the facts out there, make the case for a responsible government, in contrast with the current clown car on parade.

We The People are deeply aware that we have, as a whole, shanked it badly for decades. Let’s have a dispassionate, non-hormonal come-to-Beavis meeting, and set ourselves on a course to fix it, knowing that we’re talking about a decades-long project.

via Jewish Odysseus

Category: GOP

Chris Rock Was Right

Posted on | December 14, 2012 | 68 Comments

“Liberals talk about banning guns as if it’s the same as banning murder and banning evil.”
— Ace of Spades

“Gun-free zones are premised on a lie: that murderers will follow rules, and that people like my student are a greater danger to those around them than crazed killers. That’s an insult to honest people. Sometimes, it’s a deadly one.”
— Professor Glenn Reynolds

“Who to blame for mass murder? This may sound weird, but my gut hunch is it’s probably the homicidal psychotic’s fault.”
— Robert Stacy McCain

When I got up Friday morning, live-blogging a mass murder was not part of my plan for the day. In fact, at the end of a post Friday morning about labor union violence in Michigan, I promised further developments on that story. As I was researching that, however, the TV kept updating with news about a shooting at a school in Connecticut and I figured this might be a story worth mentioning on the blog.

The original 12:15 p.m. ET post relayed reports that “three people have been wounded or injured and one person, the suspected shooter, is dead,” but added the caution that “early reports on events like this can be often be confusing and/or inaccurate.”

To say the very least.

By the time I added the first update, NBC was already reporting 20 dead and next it was 24, then 26, then 27, and all these changing numbers were coming amid a welter of confusing (and, as it turned out, largely wrong) details about the shooter, about the victims, etc. And this kept going for about six hours. Everything is still pretty sketchy, but we now have the bare-bones facts of the story. The Associated Press:

The 20-year-old killer, carrying two handguns, committed suicide at the school, and another person was found dead at a second scene, bringing the toll to 28, authorities said. Police shed no light on the motive for the attack. The gunman was believed to suffer from a personality disorder and lived with his mother in Connecticut . . .
[Police] gave no details on the victim discovered at another scene, except to say that the person was an adult found dead by police while they were investigating the gunman. A law enforcement official identified the gunman as 20-year-old Adam Lanza, the son of a teacher. A second law enforcement official said his mother, Nancy Lanza, was presumed dead. Adam Lanza’s older brother, 24-year-old Ryan, of Hoboken, N.J., was being questioned . . .
Ryan Lanza told law enforcement he had not been in touch with his brother since about 2010. . . .
The gunman drove to the school in his mother’s car, the second official said. Three guns were found — a Glock and a Sig Sauer, both pistols, inside the school, and a .223-caliber rifle in the back of a car. . . .
Adam Lanza and his mother lived in a well-to-do part of Newtown where neighbors are doctors or hold white-collar positions at companies such as General Electric, Pepsi and IBM.

OK, so the Associated Press description of the gunman as having “a personality disorder” matches what ABC News is reporting:

Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old who killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut this morning, was “obviously not well,” a relative told ABC News.
Family friends in Newtown also described the young man as troubled and described his mother Nancy as very rigid. “[Adam] was not connected with the other kids,” said one friend.
Late today, police said Nancy Lanza’s body was found in the family home. According to sources, Lanza shot his mother in the face, then left the house armed with at least two semi-automatic handguns and a semi-automatic rifle.

“Obviously not well.” In other words, Adam Lanza was nuts.

Psycho, loony, bonkers, daft, zany, berserk and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

Advocates for the mentally ill discourage such colloquial terms as tending to stigmatize psychiatric patients. But we might ask whether stigma — and the consequent damage to the fragile self-esteem of kooks — is really worse than turning loose a homicidal schizo who kills 27 people.

I saw we might ask that, except that it’s politically incorrect to do so. We have been carefully taught that wackos are victims, and we’re not supposed to talk about the possibility that they might also be dangerous, lest we infringe the “rights” of murderous lunatics.

To quote Dirty Harry, “Well, I’m all broken up over that man’s rights.”

You’ll excuse me if I sound somewhat bitter about it, but this school shooting kind of spoiled my plans for the day. And also, some kids in Newtown, Connecticut, will miss the rest of their lives.

Our culture has lost all sense of perspective, of reasonable balance, so that we are unable to make common-sense judgments about risks. Which is the greater danger: That a schizophrenic might have his feelings hurt, or that a schizophrenic might go off his meds and kill people?

Common sense is quite nearly illegal nowadays and it’s certainly unfashionable in the Obama Age. So the usual liberal dingbats — including the ACLU types who assured us it was “a fearless, independent life style” for a crazy woman to defecate in public on the streets of Manahattan — are telling us we need more gun control.

And I say, no, what we need is more kook control. But no member of Congress in either party would have the guts to introduce “The Dangerous Lunatic Incarceration Act of 2013,” which would put wackjobs like Adam Lanza some place where they couldn’t kill people.

Chris Rock was right: “Whatever happened to ‘crazy’? . . . What? You can’t be crazy no more? Did we eliminate ‘crazy’ from the dictionary?”

 

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! If you’ve enjoyed the reading, please feel free to hit the tip jar and/or shop our Amazon links to help support the blog during this holiday season. God bless us every one!





 

Category: Connecticut, Crime, Culture

“That Concludes Today’s Live At Five Report With Stacy McCain And Smitty”

Posted on | December 14, 2012 | 16 Comments

by Smitty

American Glob picks up on the notion in the more swank right-of-center blogs that deep pockets like the Koch Brothers should buy MSNBC. The mental image of Rachel Maddow dissolving upon encounter with a teleprompter loaded with truth is satisfying (starting at 0:24):

Aliester:

The Koch Brothers should buy MSNBC and turn it over to conservative bloggers. That concludes today’s Live at Five Report with Stacy McCain and Smitty. Coming up at 6, Bill Whittle followed by Jim Geraghty and William Jacobson at 7 and Glenn Reynolds at 8. Ratings at MSNBC would go up as FOX News found itself competing for viewers for the first time since launching.

I’d vary the theme slightly and offer up the notion that the Koch’s do a KickStarter-esque project, with the notion that people putting up money have the option of converting their boodle into equity shares of The Koch Channel, or whatever. Spread the risk and build an instant market.

I don’t know that Stacy and I could anchor a show without vast amounts of training and more work than Pamela Anderson and Elizabeth Taylor combined, but I do thank Aliester for the complement.

Meanwhile, there’s a tangentially related gag on Twitter about putting (D) behind your name, so that you can say all manner of nonsense and get a media pass for it. Join the fray!

via Insty

Category: Uncategorized

CONNECTICUT SCHOOL SHOOTING UPDATE: Death Toll 27; Gunman Now Identified as 20-Year-Old Adam Lanza

Posted on | December 14, 2012 | 55 Comments

UPDATE 6:20 p.m. ET: Nearly everything originally reported about the gunman was wrong, as Ace of Spades notes. Reports had ID’d 24-year-old Ryan Lanza as the shooter, but now it is reported that in fact the shooter was his 20-year-old brother Adam Lanza:

According to a report from ABC News, neighbors of the Lanza family “described Adam Lanza to ABC as ‘odd’ and displaying characteristics associated with mental illness.”
It is unclear who makes the accusation, but ABC is updating with new reports here.

PREVIOUSLY (12:15 p.m. ET)

Shortly before 10 a.m. ET, there was an incident at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., about 12 miles from Danbury.

The early information indicates that the school’s principal was the target of the attack. It was initially reported that three people have been wounded or injured and one person, the suspected shooter, is dead. We have additional reports from ABC News and the Hartford Courant, but I emphasize that early reports on events like this can be often be confusing and/or inaccurate.

A 1 p.m. ET press conference has been scheduled.

UPDATE: Chicago Tribune:

Multiple people have been killed in a shooting at a Connecticut elementary school. Police said some of the shooting victims are children, but it is not clear if they are among the dead. An official with knowledge of the situation says a gunman is dead.

NBC News is reporting that 20 people have been shot, including some children. It is not known how many are dead and how many are wounded.

UPDATE II: Now being reported by NBC News that, according to law enforcement, 17 adults and 7 children have been shot dead. I repeat that early reports can be inaccurate or confused.

UPDATE III: The death toll is now reportedly at 26 — 18 adults and 8 children — and I’m watching this on MSNBC, where they’re alternating between reporting the news and advocating gun control. As far as the news half of their programming is concerned, it is being reported that the shooter was 20 years old and was dressed in all black. As far as the opinion/advocacy:

I’m trying to update the actual news here, and it’s not made easier by having to listen to idiots like Andrea Mitchell rhetorically bathing themselves in children’s blood in order to advance a political agenda.

UPDATE IV: There were “several fatalities at the scene,” Lt. J. Paul Vance of the Connecticut State Police said at a press conference in Newtown. Both students and staff of the school were among those dead, as was the shooter.

Lt. Vance did not give information about the shooter, nor give a number of those dead or wounded in the incident. He said that the first 911 call came “just after 9:30 a.m.. When state troopers and local police arrived on the scene, they “immediately entered the school” and began a thorough search for the gunman, Lt. Vance said, emphasizing that officers’ first priority was the safety of the children.

Lt. Vance added that are now “many agencies working together” to investigate this atrocious crime, explaining that search warrants have been used to gather additional evidence.

UPDATE V: It is now being reported that police have found the body of one of the 20-year-old gunman’s parents at a home in New Jersey. Summarizing more from The Hill:

Twenty-seven people including 18 children were killed Friday in a shooting at a Connecticut elementary school, according to the Associated Press. . . .
NBC news reported the gunman at the school was a 20-year-old man from Connecticut who carried two handguns. Law enforcement authorities were continuing to search the school and it was not clear immediately whether the gunman — who is dead at the scene — acted alone.

At this time, it is unknown when, how or why the gunman traveled to New Jersey and then back to this school in Connecticut.

UPDATE VI: OK, sources are now telling WNBC in New York that the shooter was actually 24 years old, not 20. His father’s body was apparently found in Hoboken, N.J., and that his mother was a teacher at the school in Connecticut.

The gunman’s name is being reported by MSNBC as Ryan Lanza, and reports also that Lanza’s mother is among those slain at the school.

UPDATE VII: The earlier report about a parent being killed in New Jersey was, apparently, incorrect: The gunman’s mother was shot dead in Connecticut, not in New Jersey, according to the latest reports from NBC. Lanza’s mother was a kindergarten teacher at the school, and it is reported that most of the dead children were in her classroom. Meanwhile, it’s being reported that Lanza’s attack on the school involved three weapons, a rifle and two 9mm pistols.

UPDATE VIII: Just now, one of my 20-year-old twin sons came by the house to help with the family Christmas tree. The TV was reporting this crime, which was the first he’d heard of it. “Twenty-seven people? What the hell happened?”

“Evil,” I said, and made the darkly sarcastic suggestion that Congress would pass the “Evil Control Act of 2013” to outlaw evil.

Dark sarcasm is just a habit, and perhaps not the best way of expressing my frustration toward idiots (like Alex Wagner of MSNBC) whose reaction to news like this is to share her cheery enthusiasm for new federal gun-control legislation.

What a pathetic soul. Ace of Spades has an excellent contemplation on why pathetic souls are capable of evil:

[A] certain form of intensely narcissistic psychopathy . . . spurs people to kill everyone close to them rather than just . . . suicide. . . .
nutters see themselves heroically, sort of as bigger-than-life agents of mayhem and evil. Now that may sound like a bad thing to you, but it doesn’t sound bad to them: They’ve embraced it. . . .
Yes, Evil is horrible, but these guys are embracing it for the Power of it. Because they are failures and hopelessly inadequate in their own lives, they contrive a fantasy in which they become Dark Heroes — larger than life and big as death — by murdering a lot of people. . . .

Read the whole thing. There was just another press conference in Newtown, and it was reported that there 20 children dead and 6 adult victims at the school, plus the shooter, as well as another victim at an “ancillary” scene, which we may guess was the shooter’s father.

UPDATE IX: Twitchy has a good round-up of tasteless remarks about today’s shooting made on Twitter by various celebrities, among them CNN’s Piers Morgan (who was hashtagging #GunControl) and Michael Moore, about whom my personal regard is just slightly higher than my opinion of Ryan Lanza.

My own previous outburst on Twitter, I actually rather regret, but decided to include it so that I could put it in context: I was sitting here trying to update the news as quickly as I could and, while NBC’s news reporting about the crime was very good, it was being sandwiched in between irrational lectures about gun control from Andrea Mitchell and others.

Focusing on the gun as The Source of Evil is simply absurd, an idea so false it deserves to be ridiculed at every opportunity. And so, after more than an hour of this on MSNBC — “We now interrupt our breaking news for another tendentious lecture about the need for new gun-control laws” — I simply felt an overwhelming urge to mock those useless assholes. Perhaps this wasn’t the appropriate time or venue for such mockery, and I apologize to anyone offended.

Except that fat fool Michael Moore, who can kiss my ass.

Linked at The Lonely Conservative and Victory Girls — thanks.


Category: Connecticut, Crime, Education
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