And it's not just who you think...
(c) by Tom King
In the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, the paranoid schizo-phrenics are hitting the Internet with increasingly bizarre government conspiracy theories. But they aren't the only mentally unstable folk who are hovering around this story like so many pirahna.
The conspiracy guys will tell you that the story of Sandy Hook was inconsistent. It kept changing throughout the day. They pluck "facts" out of thin air and present them as evidence. They spin speculation and present it as solid reasoning. They harass witnesses, call them liars and even threaten them. Sadly, it's one of the hazards that goes along with free speech. Free speech applies to the mentally unstable as well as rational folks. I remember sitting in a Wendy's in Cleburne, Texas listening to a guy talking to himself about government conspiracies and Waco. This was during the Branch Davidian hostage crisis and he was on his way to Waco to join the Davidians apparently. I think he was the guy that tried to climb through the window to join them. And he wasn't the only mentally unstable individual drawn to the scene of that tragedy. They came from everywhere like flies to crap.
The fact that the news reports at Sandy Hook changed throughout the day of the tragedy is better proof than anything that the story was developing just like a thousand instant news stories throughout the history of television. The TV reporter's need to get in front of the camera earliest with any scrap of information works against them in the accuracy department. I'd doubt the story more if the stories were consistent from network to network, from reporter to reporter or from moment to moment. Reporters grab any confused report and throw it up on the chance it might be true. A fabricated story would be more consistent. I'm not saying the media wasn't trying to use the incident to tell a story. They obviously were, but they were making up that storyline as they went. You can bet, for instance, that virtually every reporter had a producer checking the NRA roles looking for Adam Lanza's name. They would have dearly loved to portray him as a card-carrying gun nut. They practically drooled over his mother's being a gun enthusiast.
But don't the confuse mutual shared interest between media and the administration (in this case to promote gun control) with a conspiracy. The 9/11 truthers did that and looked stupid for it The birthers did and discredited other conservatives in the process and the, shall we call them, "Hookers?" are doing it as well. I suppose there's a place for articulate paranoid schizophrenics on the web. I remember well how they flocked to Waco, trying to get into the middle of that mess and prattled on for years about conspiracies there. The Oklahoma City bombing was timed to "commemorate" the Waco disaster which should give you some clue as to the mental stability of conspiracy theorists.
Waco was a badly botched government operation, no doubt. It was driven by the need to look good for the media and run by people who did not understand what a deranged person would do when they came after David Koresh and his people. David, (aka Vernon Howell III) went to my church. The church recognized him as a dangerous, deranged person and we booted him before he could damage the kind of emotionally fragile and mentally disturbed he burned alive in that compound along with him. Anyone who knew him, at least anyone who wasn't twisted all out of shape by his shared delusions, would have recognized that.
The problem is that the Government does a poor job of "handling" people with mental illness. For the same reason that people with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder should never become psycho-therapists, government does a poor job of dealing with mental illness. It either boxes them all up, destroys them or turns the all loose. This is because government service attracts people with OCD; people who like to put stuff in little boxes (including people). Not everybody in government is OCD, but I'd be willing to bet it's the most common mental illness among government workers. I maintain this tendency toward compulsivity is the reason government has virtually no ability to prevent things like Sandy Hook from happening however many laws they decide to pass. People look to an institution that waltzes on the edge of insanity to fix the problem of people with mental disorders.
I've observed at close range how government agencies run. There are good people there trying to do the right thing, but the government, because of its very nature, has become so obsessed with control and data collection that the system itself has confused order with compassion; control with freedom. It's not merely a case of the blind leading the blind or the lunatics running the asylum. It's worse.
It's asylum itself that's deranged.
I'm just saying,
Tom
