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Lyndalou

School shooter on autistic spectrum

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:(:crying: That's all.

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It's terrible! They are describing it as a mental illness which it is'nt. Saying all that the media seem to mostly lay the "blame" on his mum as she owned the gun and ammunition and she taught him how to shoot at a young age.I do suppose it does portray ASD in a negative light but this happens all the time in the media.At the moment I don't think its the main focus,its rather that of the gun laws and compassion for the families.

Edited by justine1

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Indeed, the whole thing is awful. They are right to focus on the victims' families, gun laws and society's attitudes towards guns, but the fact that he was on the spectrum is being widely reported and in the aftermath of this event ASD will inevitably be examined further by the media and stigmatised even more than it already is, causing even more difficulties for people with ASD at school, getting employment and integrating into society in general. Especially in schools.

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In many ways the happenings in Connecticut will be difficult for many and there is a danger of reactionary responses rather than reflective ones. The full details have not emerged yet and it will be some time before they do. The immediate response is to profile the perpetrator of these crimes and the reaction was a media response to profile Adam Lanza as a 'loner' and pull the clichés out. As more details emerge the media have found it easier to refer to him now as 'the gunman' and dehumanise him which I believe is also a mistake. it will be interesting to contrast Americas response with that of Denmark and how they responded to Anders Brevik, I anticipate a different cultural reaction, because this latest incident challenges Middle American values.

 

We are now seeing speculation about autism and the fact that his mother withdrew Adam from mainstream environments, but little is known about what followed. I suspect there are many lessons to be learnt but I am not sure if they will be. The reaction is these things shouldn't happen, but they do, that is the nature of the world we live in. The more we try and transpose set values throughout society the more we marginalise individuals and when people are on the fringes of a society constructed in that way they will not feel part of it. As a result I am not surprised unlike America as to the type of community this incident took place in.

 

I suspect the response will be to construct more robust systems to defend values rather than to stand back and understand what is really going on here. We are often trying to develop a culture where families become more and more insular to the point they fracture. Many areas have lost any real notion of what community means and when things go wrong and people are isolated and confused they struggle to find reference points. Suicide rates are on the increase through many societies as individuals search for an exit point, the writing is one the wall but we don't read it. If Adam Lanza had simply taken his own life using his mothers gun no one would have been interested he would have simply been another statistic. I doubt many will see him as one of the victims but if anything he is the one person we should try and understand. We need to reflect what went wrong in his life, the fact he took the lives 26 other individuals is very regrettable and as a parent and a retired teacher and a partner of a teacher working with that age range I feel for those concerned. If we try to understand this through applying label such as 'loner' or 'the gunman' or 'shooter' we miss the point. We are talking about an individual here who struggled to find the right sort of answers in his own life, we need to reflect how do we enable such individual to arrive at a different position in their life where they do not consider this line of action to be their only option.

 

Just a few thoughts.

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What I am understanding from the American ASD people with whom I communicate from time to time is the fact that America is responding to autism is an unfavourable light as there is much literature being produced by various others saying aspies are dangerous and how we must be controlled as one thing is apparent aspie intellect stupifies many who are vociferous in their reaction.

 

Bt last night at the pub quiz another geek a female who I do suspect is also ASD had something on her smart phone where it described the fault for this abominable action lies squarely at the feet of the media in that whoever wants to make their point knows full well the sensationalism and recognition they will get through passed occurrences. And so we have what we have now, the media dissecting every aspect and coming to conclusions or making dangerous suggestions and suggestions that will reach the wrong kind of human who will think what they think regardless of anything an expert on the matter might say.

 

Personally I am inclined to agree with what the article on the smart phone said for I do not like the media perhaps that is well known, but I do hold the media responsible for much of the ill in society, an ill that is just business to them and what they cause is just more business as they control the minds of society in destroying itself. Because you have to agree such things as this does have a detrimental affect on most people, where we are becoming more fearful and negative every day and such negativity might give rise to yet more newsworthy events to feed the media in what it is good at doing.

 

But maybe I am different in that I do not want to know the details of what has happened, for me it is enough that this thing has happened again and it will happen again and again until someone puts a muzzle on the rabid dog that is the media and so tells those that might like to go out in a blaze of twisted glory that what they do, their name anything about them will be unknown to the majority, it will be as if they didn't exist at all !

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Yet another school massacre.....but let us all be clear that the majority of these abominations are not carried out by people with ASD. With all my years of frustration and rage i have never wanted to kill anyone...and nor would i and suspect none of you would too.

I suggest that this outrage has been planned to reinforce Americas want to rid their country of guns and their constitutional right to arm themselves .

Wasn't Lee Harvey Oswald also a "loner" ?

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Oh I don't think the outrage was planned, the outrage is a natural consequence of what has happened again thus proving lessons are never learned and Lancs Lad is correct in what he is saying from my point of view, instead of ousting loners and calling them all sorts of derogatory things we would do better by trying to understand why someone feels the need to do this as nothing will stop aside from either muzzling the media or finding why people do this and take strides to stop it happening in the first place.

 

But society is breaking up, we see it here, those of us with diagnosi and how we are treated, society is fragmenting as we are all assigned little pigeon holes where we can look at each other and see the diagnosi before we see the people.

 

The US second amendment is a complex issue, when it was conceived those that conceived it had the rest of the world and history to draw from where they saw what authority had done to it's populace and given the US was to be a fresh start for many who had escaped various tyrannical regimes, they implemented the right to bear arms to limit authority.

 

Now if it was the US people could trust authority, perhaps they might bend on their right to bear arms, but who trusts authority, I don't through the very nature of humanity and those that seek to control, I do understand them well and so I do understand the fear of authority for not one of us anywhere lives in total freedom, we are all subject to being controlled by others and it is a fact there are certain types of mentalities that actually seek employment where they will have authority over others through their occupation, where these people exist I understand authority is not at all wholesome.

 

But let's look at it another way, arms and munitions is America's biggest industry, they have a massive war machine where people are trained from birth more or less to be militaristic in such things as flag break in schools and saluting the flag, everyone is a sir or a ma'am, they are indoctrinated with a militaristic mind and so expect them to give up their weaponry ?

 

Yes shooting someone is easy and removal of the tool might address some issues, but it will not address the mentality as guns are not the only weapon of mass destruction available for has anyone ever seen what a sword can do in close confines, they can cause more damage than a bullet, that is for sure, then we have bows, crossbows and all manner of nasty hand weapons from history, some that make your blood curdle just to look at them for the human mind is very inventive when it comes to offence.

 

It is as Lancs Lad has said, it is the mentality that has to be addressed, not the tool, we can be a whole lot better than what we are, but what has to be remembered about war in particular, aside from WW2 most wars prior and since have been militaristic trade expeditions where the populace has been educated to how bad such and such is so they authorise and support whatever militaristic action is planned and why,

 

because offence and defence is a business, money is being made.

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All I can say on this topic is "Problem - Reaction - Solution". Let the media create mass hysteria, find somebody to blame (i.e. an AS person) and either find an excuse to remove all arms/weapons etc from the general population so that the authorities can exert extra powers or ensure anyone with AS or ASD disorders are outcasts and cut them out from general society.

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I find the main target of Adam Lanza to be very telling. The media is currently portraying 20 of the victims as innocent children who had little chance in life to do anything wrong, they committed no offence rather they were punished in the ultimate fashion simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. To a very large extent they are correct.

 

In his mind Adam Lanza didn't make a mistake in respect to his targets, if there was any collateral damage it was the adults which got in his way. For my mind the story is not about guns and gun control rather it is about an individual who was possibly left feeling he had no place in the world because he didn't fit a stereotype and his target was the stereotype that is now being pushed by the media of the perfect child. I have an eight year old son and he is far from perfect, he is no angel and the set up school photographs don't really tell you much about. He has his strengths he has his weaknesses just like the rest of us, he is after all an individual and he should be respected as such.

 

If there is a story here it is that individuals like Adam Lanza don't fit the stereotypical view of what a child should be all about in Middle America. People are not allowed to be individualistic if that is their personality rather they are labelled as 'loners' as if they are deficient in some way. A lot of the diagnostic criteria for AS only exists because of a cultural construct as to what is deemed 'normal'. If the culture around Adam Lanza had been more flexible and accepting of individuality possibly this young man could have found a place in the world and wouldn't have taken the awful and wrong decision to take that possibility away from others many as young as 6 and 7. To me his actions strike of an 'if I can't have it you can't mentality', it is selfishness of the highest order. As youngsters we learn behaviour so where did this level of selfishness come from possibly the attitudes of the people around him as he grew up, their selfish belief he had to be like themselves.

 

America has reacted by looking at its gun laws, maybe on reflection it should look at the stereotypical culture which is promoted within large sections of its society typified by middle class suburbia. That phenomenon is not exclusive to the other side of the pond, it exists in our own country. Can we honestly say this type of incident wouldn't happen in the UK, I suspect it is happening in the minds of young people this minute the only difference is they don't have an automatic rifle close at hand, but if they did?

 

I am grateful we do not have a gun culture in the UK but that doesn't mean we should not think about the social culture and stereotypes which are prevalent in this story because we have got plenty of that. I think there is something in this for us all to reflect upon. I just hope in time the media could do the same.

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Certainly the descriptions I read of Adam Lanza in the British press yesterday were very telling....'Weird, loner geek who sinisterly could feel no pain'. It actually hurt reading that. There can be no excuse for what this young man did but to either not even be remembered by your peers or described in this way says it all. He wanted to be remembered and now he will be...for all the wrong reasons. It was also interesting that the same paper chose to show him in a photograth of the schools Tech club in order to demonstrate how weird he was.

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The media and the public have a long way to go before they start to understand the differences associated with people on the spectrum ... I think it will probably improve over time, but it horrifies me the way they strive for the simplest solutions. Life just ain't that simple and it never will be.

 

I guess Adam Lanza must have had a particularly toxic combination of factors and events that resulted in last week's terrible act. When you see the psychological profile of these shooters, they share a lot of risk factors, but so do many people who never go on to commit a violent act or even consider it ... maybe life's loners are more likely to commit this sort of act, but that doesn't mean that every loner is a potential killer, in the same way as not everyone who can kick a ball is going to play like Beckham (sorry, poor analogy).

 

An interesting (and chilling) finding is that most of these shooters have been severely bullied in the past - again, it doesn't make victims into killers, but it does raise questions about the way society deals with bullying (or not).

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Certainly the descriptions I read of Adam Lanza in the British press yesterday were very telling....'Weird, loner geek who sinisterly could feel no pain'. It actually hurt reading that. There can be no excuse for what this young man did but to either not even be remembered by your peers or described in this way says it all. He wanted to be remembered and now he will be...for all the wrong reasons. It was also interesting that the same paper chose to show him in a photograth of the schools Tech club in order to demonstrate how weird he was.

 

You are starting to understand the media's game, for they will allow a sector of society to fall under suspicion as it is in their interest.

 

I don't read newspapers for a very good reason, I will not fund their filth for I worked them out long ago.

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... I don't read newspapers for a very good reason, I will not fund their filth for I worked them out long ago.

They exist for a reason, but it's not "news", it's "olds". Like classical drama.

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Heard the complete opposite recently.

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Compare and contrast Adam Lanza with Elliot Rodger. :(

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