It's not about being "crazy." The Connecticut shooting did not happen in a mental-health vacuum.

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Well, here it comes... as we knew it would.

The connecticut school killer, Adam Lanza, was insane:

He was dark and disturbed, a deeply troubled boy from a wealthy family who unnerved his neighbors and classmates.

Mass murderer Adam Lanza, 20, was a ticking time bomb, people who knew him told the Daily News. 

"This was a deeply disturbed kid," a family insider told the Daily News. "He certainly had major issues. He was subject to outbursts from what I recall." 

Lanza, who friends and officials said suffered from Asperger's syndrome or a personality disorder, had a tortured mind.

This may all be true, but it's also the way America in general and right-wing gun nuts and their various supporters and enablers in particular refuse to take any responsibility for violent crime, especially gun crime.

It's not the guns, it's never the guns, it's the crazy guy -- this is the standard refrain. And if we all had guns, we'd be able to stop the crazy guys with guns -- this is what inevitably follows.

Whether it's Lanza or Jared Lee Loughner or James Holmes or Jacob Roberts, just four of the most recent perpetrators, it's about the craziness, not about the culture of violence and gun obsession that allowed them to commit their heinous acts. This is what conservatives tell us all the time, refusing to address any deeper socio-political problem, and it's how they control the narrative, with willing media often playing right along. And if you dare talk about the problem, and the need for gun control, as for example Bob Costas did recently in the wake of the murder-suicide in Kansas City, you're accused of politicizing a tragedy, and worse.

As I wrote last night, though, about the Connecticut shooting:

This was not an isolated incident. This was not some one-off committed by a lone psychopath with no connection to anything else going on in society. No, this was yet another horrifically violent act, mass murder committed with guns, in a violent and gun-obsessed culture that refuses that deal with its own violent obsessions and tendencies.

This was worse than anything I can remember, including Columbine, yet it was also more of the same. 

Associated with this is the problem of mental illnesss generally, which isn't taken seriously enough and certainly isn't addressed in meaningful enough ways by society at large. (And using words like "crazy" doesn't help, I know.) Again, I'm not saying these people don't suffer from significant mental-health problems. Most of them surely do, though I would note that many supposedly "sane" people have also committed horrendous acts.

But whether the person in question is "crazy" or not, the more fundamental issue here is that America is a violent, gun-obsessed country and that it's too easy to get hold of guns.

And don't fucking tell me that if it weren't for guns these people would find other ways to harm people and so it doesn't make sense to ban guns. Because the simple fact is, not all weapons are the same. If this guy had had just a knife, he wouldn't have been able to commit anywhere near this level of violence, and there wouldn't be nearly as many people -- as many children -- dead. 

Same in Arizona, same in Colorado, same everywhere. Sure, such massive violence can be committed with, say, poison gas, but we ban that, don't we? 

And yet in America guns are everywhere and guns are glorified, and people keep getting killed with them -- both by people with obvious mental-health problems, even if often untreated, and by people who seem fine. 

If you don't see this, and you don't think something needs to be done about it, you're just too fucking stupid to have an opinion that should be taken seriously.

And if there's one silver lining in this whole horrible tragedy in Connecticut, it's that maybe, just maybe, simply as a result of the scale of the horror, we'll finally isolate the gun nuts on the right and have a sensible discussion about guns, gun control, and gun-obsessed America -- and that maybe, just maybe, something meaningful will actually be done to change things for the better.