It is on days like this that I wish there was a way to combine

[HereSince1628]

7. This is not about any one of US. It's about "their" fears

and lost sense of safety. It's about naming a terrible thing as terrible and constructing it as something that can be made more remote and less threatening.

On DU and publications from across America we read commentary about the Sandy Hook mass murder written by non-experts, ordinary people with a tremendous need to feel safer.

A common way that people will find a sense of safety is by psychologically distancing themselves from the event and from it's perpetrator. One of the ways to do that is by making the perpetrator belong to an out-group the safety seekers mistakenly believe are nothing like themselves.

The mentally ill represent, as we often do, a convenient group of "others" to be used as such an outgroup because most Americans misunderstand and fear mental illness. The category mentally illness is also a convenient place to link with "incomprehensible", "deviant", "abnormal" acts. Not because people who are mentally ill actually are much more capable of horrendous acts of violence than the general population, but because in a conversation no one will use "incomprehensible" when a noun phrase such as 'mental illness' sounds so much more like an actionable diagnosis or when 'insane' and 'crazy' are so close to mind.

So at this time, the frightened are plastering DU forums with fear and misunderstanding using broad brushes that are over generalizations and mis-characterization.