It would be VERY interesting to overlap timelines of when mass school shootings started and when the SCOTUS outlawed prayer. Have no idea what the chart would look like but just curious.

Where was God? Certainly not in the perpetrator´s heart or mind.

CT has an assault gun ban that essentially is the same as the ´original´ federal assault ban. The .223 was legal in the eyes if the state.

We believe the author has hit on a salient point. The leftist Northeast liberal elite despises the ´lower´ classes who favor gun ownership, individual freedom, states´ rights, and the Second Amendment. Where do a lot of these Americans live? In the South...
Shades of 1861!

Did you hear the one about the three guns that walked into a school? Silly me, guns don´t walk into schools any more than a bottle of Jack or case of beer are able to drive a car. See, the libs always want to leave the human factor out and that just isn´t how these things work. Kinda like the days of old when we accused girls of getting themselves pregnant.
We cannot dismiss the human factor.

The politicians sware that advertisements influence voters. Million and million are
spent to influence vot thru visual media.

Why then isn´t this theory applied to the corruption of young people when the entertainment people display explosions, car wrecks, mass murders, beatings, abuse etc.
This theme is on TV, and the movies constantly.

"If mass school shootings like that in Connecticut really are a product of the apparently mad Second Amendment, then why did such shootings only take off in the late 1970s and early 1980s?"

Because that´s when we stopped locking up crazy people started calling them "special"

I don´t need this guy to tell me about a redneck gun culture when it isn´t rednecks perpetrating the most murders.

Lanza did it. Lanza is to blame.

There really are a few people out there capable of evil the rest of us can barely imagine, if at all. And some capable of selfless heroism and sacrifice we can´t conceive either.

That´s the whole of it. It hasn´t changed over human history, nor will it in this life.

It takes a special kind of denial to think we can "help" such monsters and thus "prevent" such horrors. That, and despicable, opportunistic politicians eager to erect yet another enormous, wasteful, parasitic bureaucracy.

Last: the media deserve special attention from Dante for their sub-ghoulish vulturing through this. Very special attention.

Silly article by a Brit who doesn´t know American history. There is a very simple explanation for why this didn´t happen for 2 hundred years and then became relatively commonplace in the 1970s and beyond. For it was in the 1970s that we started emptying the mental institutions and stopped sending young people with severe mental illness to such institutions. We decided they could all be managed in the community...except we saved money by not bothering to set up the community services to manage them. So we left parents like Nancy Lanza to fend for themselves and we changed the laws to make it harder for schools or law enforcement to get a person into a mental hospital...even for a short stay.

If it is not with a firearm, a person bent on taking lives will come up with other means. Getting rid of guns will not end violence.

Obama displays anger and arrogance and throughout his presidency has divided the nation as no other president in recent times.

He should have been a healer not a divider. You have to wonder if the fruits of this failure is at the root of much of the violence we see today.

When asked for my views in the immediate aftermath I said the same as Mr O´Neill although he is far more concise than I was.

Liberals don´t understand that in praising the mediocre, even the faulty, that they are creating potential powder kegs in children, especially adolescent boys already dealing with a bewildering rush of testosterone. When they discover their inevitable failings or when they experience inevitable exclusion from groups, spurned romantic advances and negative feedback in general, they have no emotional rungs on their ladder except the very top one. The fall is often traumatic and painful and in these cases the mind´s survival instinct is denial and displacement which are manifested in neuroses and psychoses with frequent violent fantasies and, sadly, the real thing.

Another great article by Brendan O´Neill, one of the few Brit writers who isn´t afraid to puncture the easy assumptions of the the PC and the Bien-pensants.

I love his online magazine Spiked. Guaranteed to generate new and unauthorized thoughts in your noggin.

The mainstream propaganda machine glamorizes these copy cat killers and saturates our lives with nonstop coverage. Each of these killers has decided to die, and to go out with a Big Bang. Each tries to outdo the previous headline grabber. Prior to the killing, as they are planning their outrage, they get vicarious thrills from the endless media glorification over the years of the other sociopath mass killers.

I agree with the title, but to be accurate, just how many southern rednecks have gone on a shooting spree ?

Southerners are taught guns are for protection and shooting food, not to play with-ever. It´s the rest of the country that tell kids guns are bad, so when they find a hidden gun, they don´t know what to do with it.

It´s more than narcissism.
They took prayer out of school and no one has the fear of G-d anymore.
They stopped the draft, so fatherless youth have no discipline.
Mothers went to work, so daycare raised the kids.
Instant gratification. Every day is Christmas. Why wait for something special ?
Kids don´t know disappointment and rejection because everyone is special.
Maybe it´s because they stopped spanking for temper tantrums.
Just who is in charge in single parent households ? Many times, the kids tell the mother what to do.

Just a couple generations ago kids took shotguns to school so they could go deer/rabbit/squirrel hunting on the way home. Mass shootings were virtually unheard of then. What changed?

I saw a panel on Charlie Rose´s show today who agreed it is TV and Hollywood and computer/video games that glorify murder that have desensitized young people.