I have tried to step away from the news today. Reading about the senseless death of children once is more than enough. I didn't need to read over and over about how 20 children would not be coming home from school. I didn't need to see the pictures of terrified children holding hands as they vacated the school. Instead, I was going to spend the night curled up on the couch with my kids and giving them every ounce of love I could.
That will come, but first I must get the anger out of me. This anger is not towards the gunman (I will not use his name, he doesn't deserve to be recognized). I got that anger out while my children were at school. This is a new anger, an anger directed at the media. News reports are now saying the shooter had "Autism symptoms" as if that was a contributing factor.
This is not the first time an Autism Spectrum Disorder has been the focus after a mass shooting. After the Aurora cinema shooting, Joe Scarborough alleged that the shooter had Asperger's. I was unable to find anything to substantiate that claim. It may be out there, I am a horrific Googler and I may have missed a million articles on the subject. But in the articles that I did see, it was all one man's beliefs about another man he had never met before.
I do not know anything about either shooters, aside from the fact that they hurt an unimaginable number of people with their actions. What I do know is that people coming out and placing the blame on Autism/Asperger's/PDD-NOS is not the way to go. We cannot lump the actions of a few men and use that to define a group.
I am fortunate to be a parent to a child with Autism. He has a hard time expressing his feelings and is often in his own world, but then there are moments, moments like the video below, where you can see the person deep down inside. You can see the caring and gentle person inside.
