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.
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
Not buying. These parents had the money to have the boy committed to a psych ward, if even for a few days of evaluation. Had they done so, the “law” as it exists would have stopped his purchase of firearms during the background check. The family also funded the son’s lifestyle without controlling him, even though he was known to be a troubled kid who refused to take his meds. His father is neck-deep in creating the dysfunctional culture of lurid violent films and commercialism, violent video-game fantasy worlds (note how the son’s “Retribution” is little morem than a bad script for a video game), and shallow materialist obsessions. There is no evidence that the son received an iota of moral grounding, something even nuts can absorb. The values Elliot Rodger learned from his family instead placed appearances over content, and he took to heart the images of success Hollywood sells (fancy cars, blonde bimbos, artificial good-looks, violence as a cool solution, unearned wealth, humiliation if you don’t have it, self-obsession, envying what others have, etc.). Peter Rodger’s solutions: Continue your own selfish pursuits; dump son’s mother and take up with new woman; pay a therapist to fix the boy; blame others. This apple did not fall far from the tree.
This family had the evidence & the money to house the kid in a private institution & keep him off the streets.
He was a time bomb.
Problems arise when you put the power of the State behind that "mental health professional," one who dared not alienate the parents by pronouncing the kid's problems as so serious that he might need to be institutionalized. To do so would be the end of that steady customer.
The same is true of the therapeutic State. Once the State gains the power to decide who is sane and who is not, "sanity" will be defined by fealty to an unlimited state. It will be Catch-22 everywhere: 'Only sane people can own guns; anybody who wants to own a gun is insane.'
The only "mental health" system with no stake in the disease is one run by charity, a function that used to be performed largely by churches and civic organizations. No charity can afford a customer who does not improve. The trial lawyers destroyed all of that, with the blessing of socialists in black robes.
His family had the resources to commit him to psychiatric care.
His family basically threw him out in the world knowing he had serious problems and simply hoped for the best while giving him the resources to do nothing but stew in his own pity without requiring any job/work on his part.
His family definitely has some serious responsibility for what happened.