Shooter Begged to be Stopped, But Nobody -- Parents, Therapists, Youtube Buddies, Police -- Gave a Damned

Elliot Rodger

This is not a case where I'm fishing for someone or something to blame for Elliot Rodger's rampage, apart from the lunatic fringe NRA.  No, I'm merely standing back and looking at a kind of psychical footprint the kid left as he stumbled through life begging for attention, long before this ghastly event happened.

Child Protective Services should have wrenched this kid away from his robotic parents years ago. But that's not how the system works. The kids who get taken are the ones with bruises.  The ones who commit mass murder are the ones who've never been touched.  Admittedly Elliot Rodger suffered from a high functioning form of autism, Asperger's Syndrome.  But damned it.  He was asking for help and look at what the grown ups gave him.  Dad left and got remarried.  As a consolation prize, Mom gave him a new BMW. When she realized he had become a danger to society, she couldn't be bothered to do anything about it. So, she called the paid help, i.e. the therapist.  Being the paid help, the therapist had no intention of getting too deeply wrapped up in the affairs of this psycho, so he/she called the police asking for a routine welfare check on the kid.  The Santa Barbara police knew nothing about the kid threatening mass murder. Neither the mother nor therapist had bothered to forward that information to them.  Elliot Rodger wasn't important enough to command that much time and attention on their part.  The Christian Science Monitor has a thought provoking article on the subject entitled:  Why Did No One Notice All the Clues?

Well I guess they have now. 

Further Reflections

Maybe there's a universal message lurking in the shadow that none of us wish to open, because we don't have a glib answer.  Perhaps it's just human nature to avoid distasteful people, as friends, as relatives and even, I suspect, as our own children if we're so unlucky as to be saddled with them.   It is fairly easy for me to whine about this kid being neglected. But admittedly I didn't have to live with him, or put up with his narcissism. In short, what are we supposed to do with the unlovable among us?

Yes, rich people pay therapists to handle as much of the unpleasantness as possible. But they're in hiding when a crisis situation arises and they're needed the most.  So what are decent people, parents who've tried their best, supposed to do when they, the caretakers have reached their limit, and are themselves on the verge of ending up in a mental institution from emotional exhaustion?  I suppose the only answer is what they all end up doing -- opening the back door, to allow their little monsters to crawl out and commit mass murder.