I can understand the difficulties of trying to get thru "the system" of getting a child like Adam committed and that it would take a long time for a loving parent to come to grips with that need. What I cannot understand is how this parent could have been in her right mind, having an ASSAULT rifle.....much less keeping it in the home with the son--and then taking him to the shooting range and teaching him to use it and practice with it.

People had to know the mother had these guns and was teaching the son with them (the gun range people said she brought him there). To me, this means the father, brother, and neighbors/friends probably knew it too.

I think this society has grown numb to the signs and signals of potential killers like this, and has its collective head in the sand and in denial. I don't think that society's thinking on this has improved much since Columbine 12 years ago!

Good grief.....Army psychiatrists and faculty physicians at Walter Reed Army Medical Center tip-toed around the Ft. Hood shooter's clear signals that he felt no empathy for those he would easily mass-murder for the sake of jihad. If the faculty, staff and colleagues THERE did not press to get the guy out of the classroom and clinical practice....general society has to be far, far behind them in removing a person like Lanza from the place he'd like to make into a killing field.

And university and college faculty, administration, and counseling services knew about the VA Tech and Tuscon, and Denver theater shooters having this propensity, too!

They have set the tone for societal thinking on this, and it's a recipe for more terror like Newtown, not less.

You are making this too simple. And any panacea can be abused by anyone with authority or power over others. I would bet that the victims in Penn State's child abuse scandal probably often felt that they had various mental health problems because of how badly they were treated within their community.

What is needed is some common sense and practical solutions to dealing with those who use violence to send a message. A terrorist does this and very few terrorists in my mind are mentally ill.

You also might have an extremely dysfunctional family involved or maybe even one where the only real members are a mother and her son or perhaps a grandfather and his grandson. The traditional family has changed a great deal over the last fifty years or so.

I think you misunderstand my post. I think people who use violence should be locked up and removed from society "to send a message".

What I'm saying above is that society has learned to LOOK THE OTHER WAY AND IGNORE kids showing signs of violent behavior and macabre thinking, and the denial is aided by faculty, physicians, courts, and counseling professionals who minimize what they are seeing.