It’s Good That Tradegies Are Sensationalized

I’m happy the Sandy Hook Tradegy is being sensationalized.  I’m not happy for some odd reason such as wanting the shooter to be glorified or wanting these innocent victims to become images of sad heroes.  I’m not concerned with either of those things. 

I’m happy that this incident is being sensationalized because it says that America is in a great spot culturally and politically.  When I heard about this incident, I (probably unfairly) thought about how many countries deal with these type of mass murders events monthly, maybe even weekly.  However, they just play it like regular news.  It’s a common occurrence for them and the reasons are obvious such as political, racial, or religious.  I’m thinking about countries such as, Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, any country with habitual conflict.

These countries offer up clear reasons because these events are systematic for them.  In America, this is simply not the case.  We don’t have common occurrences of politically, religiously, or even mentally motivated killings.  It’s out of the norm here, so when it happens it takes us by shock.  It eclipses everything because we can’t imagine how or why in any manner someone would go to a place and kill random people. 

I know over the next few weeks the media, crimnalisgosts, investigators, etc.. will be pushing theories about the shooter's motive.   Good.  Right now, people are saying things that blame gun control, mental institutions, and eventually his family’s lack of awareness.  It’s probably some of those things.  I wouldn’t doubt that.

However, at the end of the day, it was one man acting alone to commit a terrible crime.  We should never forgot that it was an individual that committed this atrocity.  He had individual motives.  This monster wasn’t created, so much as he was born and maybe ignored. 

While some people reading this will inevitably say that mental health experts missed this man.  He fell through the cracks.  He is an example of the failure of America’s mental system. 

He isn’t.  If we weren’t sensationalizing him, he would have been a failure of the mental health system.  This system does its best to offer individual treatment while at the same time battling the tendency to try and group every into something: ADD, ADHD, bipolar, depression etc.  That’s the worst possible thing for the mental health discipline.  This tradegy is terrible, but let’s take something from it.  Let’s remember that in America (the whole world even) we are all individuals and some individuals are just fucked up.  Trying to group this killer with anyone else is ridiculous.  He is simply his name.  He is not a patient with a disorder.

That’s the hardest realization for me; it’d be a lot easier if I thought that we could stop the next person to perpetrate a tragedy like this.  We can’t because no set pattern creates this.  It reminds me how a particle randomly appears in a total vacuum on occasion.  It shouldn’t happen, but it does.