and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., didn’t happen in Tracy. But it could have.
Tracy residents know from painful experience that events we sometimes think of as happening to other people in other places can indeed happen here. And even if Tracy had not experienced its own type of tragedy, we’ve seen senseless violence too many times in too many places to consider ourselves immune.
It’s one of the reasons the horror at Sandy Hook strikes deep 3,000 miles away.
Locally, police and school officials insist that there are procedures in place to deal with campus incidents, and that they are reviewed and updated at least four times a year.
But it’s hard to imagine even the best-designed plan could prevent something like the massacre in Newtown, short of turning schools into prisons with armed guards — and if we’re out of options aside from that, we might have already lost the battle for civil society.
The truth is that a certain amount of risk is inherent in a free society, and tragedy cannot always be prevented.
That doesn’t mean we passively accept the massacre of innocent people as part of the American experiment. Quite the opposite.
We must push for change. However, we should not pretend to find an easy answer. If there is one, it is liable to be complex and not to the liking of ideologues.
It must sharpen our focus on public health to help those who suffer from mental illness and to support their families.
It must increase opportunity for young people who too often find the doors to advancement shut.
It must respect the right of Americans to own guns for recreation and personal defense, while conceding that not every type of firearm,
magazine or ammunition is appropriate for civilian use.
And it must take seriously the idea that our popular culture desensitizes us to violence and impairs our empathy toward others, while also acknowledging that individuals are ultimately responsible for such acts of violence.
There is no simple antidote to the type of violence we witnessed a week ago. But we can and must work together to find the proper alchemy to protect our communities, and do as much as we can to keep another Sandy Hook from happening.
Secondly, let's not politicize this heinous crime to use as a pseudo terrorist method to address gun control. This selfish boy with mental challenges is to blame along with his poor parenting, nothing else in the way of method or what means he used can rationalize his spoiled behavior.
Adam's action is a manifestation of recoiled love, a love which may have been adjourned by his mother. The timeline will expose just how much hatred was encoded in him to perpetrate such an ominous felony.
Adam's parents divorced, this left a misunderstanding of self-mother love. With his father abdicating any young child rearing, he was blighted that love could go astray.
Still Adam held out that acceptance from his mother would sustain him, but his failure to actualize in his mother's eyes just compounded his inner self-loathing.
Adam's resentment exploded, he wanted to destroy everything his mother loved, for not loving him. He killed her because she had to go to them, and then he killed all the children that had taken his rightful love from his mother.
Now, America weeps aloud for the innocents lost and the incalculable impact these seraphim could have trumpeted for us as a nation or for all of humanity in their exorable lives.
I will always quietly weep for the loss of my fellow man, yet I feel guilt for the fact that I'm glad Adam Lanza, the coward is dead.
I am a bit embarrassed by your presumptions. Were you Adam's psychiatrist?
Your comment is hyperbolic and intellectually irresponsible.
Do you have a recommendation?
It is a matter of self defense and our rights, just like every other right we have and a matter of protecting our freedoms, and freedom of speech and the violent movies that Hollywood makes their living on and damming the NRA while making them.
This country has its military tentacles in many places around the world, yet it is unable to genuinely mitigate the trafficking that occurs along its southern border.
We know why.