Chicago And Newtown

Of course it's awful that children get killed in Chicago on a more regular basis than they do in Newtown. However, children killing each other from a sort of despair emanating from certain systemic societal failures
can't be exactly the same horror as grown men killing babies all within several minutes during his planned massacre.
The aggregate of dead children per year in Chicago is truly horrible, for one thing, because young men of the intelligence some mass murderers possess intuit from it that human life is not especially precious in all children. Then when these young men become troubled, they decide to be the ones who take the young ones our society loudly hints would be missed the most. So that our youngsters lost in big cities help mark those
who will be someday lost in small, privileged communities.
Of course these killers probably begin to form processes of derangement early in life. It likely takes time for
them to build a solid sense, though, of how they want to integrate their ways of thinking and behaving into
society as a whole. Unnoticed, untreated early developmental derangement signals another societal failure Americans endure.
Apparently at greater and greater cost, we fail to use imprisonment wisely. Community will, power, space, energy, and wealth of material resource come together to make imprisonment possible; but not inexhaustibly  in any society. The power to restrict and seclude should be used judiciously, when it is desperately needed. I always felt we should have pledged to set up great structures of new institutional protections and cautions the moment we knew Polly Klaas had been taken from her family so brazenly by an already convicted sex offender. We didn't make any such pledge. We didn't take any such action. Only now have some of us decided to stop setting aside so much jail space for non-violent offenders.

A serious societal failure in America points to the acceptance of a lack of health care- including mental
health care. We dearly need early intervention mental health care. We obviously quietly nurture grave psychic
pain until some few years after adult onset in the sufferer, we all pay for the  neglect- even those who owe it least.
As for city kids, they are rarely killed en masse by someone who has chosen a rampage in order to express himself, his possible grudges, and his chosen legacy.
People have expressed shock that anyone could even be capable of the sort of carnage against tiny humans we have seen this weekend. The fact this assault seems to have been planned and the tiny ones seem to have been singled out, is truly mind-boggling.
Psychiatrists have seen to it we all know or have heard of manic depressives.
What I would hope to see is a specific diagnosis or set of diagnoses relating to people who seem to be 'rage depressives'.  Some people seem to have manic states regularly suffused with masses of undifferentiated  and
otherwise  energetically suppressed rage. We have read about these people. We have met these people. But we can't diagnose them.  And why are we possibly more enraged than other countries?
This man in Connecticut may have shot his mom simply because she defied him and would give him away. He was hell bent on hell. My fear is that even if he is there now, he may not notice he is.
He went on a killing spree to enjoy himself. For whatever reasons, killing first graders was the thing he had been dying to do, did die to do. He kept shooting because the first shot gave him a high he had to try to repeat. There is no reason to shoot a dead child. But he enjoyed it more than he even thought he would. He
of course knew he wouldn't get this chance again. The way pleasure works, according to the nuns at my high
school in the nineteen sixties, it has to be actively and purposefully pursued with vigor- because unlike happiness, it has a tendency not to last.
Happiness is achieved by exchanging warm feelings with others. Humans have no particular reason to seek what is achieved so naturally.
Once an aggressive person realizes he will not be capable of happiness, who knows how he manages to come to what will give him pleasure instead. Can science manage or predict these bloody desires?
Otherwise at the risk of trivializing any American murders, some of this may come down to
Joan Walsh becoming able to answer her own question.
What hurts me most about Newtown, is knowing we may never ever know who was the last baby to be
killed, and who could ever measure or imagine the loneliness of that child's last moment?