Posted on 05/28/2014 2:30:51 AM PDT by markomalley
First Elliot Rodger murdered his three roommates with a knife, hammer and machete. Then he shot eight people, three of them fatally, and tried to run over several others in his car.
After the bodies were taken away, everyone on television agreed that it was the fault of the guns.
Rodger had been in therapy since he was eight and was seeing therapists every day in high school. He had a history of violent threats and psychical assaults and the police had already gotten involved. He was on multiple prescription medications and had therapists whom he alerted to his plans by sending them his manifesto.
A therapist reacted by notifying his mother who drove out personally. By then even more people were dead.
In a country where a little boy with a pop tart chewed in the shape of a gun triggers immediate action, the professionals who cashed in on the killer’s wealthy family were in no hurry to call the police. One even reassured his mother while the shootings were going on that it wasn’t him.
So it was obviously the fault of the guns… which he bought with $5,000 from his family. The BMW he used to commit some of the attacks was given to him by his mother.
Jenni Rodger, his British aunt, blamed America and guns for her nephew’s massacre. “What kind of a society allows this? How can this be allowed to happen? I want to appeal to Americans to do something about this horrific problem.”
Somehow the parenting failure of her brother is now the fault of an entire foreign country.
Rodger’s father issued a statement through his lawyer in support of gun control and “staunchly against guns.” It might have been more useful if instead of opposing a category of manual instruments; Peter Rodger had spent more time dealing with his son’s problems.
Guns did not kill six people. His son did.
When a teenager stabbed twenty people at a Pittsburgh-area high school there were no easy answers about gun control to take refuge in. If Rodger had stuck to his knife, hammer and machete, relatives who coddled him all these years wouldn’t be able to shift the blame. They wouldn’t be able to politicize the crime and snip their own involvement out of the picture.
Elliot Rodger’s parents, communicating through a lawyer and a talent agent, find it convenient to put up another layer of abstraction between themselves and the actions of their son. And the easiest way to do that is to transform it into a widespread social problem. The more that the smiling people on television talk about gun control, the less likely they are to talk about them.
Expanding an individual act into a social problem manufactures a collective responsibility. The killer’s family has successfully shifted their responsibility to people who live a thousand miles away. Now the villains are the 5 million members of the NRA who are unwilling to give up their constitutional rights because Elliot Rodger’s family failed at their single most important job.
Why is a gun owner in North Carolina more responsible for the Isla Vista killings than Peter Rodger? Does Peter Rodger’s staunch opposition to guns free him from responsibility while dumping it on the majority of Americans who believe in the Bill of Rights?
Elliot Rodger was not a social problem. He was not a gun culture. He was not a national anything. He was an individual and individuals bear responsibility for their own actions.
The left is expert at removing responsibility from individuals and assigning it to the culture at large. Every murder is a failure of society. And society fails every murderer, they insist. We are all murderers because we didn’t vote for the right politicians who would have outlawed guns.
The “You didn’t build that” society is also the “You didn’t do that” society. The flip side of Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama’s collectivist rhetoric is that just as no one invents the airplane, creates a company or writes the Great American Novel on their own, no one kills six people on their own. If you killed six people, it’s because of the Second Amendment. If you wanted to kill sorority girls, it’s because of Seth Rogen movies. If you’re a half-Asian who beat and stabbed your Asian roommates to death, it’s because of white (or half-white) supremacism.
Everyone but the killer is responsible for his shooting spree. The problem is tackled with public awareness hashtags and zero tolerance legislation that hurts millions of random people.
America’s gun owners, like its machete and hammer owners, did not kill anyone. Every day the vast majority of gun owners somehow manage to get through the day without a killing spree. Their tools don’t have minds of their own. The gun culture that liberals talk about does not sneak in through their windows at night and urge them to shoot up the neighborhood.
And it was the good guys with guns the left sneers at who stopped Elliot Rodger’s killing spree.
We aren’t rethinking the First Amendment because of Rodger’s YouTube videos and manifesto. Why are we supposed to rethink the Second Amendment every time some psycho includes guns in his killing spree? The problem was not with Rodger’s computer, his smartphone, his hammer, his machete or his handguns. They were only the tools that he used. The problem was with him.
Elliot Rodger’s family doesn’t want to deal with their own choices. Elliot Rodger certainly did not want to deal with his. However we won’t achieve a moral society through collective guilt, but through individual responsibility.
A better country doesn’t begin with banning guns, but with holding accountable those who kill.
Even while liberals were puffing out their chests over gun control, the Supreme Court’s liberal justices stepped in to save Freddie Hall who kidnapped, raped and murdered a pregnant woman.
That was in 1978. A decade earlier he had gone to jail for raping another woman and gouging out her eyes so that she wouldn’t be able to identify him.
Like some of the other monsters on death row, Hall decided to plead retarded. His IQ scores dropped. After a long series of appeals, the Supreme Court finally decided that executing him would be unconstitutional.
“Florida’s law contravenes our Nation’s commitment to dignity and its duty to teach human decency as the mark of a civilized world,” Justice Kennedy wrote, speaking for the majority.
America was at its best in decency when it held men accountable for their actions. Liberals like Kennedy instead seek every possible pretext for protecting killers from their choices. We can restore decency by rejecting social problems and instead embracing individual responsibility.
Our choice is between a society of individual responsibility where everyone can be trusted to own a gun and a society of collectivist irresponsibles where no one can be trusted to own a gun.
His real mother lives in Malaysia, I’ve read. The woman who tried to “run to the rescue” was his stepmother. Any discussion anywhere of the problems of divorce? And the alienation it brings to children?
And the child molesters want to kill more babies. Where is the outrage?
Good article-thanks for posting it. I have some “ friends” who can benefit from reading it.
Good read! I recommend everyone share this in whatever way they can.
no mention of the violent video games and violent Hollywood “entertainment” culture that have been the obsession of several recent mass murderers
Elliot Rodger was “American Psycho” in his mind
what a charming entertaining movie
Jenni Rodger, his British aunt, blamed America and guns for her nephew’s massacre. “What kind of a society allows this? How can this be allowed to happen? I want to appeal to Americans to do something about this horrific problem.”
Somehow the parenting failure of her brother is now the fault of an entire foreign country.
I'm going to have to jump in here and defend the parents. It looks like they were aware there was a problem, and have been trying to do something about it since Elliott was 8 years old. Their hands were tied, though, by a mental health system that is almost powerless to actually treat people.
His aunt was right, but not in the way she thinks. Guns are not the problem. The broken mental healthcare system is. Once upon a time, dangerous mentally ill people could be confined to institutions and prevented from causing harm to anyone. A sick child such as Elliott, in another day and age, would have been permanently hospitalized. But at some point, liberals (acting through the ACLU, IIRC) decided that keeping mentally ill people confined to hospitals violated their rights since it amounted to imprisonment without a trial. So the mental hospitals were emptied, and sick people are no longer confined.
In most cases, the mentally ill are on the streets, dirty, barely surviving, not really a danger to anyone except themselves. They are called "the homeless" and liberals love them because they view the homeless as symbols of the failures of capitalism. In a handful of cases, the person who should have been confined is a violent psychopath and hurts a lot of people. Liberals seem to love them, too, because they give liberals a symbol of everything that is wrong with freedom.
Bookmark.
These anti-gun reactions remind me of Russia.
Why is everything so run-down there?
Why do even new buildings quickly become blighted?
Because of collectivism.
When something belongs to everyone it really belongs to no one.
When something is everyone’s responsibility it’s really no one’s responsibility.
That’s how human beings work.
So, it’s not daddy’s fault for not having his disturbed son committed or not paying enough attention to him to realize he’s truly disturbed. No.
It’s my fault! Because I’m in the NRA and I own guns! Yeah! It’s my fault! That’s the ticket...
Bump.
Divorce is devastating to children. All this crap about “they are resilient, they will be fine” is a line of complete garbage. This guy’s dad moved his mom and him out and moved a sex partner in.
I blame the dad.
Same with the kid in Sandy Hook. Dad couldn’t be a man and help his sick son, he had to go drown his sorrows with a new sex partner and let mom cope somehow.
I blame the dad.
At the site, someone commented on his having been in therapy since he was 8... essentially asking what 8 year old has problems that require therapy?! Eight year olds need to feel loved and secure, and if they don’t, then maybe the family/parents need a gut check as to their part in the problem.
So barring his being a born sociopath, if there is even such a thing - the sad, honest truth is, this was a young man with serious problems that began a long time ago, at home : /
And even more profoundly, for all of us, the Left remains the party of nothing bad that someone does, is ever their own darn fault : \
May God keep watch FRiend.
Tatt
Some children are born mentally ill, and the signs are there long before age 8. This is not a matter that can be fixed by providing a sense of love and security to the child--their brain is physically defective. Even though violent psychopathy is not as obvious as, say, delusional schizophrenia, it is just as real. A big difference is that parents of violent psychopaths are blamed for their child's illness, while parents of schizophrenics are not.
If Elliot Rodger was that mentally ill, then why did the parents pawn him off on society by having him move to Santa Barbara and live independently from any medical supervision?
According to Elliot’s manifesto the parents were not aware that he was no longer going to school.
No the parents wanted Elliot out of sight and out of mind. The parents did not care if he was crazy. They were not going to be the ones to have him committed to a mental institution.
“Some children are born mentally ill, and the signs are there long before age 8.”
Parents that are too busy or cant be bothered to raise their children might resort to “Therapy” to address behavioral problems. That is an expensive option not available to most people, and “therapy” can make problems worse by making the kid feel defective. We dont know if this is the case here or why the kid was being treated at all.
Also the media-driven idea that you are a loser if you are not having sex, still a virgin at 20.
Maybe he still would gone on a rampage. He was disturbed when he was a young child.
There’s a Washington Post film critic, a woman, who is getting hammered for suggesting American movies have played a part in violence among young men. I agree with her!
And who even knows if he was “a virgin”? He could also, along with his other obvious flaws, be a liar.
If true, (and I am not doubting you FRiend - more my own lack of statistical information), then it is even more reason for the parents to take responsibility, and I cannot help but to think that sending him off to college with a BMW is an imprudent course of action!
I remember seeing another quote somewhere, from the same aunt possibly? that she was NOT surprised, that he had “always been a troubled child” : /
Regardless, the point from the article stands, that the fault was not the guns - that it was born of a sick mind, and he would have and DID use any means to exact his revenge upon his perceived tormenters...
It is so very sad, for all of us, that the Left only mourns those who serve their needs : | The victims of this very similar attacker, in the same area, received no ongoing media attention... http://wc.arizona.edu/papers/94/108/01_4_m.html Even the commentary for this attack is completely different.
“”Some Isla Vista residents said that nothing could have prevented this disaster.
“You can’t instigate programs to prevent this,” Podosek said. “You can’t protect yourself from something like this. It is so random.”
But several students resented the connection between alcohol-fueled parties and a lone young man who appeared to be an intent on harming people.
“This was an act of one crazy person,” said Brandon Brooks, a 19-year-old sophomore on the balcony in front of his apartment while looking down at the accident scene. “This wasn’t a riot at an out-of-control party. It was some idiot going out of control down a street.””
http://www.murderpedia.org/male.A/a/attias-david.htm
We have an uphill battle indeed here Friend : \
Tatt
Quite true. Just another salient point ignored in favor of the leftist agenda. Not to mention a convenient scapegoat, to shift the blame from where it belongs: the individual who committed the acts and the family that raised him.
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