Does it strike anyone as important that the CT shooter had Aspergers and it is often treated with...

[Lone_Star_Dem]

94. Fox News And The New York Times Abet Media Effort To Falsely Link Autism With CT Shooting

The murders committed in Newtown, Connecticut this week are an unimaginable national tragedy that’s still sinking in, and while there’s little the news media can do to help, they should, at the very least, do no harm at a time like this. Unfortunately, in addition to piles of reported “facts” that have wound up not to be true, our news media has been engaged, to varying degrees, in a campaign to falsely link autism with the sort of violence that resulted in this unthinkable event. Fox News’ Hannity program and The New York Times are among the latest to err on the extreme end of this spectrum.

The gold standard for irresponsibly and falsely linking autism with mass murder still belongs to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who, in the wake of the mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, told his audience that killers like Aurora shooter James Holmes are “somewhere, I believe, on the autism scale,” and that while he didn’t know if this was true of Holmes specifically, “it happens more often than not.”

Scarborough never corrected his utterly false and damaging statement on-air, but in that case, there were no other media figures mentioning autism, so Scarborough was the lone voice of irresponsibility. As I wrote extensively at that time, there is absolutely no evidence of any kind linking Autism Spectrum Disorders with criminal violence.
http://www.mediaite.com/print/fox-news-and-the-new-york-times-abet-media-effort-to-falsely-link-autism-with-ct-shooting/

Autism, Empathy, And Violence: Asperger's Does Not Explain The Connecticut Shooting

Some news coverage in the last 48 hours has mentioned autism in the context of the tragedy in Connecticut, particularly referencing shooter Adam Lanza's possible Asperger’s or "high-functioning" autism. Talking heads have brought up the "empathy" factor when discussing autism, and I'd like to set some of the record on that straight.

Empathic ability comes in two forms. One is the social ability to recognize the emotion someone is feeling by following social cues, subtle vocal fluctuations, and other nonverbal communications. Psychopaths, for example, might be quite good at reading people, at applying this cognitive empathy and then possibly exploiting it. Autistic people, on the other hand, generally tend not to be that great at this kind of recognition in non-autistic people. After all, the hallmark of autism is difficulty navigating this territory and registering the meaning of a nonverbal language that is unfamiliar to them. Worth noting, non-autistic people also seem to struggle with reading the nonverbal communication of autistic people. It can also be difficult for autistic people to automatically place themselves situationally in the other person's shoes and intuit the emotion the other person feels, although again, non-autistic people seem to struggle to do this for autistics. Autism does not, however, preclude a person from understanding a clear communication about emotion.

The other form of empathy follows on the recognition of the emotion, whether the message comes through verbally or nonverbally, intuitively or not. That's the form in which you not only can intellectualize the person's emotion but also can internalize and feel what they are feeling, known as emotional empathy. The gap for psychopaths comes in here: They seem to lack this emotional empathy. But whatever deficits autism might carry in terms of recognition, it makes up for in terms of the shared feeling. My experience has been that once an autistic becomes aware of the other person's emotion, the feeling comes without a social construct, naked and in full, unmodulated. Certainly, the expression of their feeling can be more intense. Research shows that people with Asperger's are not that great at cognitive empathy but that their emotional empathy does not differ from people without Asperger's, whereas children with conduct disorder show the reverse pattern.

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Planned, social violence is not a feature of autism. Indeed, autistic people are far more likely to have violence done against them than to do violence to others. No one knows as of this writing what drove the Connecticut shooter to kill 20 children and 7 adults, point blank, although obvious candidates are rage, hate, a huge grudge against humanity and some triggering event. But if he turns out to have been someone on the spectrum, I'd like to remind everyone that autism is not an explanatory factor in his actions. And that autistic people like my son are fully, fully capable of empathizing with those who were the target of them.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/17/autism-empathy-connecticut-shooting_n_2314769.html

And the results of all this lovely uninformed speculation about autism.

Troubling legacy of Sandy Hook may be backlash against kids with autism

(TIME.com) -- On the first day back to school after 20 first-graders and six adults died at a Connecticut elementary school, students at a Utah middle school gathered to discuss the massacre.

A boy raised his hand. "The reason why this man shot little kids is because he has autism," he said.

Tricia Nelson's seventh-grade son was at the assembly. He's shy, not the kind of child apt to speak in public, but his hand darted up in response. "Autism doesn't make people shoot other people," he said.

At 12, Nelson's son is somewhat of an expert on autism. His younger brother, who is 10, has a severe form of the neurodevelopmental disorder. He doesn't speak and he attends a school for special needs. But he is not violent, said his older brother; he would not kill anyone.

"He was in tears when he was telling me what happened," says Nelson of her older son. She is an events organizer for Autism Speaks, the world's largest autism research and advocacy group. "He said, 'This boy is going to spread rumors.'"

After Nelson's son spoke up, a teacher seconded his comments. She urged the students not to make assumptions. Yet as the country struggles to come to grips with the loss of life at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, people with autism are finding themselves the focus of misunderstanding and more than a little scrutiny.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/19/health/shooting-autism/

Think about what you're saying. This sort of speculation to push an agenda at the expense of smearing innocent people is not acceptable. Words have power, and we should never use them to hurt an already abused demographic of our population. Which if you mean to be doing so or not, is exactly what your doing with this type of misinformed speculation.