Why Did Nancy Lanza Love Guns? Probably for the same reasons I did. Until now. | Hacker News Reader

Why Did Nancy Lanza Love Guns? Probably for the same reasons I did. Until now.

slate.com

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Firearm ownership comes with responsibility.

Securing those firearms is a big part of that responsibility.

Ms.Lanza failed to secure her firearms.

People died as a direct result of her irresponsibility.

Pearl Jam had this right in Glorified G's lyrics:

"Don't think, dumb is strength Never shot at a living thing Glorified version of a pellet gun Feels so manly, when armed"

The problem is a lot of people feel that being able to fire a gun validates their masculinity or -in the case of women- their tough image, without first realizing that guns were developed first and foremost to kill other people, not making paper silhouettes go pop at 20 feet.

I've been firing guns since I was... I don't know, 6? I fired my first shotgun at age 10 or so. I was taught guns were hunting weapons, and encouraged from an early age to skin and clean the animals we hunted. It's much easier to appreciate the mess a gunshot makes when you have to dissect the animal to extract the pellets. Starting at certain age I was told to eat whatever I killed, so no more killing animals just because they were within range. Being able to fire a gun stopped feeling like something glamorous and became just what it should be: a useful skill in case I ever needed it.

I guess what I'm trying to say is: take the glamour out of having guns, make them as expensive as they should be through taxation (after all, how many machines capable of killing a man can you need in a household?) and the issue of overarming should fix itself out.

Can't say whether that would fix the mental issues associated with the super individualistic American society though :/

Not strictly true, guns were first developed as a better way to kill things you wanted to make dead at a distance, that could include people or venison. Handguns were expressly made to kill people, you don't hunt with a handgun.

That said when you own a gun you also need to keep it safe, and generally that means locking it up. You don't let your toddler play with your MiG Welding setup and you don't let them play with a gun. Is that a strange concept?

christ. you have all my sympathy. what happened was horrible. the social situation you face is a complete mess. the fractured sense of communities and cultures is a disaster. half the country doesn't trust the other half. and the halves aren't even well defined. there's no common faith and no common ground.

and into all that you have people making their facebook posts. framing their memes. writing their little propaganda articles. sending their links to hn. their own emotional cruise missile for the cause. all from one side or the other. all trying to find the right balance of words to appeal to one side and convert or humiliate or show or whatever the other.

from outside it looks ugly as fuck. i hope you guys get well soon.

I'm sure that some people own guns for irrational reasons. And it is valuable to know her story.

Still, there is one key fact that simplifies the gun control debate to me: 3 times more people died of accidental poisoning last year than gun homicide. The number of people murdered by gun yearly is shockingly low.

To me, that means there are other more important areas for us to focus on. (And btw, I'm not a gun owner).

I think one also has to factor in the psychological costs, though, to citizens that worry about gun violence. I tend to think statistically like you, so I'm not particularly concerned about getting shot. But my mother certainly doesn't think that way, and no amount of showing her evidence is going to cause her not to worry while out about "some maniac" showing up with a gun. And there's also a low-level distrust that pervades society when one does know the statistics and realizes how many people around them on an average day are likely to be packing a machine that can kill merely by being pointed at somebody and a button being pressed. "An armed society is a polite society" seems like a crazy statement, but the kernel of truth it does have is that an armed society is more distrustful of others (less "social") than an unarmed one.

accidental poisoning includes everything from drug overdoses to industrial accidents. We should certainly seek to reduce that, but >10,000 gun homicides is not 'shockingly low' by any stretch of the imagination. when suicides and deaths due to accidental discharge of a firearm are included, the total is about the same as that for accidental poisoning (~30k/y).

Of course people kill and injure themselves (deliberately and accidentally) in other places too, but the plain fact is that the murder rates in places where gun ownership is heavily restricted are much, much lower. ISTM that this imposes a rather hefty cost on the US economy.

All that is true, but still ... medical errors kill 195,000 people per year. Unintentional falls kill 24,792 per year!

So the number of gun homicides is shockingly low! I was shocked yesterday when someone pointed this out to me.

I can't remember the time I started my day out by worrying about whether someone I loved would die that day from an accidental fall. But that's twice as likely to happen as them being murdered with a gun. Shocking.

According to the CDC, 91% of accidental poisoning deaths are from drug use.

That's certainly a problem, and I do think the USA also needs to do something to get its drug problem under control. But for the purposes of this discussion, drug users overdosing and gun violence isn't exactly an apples-to-apples comparison.

From my reading, it sounds like the author was more in love with the idea of guns than guns themselves.

Or with how guns could be used as props around which she could construct a new self-image for herself:

I fell in love with guns from the first shot. It’s hard to explain what it was that did it... That I, a historically scrawny, weak nerd who’d been the prey to all sorts of danger, could now be the danger...

Guns seemed the pinnacle of virility, and the ultimate way for me to be a badass woman—a tough girl in a man’s world, just a hair shy of being an actual man.

(Which, in her defense, is the same thing a lot of male gun owners get out of them. They're not shooting because they love shooting, they're shooting because they love the image of themselves that holding a gun plants in their head.)

And that's one of the great problems with the entire debate from both sides; the mythology of the gun often overshadows the utility of the gun.

From the gun control side, there's often a fundamental misunderstanding of the operation of firearms which breeds emotional fear rather than intellectual caution. On the gun rights side, there's often a romanticism about the firearm that's just as emotional and absent the view of cold rationality.

I could not agree more. Great read.

Apart from all the problems Adam Lanza had, and the fact he was, I'm sure, drugged up on a cocktail of psychotropics. Can we stop pretending that the gun killed these people and start acknowledging it was a person who killed these people. Maybe, just maybe, if Nancy was a better parent, and her son wasn't cast away into a land of prescription pills, this would have never happened. We don't need to abandon the second amendment - it's there for a reason - what we need to do is start being better parents, and better individuals to one another.

Disclaimer: I don't own a gun, nor do I want to.

Blaming medication is as facile as blaming guns in general for violence. I've taken a lot of prescription psychotropic medicine (as well as lot of proscription medication, IYSWIM), and I've never felt the urge to launch a homicidal attack on anyone.

What we need is a multifaceted approach to the problem; better and more accessible treatment regimes for the mentally ill; better protocols for restraining the dangerous without scrapping their rights; better tracking of firearms and ammunition (eg NanoTags - http://www.nssf.org/share/legal/docs/AFTEVol38No1KrivostaNan...) and better regulation of gun ownership in order to achieve the goal of a well-regulated militia as stated in the 2nd Amendment. I'm not in favor of banning guns, but I think licensure, recertification, and insurance should all be part of responsible gun ownership.

Apparently this Lanza woman was convinced of an imminent economic collapse and presumably thought her reportedly-Autistic son would be in danger in any resultant breakdown of society, so she taught him to shoot. Her misapprehensions about the danger to her own and her son's life imposed a horrendous cost on her community. Beside that, the cost of insurance is negligible.

Can we please stop pretending "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" is anything but the most specious of oversimplifactions?

Yes, a person killed all these people. But he wouldn't have been able to if he didn't have easy access to firearms and a large cache of ammunition. Everything else that can be said on the subject of what would or would not have prevented this is speculation that is, at best, contingent on a large number of factors about which none of us can possibly know enough to make anything but the most tentative of suggestions.

But it's absolutely a cut and dry truth that it would not have been possible for him to do this if he (he specifically) had not had access to the kinds of weapons necessary to enable someone to commit these kinds of murders.

Not looking to get into a whole thing here, but...

> he wouldn't have been able to if he didn't have easy access to firearms and a large cache of ammunition.

There's no possible way you can know that. Guns are certainly more accessible than, say, making a pipe bomb, but definitely less accessible than knives. Reference that story floating around the internet the past few days of some guy stabbing 22 kids in China. Not to mention the fact that you also have no knowledge of how capable he was of illegally obtaining the firearms and ammunition from other sources.

Zero of those 22 kids in China died.

I have read about that one. There's a significant difference in verbs between the two stories. In one sentence it's "stabbed", in the other it's "killed".

And only seven of them needed to be taken to the hospital.

But you probably didn't read about the other knife/axe/hammer attacks in China over the last few years, some of which did kill a lot of people:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_attacks_in_China_%282010...

(via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers:_School... ).

We don't need to abandon the second amendment - it's there for a reason - what we need to do is start being better parents, and better individuals to one another.

Well said. My first gun was purchased for me (by my maternal grandfather) before I was born and I've owned guns and shot guns my entire life. And ya know what? I've never felt any temptation to go on a homicidal shooting binge. BUT... my father took me out and taught me to shoot when I was about 9 or so, and a big part of the "shooting lesson" was drilling into my head a notion of respect for human life, the importance of firearms safety and a mindset that one should never pull a gun on someone unless they are threatening you and you intend to kill them.

I know it's very PC to blame guns right now, but it's very short-sighted to ignore the impact of parenting, a culture that glamorizes violence (and gun violence in particular), the state of mental health care, and other factors.

Do we have evidence at this point that Ms Lanza wasn't "a good parent" (aside from some apparent negligence regarding keeping her guns stored well)? Or that her son was "cast away into a land of prescription pills"?

Given the scenario, I was extrapolating, just as everyone else has with this senseless act, but it has been reported that he was on medication in another Slate article. And yes, not locking up your weapons is grounds for calling someone a bad parent, as is not teaching your child that under NO circumstances should you ever feel taking another persons life is a valid solution to a problem.

I'm just tired of all the rhetoric.. as everyone pretends that by getting rid of all the guns we would effectively end all the violence.

... and be better gun owners. Lock your guns.

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