Then he was too sick to have been allowed to own firearms.
At this advanced day and age, when Wayne LaPierre rules Congress and the Teabaggers scream about Second Amendment rights, I am slow to claim that it is against any law for mentally deficient persons to own or operate firearms. I am all but certain it USED TO BE...and that once a person has been declared by a court of law to be incompetent, he or she MAY be placed on an FBI or national database that arms sellers are supposed to consult before they can purchase them.
With all that possible disclaimer, I'll come to the point: It's been written that Elliot Rodger was diagnosed or observed to be a person with autism. If this is true, then all the horrible comments about his sense of entitlement or his misogyny or even his murderous deeds have a fairly simple explanation. I will try to enlighten.
My daughter has autism. She is 14 years old. She is attractive, athletic, pretty, healthy physically. She likes boys. She likes pop music. She's on the 'mild' end of the spectrum of autism; she goes to a regular high school and finished the year with mostly As, one B and one C grade. She used to have a close circle of friends, but when she started high school, they more or less went their separate ways. We have hopes that she will again socialize with close friends; most people develop new friends at times like entering high school, but we just have to wait.
She was diagnosed when she was only 2 and a half. We have given her what we considered to be the very best in treatment. It's called RDI. We chose it because it was recommended by specialists, but more importantly, we were convinced of the science behind the treatment by the several seminars the neurologists who created it gave on it. We will never know for sure, but I am convinced that my daughter does much better than she would have because of the hands-on daily treatment that we, her parents, gave and continue to give her.
The treatment is about re-wiring the brain, to address the core deficiencies. It is complex. It is comprehensive. It was developed by someone with so much attention to the smallest detail, it's impossible to try to distill it in this already-long post. My real point is this: I know autism. I've studied it as a parent. I've seen what it is with my own eyes, in my own child. It's something that just doesn't go away, but can be treated and help IMPROVE the person's life.
People with autism do not know how to communicate effectively. Their brains do not develop automatically from about six months on through the rest of childhood and adolescence. When a 'typical' baby develops, they naturally gaze and look for faces to see and observe and imitate and learn from and get comfort from. Not autistics. And that's only one small part of the deficits autistics suffer from. They can't understand voice levels (prosody), double meanings, body language, facial expressions, pauses, etc. To autistics, all language is LITERAL, none of it figurative; there is no nuance or shades of gray in their understanding, no maybes, only yes or no. And: for all human beings, 80% of all communication is NON-VERBAL. If it's not verbal, autistics simply can't process the mental ideas.
Just two points here about Elliot Rodger's autism, and how it led to this murder spree:
Elliot could not approach women because he didn't know how. He had no confidence because he'd never developed confidence in communication. He was isolated in his own mind--the worst part of autism. So many of the comments are misguided in saying he was a cruel woman hater. He was trapped.
Elliot also could not determine for himself how the misogynist messages he read could be absurd or nonsense. They made sense to him in his isolation, in his experience, in his observation from his brain. He had no way to counter the thinking. He had no way to regret it. It really just ate him up, and he saw no way out.
Maybe the family should have worked harder to keep tabs on him. Maybe they didn't know what to do about him. Most probably they had no idea he would do this, but if they did, today they are simply sick about it--and you can't 'punish' someone who feels like that any more than they are already punishing themselves...
Bottom line: Keep guns away from people with mental problems. All the comments about society and sex really have very little to do with this tragedy. He was very sick. His family knows what I speak of here, if they know anything at all about autism. They tried to intervene...but it didn't work. He fooled the cops.
So would my daughter. NOBODY knows she has autism. And that's the goal, plus addressing the core deficits inherent in her neurology. But I would applaud any law that kept guns from her or any other person with a diagnosis of autism.
It's the least we should be able to do about this.
