Six Degrees of Adam Lanza? aka Where’s My Xanax

Very serious and important people are more shocked and horrified than you are  at what Adam Lanza did because their outrage is official. Their grief is so profound they get paid to bluster about it on live TV.

Forget about gun control. Gun control discussion have reached an
elevated level, which is probably a good thing, even though people are buying guns like the freaks they are and Wayne Lapierre wants a gun in the hand of every child, which is probably a bad thing.

But back to Adam Lanza and mental illness. Serious people are doing serious investigations into his life. His DNA is being investigated. Maybe they can put his genetic material into a hamster and see how it responds in captivity.

Case studies will be conducted. Test subjects will go on the Adam Lanza diet to see how that affects their homicidal desires towards children.

I, for one, will volunteer to play violent video games and watch Hollywood movies all day long, but ONLY if I get paid $10/hour.

But I don’t want to watch the Human Centipede 2. That movie scares me.

Amazingly Adam Lanza didn’t leave any crazy shit around for people to read after he died, and yet this is actually a BAD thing. Maybe because the media has even less to present in their 24/7 attempt to raise your blood pressure.

Anyway, lost in all this is the very probable fact that you are not Adam Lanza.  Your neighbors are not Adam Lanza. Even that psycho at work is not Adam Lanza. You don’t know anybody like Adam Lanza.

Adam Lanza was Adam Lanza. And even Adam Lanza wasn’t ADAM LANZA until that day this month. Human beings aren’t deterministic and society is a complex system, so while you can maybe work backward, you can’t study Adam Lanza’s DNA and then move forward, as if that would mean anything.

If you cloned a dozen Adam Lanzas, or even a million, I bet they all turn out okay. If you copy the exact circumstances in which he lived for twenty years, maybe 1 or 2 out of the million Adam Lanzas makes the same mistake. That’s what I think, anyway.

You won’t see the results of the study that are honest, though, that confirm this. Uninteresting results will be ignored and bogus hysterical results will have those serious and important media people shrieking again.

Why is this bad, besides a failure on the part of the media? Because now the burden of proof is on mentally ill people, or anyone with a history of anything, to demonstrate that they are not the next Adam Lanza.

Instead society should have to prove that there is not something rotten within which makes it conducive to generating the occasional Adam Lanza (hint: maybe it has something to do with the CHEAP AND AVAILABLE PROLIFERATION OF GUNS).

Preempting killing sprees would certainly be a grand thing, but not at the Minority-Report style cost of red flagging hundreds of thousands of people. Isn’t that what the point of that movie was?

Finally, I will repeat what I said on facebook, which is that I believe all attempts to understand Adam Lanza on some kind of logical or moral level is absurd. There is no rational for shooting up a school. No healthy thought process. Adam Lanza woke up that day and 2 +2 = 7. He was crazy, not just “omg you’re wearing that color pants you so crazy” crazy but “your brain is shutting down” crazy. This is not just my idea either. Many intelligent people have written about this recently (Sarah Palin is not one of them).

So turn off the TV and take a deep breath. And sell your guns.