I am Adam Lanza's Mother

[Spider]

[Stratego]

Here's the thing though. How do you distinguish being a loner and having mental problems?

[PoS]

[The Dude]

[The Comrade]

that was a brutal read but that woman is absolutely right. suddenly this country acts like mental illness doesn't exist and until we stop doing that we're going to have more and more of these incidents.

[Mo~]

My first thought when it came out that the guns belonged to the mother was, "I wonder if she got them to use on him". My guns were around to specifically be used on my father if he ever came after me and my children. But, he knew that's why I had my guns and being as he was crazy rather than stupid, he never challenged me or ever attempted to make contact with us.

Unfortunately, because he was crazy rather than stupid, he got away with a helluva lot and we could almost never truly get the upper hand on him and neither could the courts. We were finally able to push him out of our lives for self preservation, but he was still loose in general society. He could have gone off at anytime. He threatened us and especially my mom all the time. How the hell she survived the beatings is beyond me.

Guns have been both a blessing and a curse in the whole mess. When I was 2, my 17 year old sister saved my mom from one of the last beatings with a gun in his face. It was the only thing that saved Mom's life and it was the only way he could have been stopped. At the same time, he was always threatening us and those we cared about with them too. He's the one who owned them, BTW.

The Postal Shooting years were really hard on me since my mom was a Post Master and my dad was always gonna kill her. The fear wasn't over after I raced for a TV to find out where it had happened. It just changed to fear that he would get a bright idea from the latest and plan one of his own. Fortunately by that time bad health and fear of self defense kept him pretty down. There were a couple of rants and disappearances that put everyone on edge after that, but they only lasted a couple of days before he was found.

I became pregnant with my first near the end of the Postal Shooting Years and I got hard. There was no way in hell I was letting the f**k ever mess with me or mine. The cops, the courts, the mental health pros, the neighbors, the friends, etc. have never been useful in dealing with a bat shit crazy. He had been through the system most of his adult life and knew the game better the guys prosecuting him. So, I made it clear that if he showed up around me and mine, I would kill him. The only time I've seen him stopped in his tracks was when he faced the deadly consequences of his actions, not only with my sister but the couple of times the cops did intervene. So I went with what had worked...and it worked. He left us alone and died when I was 32 allowing me to finally rest in peace.

Our society doesn't handle mental health well at all. But, of course, I don't have any solutions either. All I could figure out to do was go into survival and self preservation mode. That does nothing to help society in general though and he still could have gone off with no one around to predict it(like that's even possible). You can't hardly get mental health care in this country even with insurance and it typically results in a prescription and a pat on the back on your way to pay the receptionist. People who live, work and otherwise function around the crazies would just rather avoid it, which is perfectly natural too. It's a very difficult situation to deal with for everyone involved.

[Breakage]

[The Dharma Bum]

As some one who has a relative with mental illness I can tell you actual effective help is non-existent. You just gotta get by however you can. They have facilities and staff but they are useless because they are totally overwhelmed with the number of mentally ill people and all they do is give people some pills to take and then ignore them to go back out on the streets.

If they monitored them somehow and ensured they take the medicine it would probably be ok but they don't bother with that. They tell you they can't do anything unless they are arrested. Then they just stick 'em in prison to be abused.

[Sparse1]

You'll find it is the same in most Western countries, even those with universal healthcare are reluctant to institutionalise people when they actually need it. It's partly social attitudes and partly cost.

I'd suggest the woman quoted in the initial post avoids keeping firearms where her son can get hold of them though.

[Thundertaker]