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Dec. 30, 2012 - Steve Pieczenik

27:33

SANDY HOOK MURDERS: Leading Psychiatrist Discusses The Tragedy

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	Hi, this is Dr.
	Pchenik again, and tonight we're going to talk about the Sandy Hook murder and what happened in Sandy Hook.
	I've waited quite a long time to see what evolved in terms of the story of what most of you know is a young man who ostensibly was disturbed and killed 22, 23 innocent children at school in Sandy Hook using a high-powered rifle.
	All kinds of commentaries were made about it, and the specific rifle was a Bushmaster XM15, which is quite high power, and Adam Lance and Nancy Lance's mother, who taught him how to use the gun and brought him to the gun shooting range, We're the key characters in the Sandy Hook drama.
	Now, I don't mean to be facetious or denigrate the episode, but I've been involved with mass killers since 1968, 69, for about 10, 20 years.
	Initially, as a military officer and a member of the Public Health Service, I was in charge of a unit that had the criminally sane, not the maximum security unit, but one less than the maximum security at St.
	Elizabeth's Hospital.
	Where I incarcerated over 34 or 35 different types of killers who had killed more than 5 to 10 people.
	And St.
	Elizabeth was taken over by the military at the time because there weren't enough civilian doctors to...
	We manage 4,000 psychiatric patients.
	And I think that portends the problem in the future, that we will not have enough mental health workers to deal with our increasing population of disturbed patients or disturbed individuals.
	But be it as it may, when I was dealing with mass killers, Many of them were not psychotic and many of them were not schizophrenics.
	What I found was that they were incarcerated at St.
	Elizabeth's instead of being summarily executed for mass murder.
	And the reason they were incarcerated is because the District of Columbia prosecutors didn't want to instill or propagate the notion of the death penalty.
	I'm not here to be a legal advisor, but I am here to basically tell you about my experiences where I felt that almost every one of the 33 mass killers really did not deserve to live, and putting them in a psychiatric hospital for 10 to 20 to some odd 30 years did nothing to rehabilitate them or even to reconstitute Their mental condition,
	some of whom were quite normal and just felt that they could play out the rest of their life in a psychiatric hospital as opposed to a prison.
	Now, that's not a point of being facetious or a point of being skeptical.
	It's just a point of fact that very few of the killers that I dealt with were either insane or mentally incapacitated.
	But because the judicial system didn't want to really...
	Designated a death penalty.
	For whatever reason, they decided to rationalize it as a mental health case because by definition anybody who kills a great number of people or more than one or even one is mentally insane.
	Well, from my experiences as an operational intelligence and a deputy assistant secretary of state and somebody who was involved in what we call regime change, that in fact is not true.
	Assassinations are a operational means by which one can affect change without using a large number of soldiers.
	And in many cases can be quite effective in terms of avoiding a war or avoiding any form of a conflagration where you don't want to deploy a certain amount of soldiers or civilians in an area which could be quite explosive.
	The examples are in Cambodia where we had regime change.
	It was done very effectively.
	I won't go into the techniques where, in fact, we were able to disarm, and I was part of that group, thousands of Khmer Rouge soldiers who had...
	In the past killed over 1.2 million of their own people in autogenocide by using psychological techniques and other means where nobody was really killed and very few were injured, but nevertheless there was an effective consequence outcome.
	So from a professional's point of view, assassination is not a dirty word.
	It's not an evil word.
	It is an operational term which affects a change, a desired change.
	It's not often...
	Officiated or prescribed by a nation-state because there's a negative connotation to it, but it does occur.
	And in order for an assassination to occur officially on behalf of the U.S. government, one needs a finding from Congress, and the president initiates a finding.
	So, number one, the notion of killer or mass killer is not an immediate designation of somebody who is mentally ill or in any way disturbed, but can be quite effective, professional, and in effect, quite efficient.
	Secondly, to make that point, almost all of the people who I've been involved with as adversaries in the world of counterterrorism who've used terror and have killed many others using explosives or grenades or forms of terror techniques where people are killed were physicians.
	And that was true of...
	Right now, Bashir Assad, who is an ophthalmologist in charge of Syria, has no qualms about using force in order to affect an outcome.
	That was true of the Islamic Brotherhood, where there were pediatricians, or George Habash, who was a pediatrician for the PFLP. I was a very good pediatrician, as well as many physicians who were in charge of Iraq, as well as the Islamic Brotherhood were the orthopedic surgeons.
	So physicians have been in the position of being professional killers in a world that we call terrorism.
	None of whom were in any way mentally unstable or emotionally disturbed.
	So, from a professional point of view, Dr.
	Pachenik says that really killing in and of itself is not a sign of mental illness.
	It is an act which has a certain consequence to it.
	From a legal point of view, you have the McNaughton ruling, which says either you know what you're doing, you're insane, or you're in danger to others, and therefore, by definition, you are insane and in need of psychiatric care.
	That often doesn't follow, but those are the legal constraints that we have on someone who kills someone else.
	Now, why are these relevant points?
	These are relevant points because in a world where I have been involved with terror, where there has been assassination, and where there has been mass killings, Most often than not, I have not found that the mass killer, as awful as it may seem, were either mentally disturbed or deranged.
	Example, Pol Pot, who committed autogenocide, was in no way mentally ill or in any way mentally disturbed.
	He was a teacher in a French school.
	And he was trained by the French and he was encouraged and supported by the Chinese and committed autogenocide and decided that he would create a civilization called Zero Civilization or the elimination of any Western influence by killing his own people or anybody who demonstrated Western traits, wearing glasses, had a dog, or had a Western education.
	And thereby, only using palm leaves, he was able to He was not insane.
	Idi Amin, even though he was portrayed as insane, was not insane.
	Gaddafi, who's been portrayed as this horrific, despotic, insane terrorist, was not in any way insane.
	He was very clear about what he was doing.
	He had a specific outcome.
	He needed to use violence or killing or death.
	But he effected change accordingly, and when he was of use to the United States, then we found him to be a good ally.
	When he was no longer of use to the United States, we found him to be an enemy.
	And that's usually a principle of national security that we have adjudicated with Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Gaddafi, and many others who worked with us in the intelligence community and the foreign service.
	And as General Noriega once said to me, the worst thing to be in this world is to be an ally of the United States because subsequently the United States will turn against its ally.
	Having said that, I go back to the episode of Sandy Hook.
	And what really was disturbing me was not the issue of a young man who used a rifle to kill 23 or 24 innocent children.
	What disturbed me was the very elements that I did not hear.
	And in the world of intelligence or political psychiatry, which I was trained in, I often wait to listen for what I call the scream of silence.
	What is it that I don't hear and why is it that this particular town, Sandy Hook, which is located in Fairfield, Connecticut, a very wealthy, prominent, Stable community, which I know very well, having been an intern at Greenwich, Connecticut Hospital in 1968.
	I've treated many people from Fairfield County and Sandy Hook, so I had a pretty good idea of who the people were and what they were like.
	What I did not know was what are the elements that are essential to the media or the underlying confluence of factors that would lead to a massacre of such proportion Besides the issue of gun control or whether this person was psychotic or mentally insane,
	neither one of those descriptions really addressed the issue of what I was concerned with, which is again the elements that were missing from the discussion.
	The first element that was missing was that Number one, Sandy Hook is very much in the center of the gun manufacturing industry.
	What I did not know, and it was interesting to find out, and none of the people really talked about it in the media, was the fact that Connecticut, like Texas, is a center of manufacturing of guns and rifles, and that Sandy Hook was very much a part of that community,
	Where over 2,000 people were employed in and around Sandy Hook by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the NSSF, which is a trade organization which represents manufacturers,
	7,000 manufacturers of guns, distributors, firearms, retailers, shooting range, sportsmen organization, and publishers of arms and guns.
	I'm not here to comment on whether it's right or wrong.
	I'm simply here to state what I subsequently learned.
	The NSSF helps write the firearm safety and instruction standards and promotes shooting sports such as hunting, ski, trap, and target shooting.
	So in essence, this quiet little prosperous upper middle class suburban town called Sandy Hook was replete with what I would call gun culture.
	uh...
	And this gun culture was not only propagated by a lobbying organization, the NSSF, but was in fact part and parcel of a manufacturing industry where Connecticut prided itself on being one of the three major So you
	can see that over, I'd say, 2,000 or more people were employed in the gun manufacturing industry.
	And several thousand more in the propagation of the lobbying and the PR concerning guns.
	Now why is this relevant?
	This is relevant because an innocent or halcyon community that is portrayed as innocent and halcyon is not necessarily all that beatific or pretty or quiet or nice.
	Underlying this portrait that we saw on CNN and elsewhere of this quiet community that suddenly erupted in violence, I began to realize that this was not necessarily a quiet community.
	And as I said, when I researched the silence, I found that in that silence there was the gun manufacturers, there were the lobbyists.
	And equally important was the fact that we had a very famous woman writer who lived in that very town by the name of Suzanne Collins.
	And what was interesting is that in none of the media portrayals of Sandy Hook, did anybody ever interview Suzanne Collins?
	I don't know her.
	Many of you will know her as the author of The Hunger Games, which the film I saw.
	And I was actually quite taken aback when I saw that film because the film had in it many issues of game theory, war, and violence.
	And I was quite shocked to see that this film was very much involved in what we call war and game theory.
	And it turned out she, in fact, was very much influenced by her father.
	And in turn, this type of book and attitude was portrayed in a whole sequence of books and films that amounted to a major financial issue.
	Reward of about $600 million.
	And guess where Suzanne Collins lived?
	And she lived in Sandy Hook.
	Yet nothing was said or written about her or her influence in that particular town.
	But I will read two quotes that struck me quite clearly after I looked at her, some of her works.
	I've never read her books.
	I did see one of the films.
	I was not impressed, but that's neither here nor there.
	But two quotes in particular stood out from her works, and one was, destroying things is much easier than making them.
	That's number one.
	But the more ominous quote is, look how we take your children and sacrifice, and there's nothing you can do.
	If you lift a finger, we would destroy every last one of you, just as we did in District 13.
	Now, that's part of Hunger Game, and that's part of the books that she writes about.
	But more interestingly, that attitude of doomsday and what we call the preppy, or people who prepare for survivalism, was very much a part of of Nancy Alonza, the mother of Adam Alonza, the perpetrator, the killer.
	So now we have not only the manufacturer and the publicist, now we have a writer or a fictional novelist who propagates this incredible amount of Theology or heuristic concepts regarding the end of life,
	the need to survive, the horrors of war, the need to destroy the innocent and what happens in the system.
	And at the same time, we have what's called a preppy...
	...indoctrination or philosophy that's replete in this community of Sandy Hook, which looks so innocent and disingenuous, which in fact is replete with guns and survivalists who are thinking that...
	This may be the end of the world, and we may be entering a financial crisis where we have to prepare for the ending.
	And when you have that kind of collective, I won't call it paranoia, but survivalist philosophy, it imbues a certain amount of hypercritical thinking, hypersensitivity, and a certain paranoia where You combine it with guns and you combine it with a gun culture and you get yourself the beginning of what we call AMFO or a nitroglycerin combined with gasoline.
	And we begin to get into a cultural atmosphere which is very toxic.
	Now on top of that, you take a mother who is basically an alcoholic, goes out every evening by herself or every other evening, it really doesn't matter, goes into the bar, she's known in the bar, drinks and talks about her gun collection, takes her disturbed son and talks about her disturbed son and the fact that, you know, she needs to do something about him, whether it's to hospitalize him or not, is not really all that relevant.
	And in the meantime, shows him how to use a sig-sau or a pistol, makes sure that he's proficient in gun shooting, and at the same time prepares herself for the end of the world.
	And you have the philosophy of Suzanne Collins coming in replete with survivalism and the need to make sure that you can destroy the others before they destroy you.
	And you take alcohol with all of this element together and you've got yourself a very dangerous cocktail.
	I would call it the Sandy Hook cocktail, which means that it wasn't just an individual and it wasn't just a rifle.
	It was a combination of guns, manufacturing, publicity, survivalism, Fiction, heuristic concepts, and the last but not least, the most important concept was games, video games that encouraged one to really start to kill others.
	And there were games on the video which It really almost desensitizes you to the notion of killing, the notion of being invincible.
	Many of them, one was a famous game called to Arms.
	Others were about decimating a whole group of innocent individuals.
	Others dealt with black ops.
	Many of the games were developed by Electronic Arts, which I knew about and never got involved with.
	Now, the issue of video games, as much as everybody mocks that, and I know Mr.
	Lapierre of the NRA mentioned it and was denigrated by the media, is not a minor issue.
	Because game theory and gaming and video games, which have become exceedingly violent, was something that I got to be involved with about 10 to 15 years ago with my partner.
	Tom Clancy, and it was something that I looked at and decided on my part not to get involved with, for the very reason that even 15 years ago, when I saw the games at Electronic Arts and I saw the games at the Las Vegas video game convention, I found them to be repulsive, absolutely abhorrent, and exceedingly violent.
	Now anyone who tells me that there's no correlation between playing these video games and being involved in dehumanizing experiences of mass murder is absolutely wrong and the fact that there's no correlation between these games of mass murder and the ability to go out and kill someone is absolutely wrong.
	I don't care which studies have been done.
	I'm not interested in the studies.
	I know from my own experience that those people I've been involved with who were killers and in fact were not psychotic or in any way crazy were very much influenced by the notion that their invincibility It was very much directly correlated to the notion that they could mimic what was on the game or the cartoon and they themselves found themselves invincible.
	Whether it's fantasy or delusional, it's not as relevant as the outcome.
	So now you have in Sandy Hook a confluence of many elements that no one really talked about.
	You have a confluence again of the gun manufacturers, the gun lobbyists, The gun culture, the preppy culture, the Susan Collins game theory and the fact that survivalism and the need to kill innocent people is a necessity in a dystopic world.
	And you have the notion of video games that facilitates dehumanization, the ability to kill others.
	This all basically came together in a moment in time, in a place in time, called Sandy Hook.
	And it was not an accident that this young man suddenly went out to kill these innocent children.
	Why?
	I could give you many reasons.
	One, perhaps he was influenced by the fact he'd read Hunger Games or he saw a video game where he in fact felt that it was his obligation thanks to the notion that his mother said the end of the world was coming to make sure that these innocent children would never incur the pain and the catastrophe of an end of the world scenario.
	That's one thesis.
	Or he felt it was his obligation to make sure that innocence was destroyed before it became malevolent and had a reverse theological, a reverse Catholic notion.
	But those are hypotheses.
	What's not a hypothesis is that no single element contributed to this man's killing.
	Neither his instability or ostensibly his autism, whether it was there or not, or the fact that he had a rifle contributed to his killing.
	What contributed to his killing is really the Sandy Hook phenomenon.
	This disingenuous halcyon Pretty little rich community in Fairfield County, replete with alcohol, replete with wealth, and replete with guns, and a gun culture, as well as survivalism, and a lack of faith in the American Republic.
	This all contributed to the slaughter or the massacre we call Sandy Hook.
	So I ask you Americans to think very clearly about what I'm about to say.
	And that is, it's not the mentally insane who kill.
	And it's not the guns that will kill.
	I'm not here to propagate gun legislation.
	That will never happen.
	I happen to have guns, I have a license to use the guns, and I've lived in a state in Montana where guns are very much a part of the culture.
	But what was not present in Montana was the wealth The disingenuous aspects and the replete notion of a survivalist culture which always predicted the end of the state of life.
	And instead, you saw in the state of Montana a glorification of the forest, the sports, the skiing, and all the activities that were not present in Fairfield, Connecticut.
	So again, I warn you in many communities that are particularly wealthy, that have a lot of free time, where the families are broken apart, and you have elements of discordance in every family, that if you mix alcohol, wealth, free time, along with a very violent, media-induced culture, vis-a-vis the gun and killing, you will have another Sandy Hook.
	It will not be based on preventing mental illness or gun legislation.
	That will never happen because we need to have enough psychiatrists or mental health specialists and certainly our legislators will never affect change.
	But it will depend on you, the listener, to understand the environment that you live in and what are the cues and elements that are part of your environment.
	Do they encourage violence?
	Do they allow you to speak about violence?
	And do they let you act out on the violence?
	Those are questions that you have to ask yourself.
	As for the rest, it's all a media commentary which had no relevance to the actual Sandy Hook massacre.
	This is Dr.
	Pachenik.
	I hope you've heard what I've said.
	Please listen.
	Please critique it.
	Please respond to it and I look forward to talking to you next time.

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