Wanton killings and mental illness

Dec 18, 2012 Editorial

The news media were all abuzz with reports of a shooting in a small community in Connecticut. A 20-year-old, who was said to be a victim of Asperger’s Syndrome, took a gun to his mother, twenty children all under seven and six adults.
Asperger’s Syndrome is considered a mild form of autism, which in itself is a disorder that affects children in many different ways. Autistic children have certain learning disabilities although some of them are near wizards in certain fields. They have been known to be excellent mathematicians, excellent musicians—in short they are not our mainstream individuals.
In this case the shooter was classified as someone more likely to be a victim than a violent and aggressive person. So it just goes to show that no stereotype can work here.
People talk about the bond between mother and her son. They identified her as a woman who gave up her job to home tutor her son, having recognized that he had a disability although those who knew him from his short stay at school contended that he was bright but that he had a social deficiency.
However, the real issue is about what would trigger a person to kill a parent then go on a rampage at a school that he once attended. What could it be in the mind of the person?
This is not the first shooting in a crowded area, nor is it the first mass shooting in the global community. With the proliferation of guns there are bound to be cases of people discharging their weapons at any source that annoys them. There was the mass shooting in a place called Columbine in the United States. Also in that country there were shootings in shopping malls, schools and even at military bases.
There have been similar mass shooting in other countries. Not so long ago a man visited an island on which many children and their parents had gone on a tour. Like a hunter of wild animals, this man killed more than seventy people.
There is a school of thought that some of these are copycat behavior in the same manner people who are suicidal would mimic a report of a suicide. When Saddam Hussein was hanged and a video of that hanging made public, at least five children mimicked the hanging and died.
This brings us to the point where we need to ask if we could protect our society from that kind of killing. Four years ago, Guyana had its share of mass shootings. A gunman led some children into a community at Lusignan, East Coast Demerara, and killed more than a dozen people, some of them in their beds. This could not have been copycat behavior but it was certainly madness at its most brutal.
The nation has seen wanton killings but not in this volume until then. There were people who were gunned down without a chance during robberies; there were people who were shot out of hand because they offended someone or a group, and there were those who were shot and killed in a bout of jealousy.
Today, some people feel that knowing that Guyanese love to copy everything that is despicable from the outer world, there could be in this country, the kind of madness that broke out in this Connecticut school last Friday. Yet this seems so farfetched given that the family structure, while not as strong as it once was, is still strong in this country.
Further, no matter how we try to make things appear bad in this country the extent of mental illness is not what it is in those other countries. Although, when we take a look at some of the murders committed within the country we cannot help but wonder at how some of us perceive human life.
Incidents like the recent shooting highlight the need for psychiatrists in our society. We have less than a handful of these people who are known to deal with the mentally ill.

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