People talk about gun control because they don't want to think about evil.

The reason we don't is because true evil is hard to understand and it is too scary to think that human beings can actually be evil: they must be something else--i.e., mentally ill more than likely.

Adam Lanza of Newtown Connecticut--spree killer, mass murderer of human children and adults--was evil.

Evil is the absence of the good.

The presence of the good takes work and effort by choice on a continual basis along with many many many other things that good human beings--once good--then do do automatically in addition to continuing to choose to not default on the good as well as continuing to do the good in order to be good. Consequently--since they are so busy being good--it is not easy for them--the good humans--to understand evil, let alone to deal with it when it rears its ugly head.

True evil does not exist as a metaphysical force (i.e. a literal devil) but it has the power of metaphysics (e.g., everything you do counts) behind it in-those-humans who do cross over the proverbial, slippery-slope-into-the-abyss, divide.

Adam Lanza crossed over.

The specifics of how he crossed over of course is a larger study, but that he crossed over is not up for debate.

If some people want to argue that Adam Lanza was mentally ill--that is, in the sense that he was not responsible for his actions for reasons beyond his control as a human being--and not evil, then the burden of proving this is on their shoulders.

And if their argument is: the act of murdering innocent children makes Adam Lanza mentally ill by definition, then they are wrong because such an argument denies the intuitively obvious fact of free will in us humans.

The act of murdering--until and unless proven otherwise--brands Adam Lanza evil. The act of murdering innocent children brands him a monster.

............................................
Gary Deering
PsycHHology Engineer
January 15, 2013

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