Who or what is to blame?

Posted on the blog “The Vanishing American”

Oddly, there were two mass slayings in the news today, one of them at a school in Germany and another in Alabama, where 11 died.
I can only offer sympathies and prayers for the bereaved surviving family members and friends.

After such incidents, there is always the soul-searching in the media, with endless questions about ‘why’ the killer did what he did, as if any explanation really suffices. Inevitably, there are likely to be calls for stricter gun controls, although the German incident seems to undermine the liberal idea that strict gun laws prevent such occurrences. But nonetheless, there will be laments about the ease with which Americans can obtain guns, and there will be blanket condemnations of ‘society’ and its guilt in incidents like this. There is always disparaging talk about the South or heartland America in general, and its ‘gun culture’, as if that is the problem rather than simply human evil.

Why is it that so many people today have a problem identifying evil? If somebody kills most of their own family members, as the Alabama shooter did, is that act not evil? The German shooter apparently targeted mostly girls. Nowadays, what with feminism and with even many conservatives regarding women as more or less the same as men, it is not particularly seen as cowardly to target women or girls, though the code of chivalry would see it as such.

Most of all, though, incidents like these mass slayings always provoke more discussion of ‘mental illness’, as it is accepted by almost 100 percent of society that anyone who commits such crimes is automatically ‘sick’ or a victim of a mental disorder. Again, this obscures questions of good and evil, and individual responsibility.

That problem was also evident in the story I blogged on the other day, about the Chinese immigrant in Canada who savagely killed a Canadian bus passenger, in a particularly gruesome fashion.

On the discussion thread following that blog entry, reader and commenter Fed Up Canuck posted this link to the blog of Canadian radio commentator Charles Adler, who wrote about the court decision: Canada – Guilty of Gullibility in the First Degree.

Yes, it’s been a bit of a rough week. Not nearly as rough for me, as for the family of Tim McLean. But one of the reasons I sounded a bit rough yesterday, was because I was trying as hard as possible to be restrained, out of respect for the event that was fresh and raw. The event being a judge rendering a verdict of not guilty of criminal responsibility, in the case of the beheading of a young Canadian named Tim McLean. To me, it felt like he had just laid down a guilty verdict on all of us.

The Canadian people found guilty of allowing an elite group of experts, who do business in the legal system, telling us what is right and what is wrong.

The Canadian people found guilty for allowing themselves to believe that confining a mentally ill person for life is the equivalent of condemning all people suffering from any kind of mental illness.

The Canadian people found guilty for supporting a public school system where REASON is not taught and so vile arguments are presented in courts of law, and courts of public opinion go unchallenged by many members of the public who should know better, but have never been given the tools by an education system because it’s more about indoctrination than education.

The Canadian people have been found guilty for allowing their country to be stolen from them by the jackals of political correctness and moral equivalence and baffle gab.”

Adler’s commentary is sound, and it applies to America almost as much as Canada, and most of those who left comments agreed with him and shared his outrage. However there are a few typically obnoxious and piously self-righteous liberals who leave typically nasty comments.

Like this commenter:

Brilliant Charles. Do as the US does. Shoot the guy on site. Lovely. Vigilante justice. Won’t be accused of being ‘elite’ then! Why don’t you move to the states if you find their style of justice so soothing to your scared self. You can take comfort in the fact that they imprison more people than any other country in the world, yet still have the worst crime rates.”

Somehow America has the reputation of being the most crime-ridden country in the world, and few people challenge that assertion which is frequently made by liberals on forums and blogs and in the old media. However, even considering that liberals are disingenuously spreading false ideas, the fact is that high-profile mass slayings, like that in Alabama today, further cements the liberal (and foreign) image of America as a dangerous and violent country where (mostly White) psychotics with guns run amok on a regular basis.

It seems, too, that liberals and foreigners lambaste our American justice system, in which they believe we carry out draconian, inhuman punishments on the poor criminals. The fact is, we in America are quickly becoming as liberal as Canada and Europe, yet the leftists have succeeded in portraying us as this land with a harsh and brutal justice system. Perhaps if we were, we would have less crime.

But it is paradoxical that they think we are such a barbaric society with criminals running loose, yet at the same time we are too harsh on our criminals. It would seem the ideas rather contradict each other.

But a few terse comments on the Adler article linked above are the most dead-on, such as this one:

I HAVE NEVER UNDERSTOOD THE TIME, THE RUSH, THE UNDERSTANDING AND THE SOLIDARITY GIVEN TO THE CRIMINAL RATHER THAN TO THE VICTIM.

Agreed!

How twisted, really, to defend a murderer and cannibal, and reserve all one’s anger for the justice system, or for ‘evil Americans’ who actually punish the occasional criminal once in a while.

It has to be repeated, though, that liberals’ famous sympathy for criminals is markedly diminished when the criminal is a White male, especially a White male from the South. The liberals do not get out their hankies for the White perpetrators. One of the distinguishing marks of the liberal/leftist is his or her sympathy and solidarity with criminals, though mostly when the criminal is of an official victim group. Li gets double points: he is nonwhite, and an immigrant. If the victim were nonwhite and the perpetrator White, you can bet there would be no sympathy given by the usual suspects. There would be no crocodile tears shed and no righteous denunciation of the cruel legal system. Political correctness discriminates.

When non-whites kill numbers of people, like Colin Ferguson on the commuter train in New York, excuses fly, such as the defense’s ‘black rage’ defense: having been a victim of racism, Ferguson was full of rage towards Whites, and also Asians.

But the time-honored defense, at least for the last half-century or more, is ‘the accused is said to have a history of mental illness.’ And everybody knows that murderers are, by definition, ‘sick’.

The following comment is right to the point:

Psychiatry is about as scientific as astrology, there’s more substance in snake oil. Wake up people.”

I believe it was Nobel-winning scientist Richard Feynman who said it was akin to witch-doctoring, and it was not a science.

I think the love affair with psychiatry and psychology is at the heart of a lot of what is wrong with our ‘justice system’ as well as with much of our society. Psychiatry and psychology pass as ‘sciences’ in our society, despite their slippery, subjective nature. And despite their imprecise and subjective, touchy-feely nature, they are allowed an enormous amount of influence in our justice system. Adler points out in his piece that the only witnesses in the Li trial were two psychiatrists:

In the so-called trial held in a Canadian court room, a trial to determine whether the defendant was guilty or not guilty of murdering Tim McLean, do you know how many witnesses were called? Two. Both of them psychiatrists, who both agreed that the defendant was not criminally responsible because he was ill. None of the testimony was challenged by the Prosecution because the Prosecution agreed with the Defense on everything of substance and there was no point in challenging testimony they agreed with. So who was representing the victim’s family and the family known as the Canadian people? Were there eyewitnesses to the crime? Dozens of them. The passengers and the bus driver. Why weren’t any of them called? The so-called witnesses who were called, weren’t witnesses of anything. They were two doctors who talked to the accused, who under medication told a story of God and voices. We have no evidence that he is telling the truth, but we are told that he is a sick man, obviously a sick man. Jefferey Dahmer was a sick man. Charles Manson was a sick man. Paul Bernardo was a sick man. Because the man who killed Tim McLean and presumably ate his victim’s eyeballs – because he was sick and is sick – the rest of us are forced to be sickened by the notion that he is saved from a permanent incarceration by his sickness, which the witnesses say can be medicated away.”

We have seen Li escape just punishment for his heinous crime, based on the idea that he was a ‘sick’ man and not a bad man. I have a feeling that we won’t hear such sympathy for today’s shooters; they were just White males.

At least they will not be tried in our compromised court systems, because they died before being arrested.

But we will hear about their supposed ‘sicknesses’ and we will hear more liberal hand-wringing about how the ‘mental health system’ has to identify and treat such people before they act out. How we are to reconcile that with our ideas of civil rights, due process, etc., is yet to be determined. However I am expecting to hear, as the stories come out, that these shooters may already have been medicated with psychiatric drugs, possibly anti-depressants. It seems that a disturbing number of these incidents involve people on such medications, all in the name of treating their sicknesses and making them better.

We do place a great deal of blind faith in our systems of psychology and psychiatry, despite their rather poor record of identifying, predicting, curing or effectively treating violence-prone people. This is something that needs to be questioned and scrutinized. We have largely abandoned the old Christian ideas of right and wrong, good and evil, and human responsibility which underpin our system of laws. The new religions of psychiatry and psychology are essentially incompatible with our system of justice. Accordingly, we need to re-examine our beliefs and determine whether we can reconcile the basically conflicting systems of thought.