Good Morning Florida Keys

I live in fear.

A week ago a 76 year old man called me from Washington state. He told me his aunt had died and he found a picture of my mom and dad’s Wedding in 1954. He has been researching for 10 years for the Walinsky family history. He discovered that my great grandfather had 2 brothers with him when they came to Ellis Island. He has copies of immigrant papers. Lacking writing skills, one brother changed his name to Walinski, the other brother changed his to Balinsky.

I am worried that I am related to Sloan. I do not talk to midnight monsters, and I do not have people come to me in my dreams and I do not feel the need to run in every election. I do read all the stuff he writes.

Now I fear the angels are going to start talking to me! (Ed: Oh, you poor soul. Do not fear, I can save you! Sloan’s name is Bashinsky not Balinsky so you may sleep in peace. Merry Christmas.)

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Fearing the angels will start talking to him/her is something to truly fear, for if that happens, that poor soul will become a lot like me, after a whole heap of wailing and gnashing of teeth. I wrote maybe two months ago of being asked to make a prayer for a divine intervention of the feminine into the United States of America, which prayer I made. I wrote that my own experience with the feminine coming into me, and into other people I had known, was that it was really rough. It dawned on me this morning that the same holds true for USA. Hurricane Sandy and Sandy Hook express her sentiments about guns, the NRA, and the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In that vein, distant in-law Ron, who used to vacation in Key West, wrote further about Sandy Hook:

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SLOAN – No matter, I am not certain I am on the right page. I don’t belong to the NRA and am certainly not on the same page with them. I do own guns. I do shoot deer, ducks, turkey and paper. I have no idea how you filter the mass shooters out of society. I know there is no perfect solution. Giving those people who have our young people in their care a fighting chance to protect themselves and those in their care, seems like a good idea until we can figure it out. Not perfect but better than being a lamb.

New York Mayor, Mike Bloomberg made a strong case for what works in the Big Apple on Face the Nation yesterday. Sounded like common sense to me. If his numbers are correct, the New York city plan is working. Perfect, No! Better, Yes! Mike called the Obomber out big time. The elected leaders of the country are, I think, going to do something now. Let us hope that what is done has some modicum of common sense. Let us hope that what is done works. It breaks my heart thinking of the very young people dying in terror. It breaks my heart to think of the young teachers, and the staff of Sandy Hook dying in terror. These were good people. These were innocent people. We all need to get on close to the same page and come up with an effective common sense answer to this crazy problem.

Common sense—- not like making everyone who flies in a commercial plane take their shoes off, because one idiot tried to blow up his shoes. Common sense, dare we hope?

Regards, Ron

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I replied:

I missed what Bloomberg said on Face the Nation.
I don’t see any way in hell or heaven to stop what happened at Sandy Hook from happening again, not even with S.W.A.T. or Navy SEAL teams stationed at every school in America.
If kids can get pistols like those, a rifle like those, they can get a rocket propelled grenade launcher and grenades, they can get mortars, they can get sniper rifles, they can get fertilizer. If they are determined, they can kill school school children and their teachers with little effort.
We have the NRA to thank for the weapons that kid used being able to be purchased by his mother, who was anything but pure as the driven snow, given the weapons she purchased.
Of course, it was horrible. But my sympathy is with the surviving relatives, who are still here. The departeds are in God’s hands. Including the shooter.
There is stuff on MSN.com about the shooter’s mother this morning, am going to try to find it.

Follow up to Ron:

Gunman’ hiddens mother kepttrials of home life hidden

Rex Features. Newtown school shooting: Nancy Lanza, mother of Adam Lanza, 20, who killed his mother before heading to Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and shot 26 people dead and then shot himself.

Nancy Lanza spoke proudly of her sons, but friends say she held one card very close: home life, especially its trials and setbacks.

NEWTOWN, Conn. — At the bar, everybody knew her name. Nancy Lanza was the one who, if she heard you were short on cash, regularly offered to pick up the tab at My Place. Two or three nights a week, Lanza — the mother of the gunman in Connecticut’s horrific school massacre — came in for carryout salads, but stayed for Chardonnay and good humor. The divorced mother of two — still smooth-skinned and ash blonde at 52 — clearly didn’t have to work, but was always glad to share talk of her beloved Red Sox, gardening and a growing enthusiasm for target shooting. But while Lanza spoke proudly about her sons and brought them in for breakfast when they were younger, friends say she held one card very close: home life, especially its trials and setbacks, was off limits. Now, the secrets Lanza kept are at the center of the questions that envelop this New England town, grieving over the slaughter unleashed by her 20-year-old son Adam, who investigators say killed his mother Friday with one of her own guns before murdering 26 children and teachers at a nearby school. “Her family life was her family life. She kept it private, when we were together. That was her own thing,” said Louise Tambascio, who runs the warmly lit pizzeria and bar with her own sons, and became a shopping and dining companion of Nancy Lanza’s. Friends had met Lanza’s younger son, who stared down at the floor and didn’t speak when she brought him in. They knew he’d switched schools more than once and that she’d tried home schooling him. But while she occasionally expressed concern about his future during evenings at the bar, she never complained about anything at all.

“I heard her as a parent. I always said that I wouldn’t want to be in her shoes. But I thought, ‘Wow. She holds it well,’” said Tambascio’s son, John. California resident Ryan Kraft told KCAL-TV in Los Angeles that when he was a teenager he lived a few doors down from the Lanza family and used to babysit Adam Lanza, then nine or 10 years old. He said the boy “struck me as an introverted kid.” “His mom Nancy had always instructed me to keep an eye on him at all times, never turn my back or even go to the bathroom or anything like that. Which I found odd but I really didn’t ask; it wasn’t any of my business,” said Kraft, who lives in Hermosa Beach. “But looking back at it now, I guess there was something else going on.” Despite the challenges, the trappings of Lanza’s life in Newtown were comfortable. When she and then-husband Peter Lanza moved to the central Connecticut community in 1998 from southern New Hampshire, they bought a brand new 3,100-square-foot colonial set on more than two acres in the Bennett’s Farm neighborhood. Nancy Lanza had previously worked as a stock broker at John Hancock in Boston and her husband was a successful executive. When the couple divorced in 2009, he left their spacious home to Nancy Lanza and told her she would never have to work another day in her life, said Marsha Lanza of Crystal Lake, Ill., Lanza’s aunt. The split-up was not acrimonious and Adam spent time with both his mother and father, she said. Those who knew Nancy Lanza recall her as very generous, often giving money to those she met and doing volunteer work. When a mutual friend sought a loan from an acquaintance, Jim Leff, and Leff asked for collateral, Lanza intervened. “Nancy overheard the discussion, and, unblinkingly, told him she’d just write him a check then and there,” Leff recalled on his blog in a post after Lanza’s death. “While I’m far from the most generous guy in the world, it’s not often that I feel stingy. But I learned something from that. I should have just written him the check. She was right.” Mark Tambascio recalled the time Lanza invited him and his brother to attend a Boston Red Sox game, buying them tickets atop the outfield wall known as the Green Monster, and refusing any talk of repayment. There were moments when she appeared carefree. Inside My Place on Sunday, friends passed around a book of photos from a 2008 sailing trip off Newport, R.I., including one showing Lanza, her eyes gently closed and head tilted back as the sea breeze blew through her hair. “Dreamer!” read the caption. Neighbors knew her from the monthly gathering of women who rotated between homes for games of the dice game bunko. Lanza enthused about gardening, while poking fun of the fact that few could see the result because her house was set back from the road on a low rise, partly cloaked by trees. “She used to give me a hard time, you know, because I put out all these Christmas lights, and she said, ‘I put out mine, too, but you can’t even see them,’” said Rhonda Cullens, who lives one street over. Lanza also began telling friends that she’d bought guns and had taken up target shooting, John Tambascio said. All three of the guns that Adam Lanza carried into Sandy Hook Elementary were owned and registered by his mother — a pair of handguns and a .223-caliber Bushmaster rifle, his primary weapon. Investigators said Sunday that Nancy Lanza visited shooting ranges several times and that her son also visited an area range. Ginger Colbrun, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, said it’s still not clear whether Nancy Lanza brought her son to the range or whether he ever fired a weapon there. Marsha Lanza told the Chicago Sun-Times that Nancy Lanza wanted guns for protection. “She prepared for the worst,” Marsha Lanza told the newspaper. “I didn’t know that they (the guns) would be used on her.” Guns were her hobby,” Dan Holmes, who got to know Lanza while doing landscaping work for her, told The Washington Post. “She told me she liked the single-mindedness of shooting.”Related: Obama at Newtown vigil: US ‘will have to change’ But while trips to shooting ranges gave Lanza an outlet, she returned home to the ever-present challenges of raising a son with intractable problems. At Newtown High School, Adam Lanza was often having crises that only his mother could defuse. “He would have an episode, and she’d have to return or come to the high school and deal with it,” said Richard Novia, the school district’s head of security until 2008, who got to know the family because both Lanza sons joined the school technology club he chartered. Novia said Adam Lanza would sometimes withdraw completely “from whatever he was supposed to be doing,” whether it was sitting in class or reading a book. Adam Lanza “could take flight, which I think was the big issue, and it wasn’t a rebellious or defiant thing,” Novia said. “It was withdrawal.” The club gave the boy a place where he could be more at ease and indulge his interest in computers. His anxieties appeared to ease somewhat, but they never disappeared. When people approached him in the hallways, he would press himself against the wall or walk in a different direction, clutching tight to his black briefcase. Marsha Lanza described Nancy Lanza as a good mother. “If he had needed consulting, she would have gotten it,” Marsha Lanza said. “Nancy wasn’t one to deny reality.” But friends and neighbors said Lanza never spoke about the difficulties of raising her son. Mostly she noted how smart he was and that she hoped, even with his problems, that he’d find a way to succeed. “We never talked about the family,” John Tambascio said. “She just came in to have a great time.”
Associated Press writer Matt Apuzzo in Southbury, Conn. and Michael Tarm in Crystal Lake, Ill. contributed to this report.

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Later to Ron:

I just watched a clip of Bloomberg on Face the Nation – he sez NRA power over-rated, NRA unable to ruin political careers.
He didn’t convince me one millimeter. The NRA is the biggest lobby outfit in US. It fights gun control as hard, if not harder, than the ACLU fights what it perceives as Constitutional encroachment, even the when the right to bear arms is attacked, I imagine.
Arguing the NRA did not contribute to what happened at Sandy Hook is like arguing the NRA did not contribute to the shooting of Trayvon Martin, or the passage of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. In fact, the NRA’s political muscle got that law passed. But that horse seems far out of the barn, and what to do now?

My ex-Special Forces friend Todd German agreed, a S.W.A.T. or Navy SEALS team could not protect one school. Someone with a deer rifle with a scope could set up a few hundred yards off and pick off students and teachers until apprehended. There are lots of other ways, sadly.

Todd talked about mental health interventions. Legally, very hard to bring off, unless a crime is involved or patently threatened. Mentally ill people cannot otherwise be forced to seek treatment, take meds. And, there are a lot fewer facilities for mentally ill, jails and prisons provide a lot more there than before.

I told Todd, it really isn’t about mental illness. It’s about demonic possession, which psychiatry does not recognize or treat. For that, the Catholic Church has to be brought in, and it is short of exorcists priests who know what they are doing because for some years the Church suspended teaching priests the Rites of Exorcism. But even then, you can’t force someone to being exorcised. And so few people accept the reality of demonic possession, ie. the Sandy Hook shooter’s mother, perhaps, that it’s not likely that exorcists priests can have much preventative effect.

Schools in the Keys went through emergency drills today, caused by Sandy Hook.

I don’t see a solution. It looks like I will write more about this tomorrow.

[The Key West's Citizen article today on the Sheriff and School District's Sandy Hook response proves the Keys are totally out of their depth this arena. www.keysnews.com, you will have to pay with plastic money to read it, if you are not a subscriber, because The Citizen asked me to stop reproducing their articles in my daily posts.

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Nancy Lanza knew, Christine, that her son was seriously messed up, and she had those two nasty-looking automatic pistols and the even nastier looking semi-automatic rifle in her home. The article said she was independently wealthy from a divorce settlement, was said to be very generous, and liked to shoot guns at a nearby range. Nobody seemed to know if she’d ever taken Adam with her to the range. I told some people today that if Adam had not killed his mother, she would be burned at the stake.

After a 1996 Mass Shooting, Australia Enacted Strict Gun Laws. It Hasn’t Had a Similar Massacre Since.

Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard lays a wreath at the memorial site of the Port Arthur massacre on its 10th anniversary. The mass killing spurred Howard’s government to pass sweeping gun control laws. Photo by Ian Waldie/Getty Images

Read the rest of Slate’s coverage of the Sandy Hook school shooting.

On April 28, 1996, a gunman opened fire on tourists in a seaside resort in Port Arthur, Tasmania. By the time he was finished, he had killed 35 people and wounded 23 more. It was the worst mass murder in Australia’s history.

Twelve days later, Australia’s government did something remarkable. Led by newly elected conservative Prime Minister John Howard, it announced a bipartisan deal with state and local governments to enact sweeping gun-control measures. A decade and a half hence, the results of these policy changes are clear: They worked really, really well.

At the heart of the push was a massive buyback of more than 600,000 semi-automatic shotguns and rifles, or about one-fifth of all firearms in circulation in Australia. The country’s new gun laws prohibited private sales, required that all weapons be individually registered to their owners, and required that gun buyers present a “genuine reason” for needing each weapon at the time of the purchase. (Self-defense did not count.) In the wake of the tragedy, polls showed public support for these measures at upwards of 90 percent.

What happened next has been the subject of several academic studies. Violent crime and gun-related deaths did not come to an end in Australia, of course. But as the Washington Post’s Wonkblog pointed out in August, homicides by firearm plunged 59 percent between 1995 and 2006, with no corresponding increase in non-firearm-related homicides. The drop in suicides by gun was even steeper: 65 percent. Studies found a close correlation between the sharp declines and the gun buybacks. Robberies involving a firearm also dropped significantly. Meanwhile, home invasions did not increase, contrary to fears that firearm ownership is needed to deter such crimes. But here’s the most stunning statistic. In the decade before the Port Arthur massacre, there had been 11 mass shootings in the country. There hasn’t been a single one in Australia since.

Read more from Slate‘s coverage of the Sandy Hook school shooting

There have been some contrarian studies about the decrease in gun violence in Australia, including a 2006 paper that argued the decline in gun-related homicides after Port Arthur was simply a continuation of trends already under way. But that paper’s methodology has been discredited, which is not surprising when you consider that its authors were affiliated with pro-gun groups. Other reports from gun advocates have similarly cherry-picked anecdotal evidence or presented outright fabrications in attempting to make the case that Australia’s more-restrictive laws didn’t work. Those are effectively refuted by findings from peer-reviewed papers, which note that the rate of decrease in gun-related deaths more than doubled following the gun buyback, and that states with the highest buyback rates showed the steepest declines. A 2011 Harvard summary of the research concluded that, at the time the laws were passed in 1996, “it would have been difficult to imagine more compelling future evidence of a beneficial effect.”

Whether the same policies would work as well in the United States—or whether similar legislation would have any chance of being passed here in the first place—is an open question. Howard, the conservative leader behind the Australian reforms, wrote an op-ed in an Australian paper after visiting the United States in the wake of the Aurora shootings. He came away convinced that America needed to change its gun laws, but lamented its lack of will to do so.