It seems to have already started. The media has started rallying to the entrenched powers in our society. It was one of the more depressing news segments I think I have ever seen. The first really in-depth exploration on a show that serves as a type of shared living room has attempted to set the channels of discussion - in ways that will benefit the NRA and may destroy thousands of lives and set the way we treat the cognitively disabled for years if not decades. The first part was an interview with somebody who was in the school - really for the most part meaningless only in that we have heard the stories already. But then they went into the shooter and his relationship with his mother. The impact of the weapons he used were barely mentioned (the description of the guns and how they were used and the damage that was done with them was almost completely missing).
No the message was guns don't kill people, people kill people. But more particular than that, people with Aspergers syndrome kill people.
Yes, Adam Lanza was identified as a boy with Aspergers - not based on any diagnosis mind you, but on the hearsay of two neighbors, who seemed to have their own agenda. Aspergers was presented as some dark, mysterious condition, somewhere along the autism spectrum. Adam definitely had Aspergers and it made him extremely difficult to deal with. His mother had to home school him and devote her life to him, when she wasn't donating to some charity. Adam was a deeply disturbed young man, a young man with Aspergers. There was no effort at all to explain what Aspergers is, that many of the people you meet in your everyday life have it without you even knowing it - perhaps your child's shy and over polite friend, perhaps the guy who came over to fix your computer last week and worked for three hours but only charged you for one, perhaps the professor who spent three hours going over a paper with your college age child so he could pass a course and graduate. No - Adam had Aspergers - and maybe that was the reason for the massacre. The innuendo was unmistakable. Of course there was the disclaimer that maybe Aspergers had nothing to do with it - but there was a much stronger darker side - it wasn't the guns it was the Aspergers that was dangerous.
And as for guns. Well the mother owned the guns. You see she grew up on a farm and liked to have a "few" guns around. But she was warm, devoted and generous, a real model citizen. It had nothing really to do with the mom or the guns. No the monster under the bed is the Aspergers, that dark and mysterious disease. It was frightening to watch and perhaps even more frightening to write about. 60 Minutes should be drowned in shame for what they have done.