The Phantom just watched the movie version of We Need to Talk About Kevin. This is not a movie based on an account of a real family, but on a novel about the mother of a mass murderer.
The Phantom has no knowledge about how close to the actual pattern of someone who goes on to murder his classmates this story gets in its depiction of this hellion, but it certainly plays convincingly. He is a demon seed sort of child, whose only pleasure seems to be inflicting pain. He is manipulative, cunning, perceptive and takes special pleasure in torturing his mother. He is a creepy, malevolent child from the moment he can convey any sort of response. He is amoral, lacks empathy, kills a hamster, maims his sister, and ultimately slays in a carefully planned killing spree.
His father is in deep denial and is completely duped by his son.
The Phantom once knew a child who did some of the things this child did, but none of the violent things, and his mother was as oblivious as Kevin's father.
The problem of whether or not this work of fiction has arrived at a closer truth than a non fiction work could is not to be resolved. The Phantom is not privy to enough case studies of psychopaths, but one can imagine the child depicted moving on in adolescence to mow down his classmates.
Considering this story, if it is an accurate representation, it makes the confidently espoused plans from Janet Reno and Louis Freh after Columbine look even more ridiculous than history has proved them to be. Our society simply has no mechanism, no institution to identify and head off this sort of aberrant homicidal sociopath.
Gun control laws may inhibit these killers, might drive them to more inventiveness, but if it's not a gun, it will be a bow and arrow or a homemade bomb or a chain saw or some other improvised weapon of mass destruction.
If people like this are growing up among us, then there is no gun law which will protect us very well. Take away the gun, and there is always the bow and arrow, the bomb, the automobile.
And there simply is nowhere for the parent of such a child to turn.
If we are seeing more mass killings, especially of children, the Phantom cannot imagine this is because of some sort of mass effect: Not too much fluoride in the water, not too many violent video games nor too much sugar in the diet. No, there is something out there which affects just the rare individual, some mutation.
As depicted in the movie, and one has to suspect these details come from accounts from the mothers, this child would never respond as most children do to smiles as an infant, would not even roll a ball back to the mother, was still in diapers at age five, defecating in ways which were clearly calculated to enrage his mother, and there is one chilling scene where he spews forth an accurately aimed venom at his mother when she has taken him to lunch, and he says, "Oh, this is the part where you reach across to put your arm around me." He rejects warmth, expressions of affection. He is at war with his mother.
At Yale, the Phantom once opened the door to a toilet stall and there, right next to the toilet, on the floor was a pile of feces, placed there very carefully by some psychopathic undergraduate--one of the best and the brightest in the carefully screened and selected student body which Yale claimed to have chosen with such exactitude. This film brought that memory to mind.
It all leaves you depressed, and disarmed. Nothing will help. No expert in mental health, no mental health program, nothing can effectively disarm a child as cunning, determined, hateful, secretive, relentless and homicidal as Kevin.
Kevin offers no solutions, only despair.
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