You wanna talk about ‘shaking with rage’, Pamela? Well, you should see me right now, because I’m positively spastic just from reading your noxious article.

Frankly, if this is how the neurotypical ‘empathy gene’ manifests itself, I think I’ll take that Asperger’s diagnosis that’s been hovering around me for a while.

That’s what scares me, and breaks my heart, when I look at my adorable boy, full of love, life and goodness – that anyone might decide they can’t take a chance on him.

You know what happens when stories like this keep coming out, one after another after another? I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, Rachel, or the other autistic people (and allies) reading this, but I’ll say it anyway: People start saying things like, “Yes, we know that most of you aren’t like that, but just in case you are the one in 500 million who would do such a thing — which we can’t know because we hardly know you — we can’t take the chance on hiring you/being your friend/letting you go to school or live here/etc.”

We can’t take the chance. That’s what this comes down to, people wanting their suspicions confirmed. The same thing would probably have happened if he were NT but brown or Muslim or transgender, or maybe even gay or Jewish or pagan or avowedly atheist or fat (I’m sure I could make this list even longer if I thought about it). “You’re one of them, those people we will grudgingly tolerate until one of you does something very, very bad. Then we will use that as an excuse to do what we’ve secretly been wanting to do, which is relentlessly snub each and every one of you, because we only really trust people who are exactly like us.”

It doesn’t make sense. That’s because it’s based on a prejudice.

Okay, it’s also unsettling in other ways that I remembered immediately after I hit submit…figures. But I do think I understand what she’s *trying* to say in the piece – how’s that for theory of mind? – I just don’t think she’s saying it very effectively, which is why it still feels unsettling to me.

With a subject like this, I think people need to go into overkill mode with explanations and caveats and paraphrasing complex ideas into the simplest constructions possible – repeatedly – because it’s too easy for things to be misunderstood. It’s too heavy and consequential a topic for an author to not make sure she is being absolutely, without a doubt, perfectly clear in what she is actually trying to convey.

I just read her addition and I do think it helps explain where she is coming from a bit. She touches on the same ideas I have been thinking about – the indirect routes from one point to another, with all of the input from external sources that happens along the way. I do want to give her the benefit of the doubt in light of that, but I also think that if we’re going to be discussing indirect relationships, we need to stop talking about autism specifically, because if the indirect relationships between things are about bullying, abuse, silencing, and all of the other things that happen, then we are absolutely not just talking about autism. We are talking about an entire culture.

And still, her article is unsettling to me because I know that so many people don’t think critically or deeply about things. I hate seeing autism and violence in the same article even if there is more to it than that, because I am so afraid that people won’t notice, absorb, or care about the “more to it.”

This, I understand. I got to that point many times when I was younger. I had to use up every ounce of self-control restraining myself from hitting someone or throwing something at someone. It didn’t take long before I started hurting myself instead, and I’ve had the bruises and scratches and aches and still have the scars to show for it. I know what it’s like. And she’s right: it *is* a testament to his goodness that he exerts so much energy to restrain himself when he has arrived or been brought to that point of frustration.

But that’s where it ends. There is no excuse for the author thinking that all it takes to go from that to premeditated murder is an unknown trigger. No excuse. It’s ridiculous. I don’t even know how else to get that point across because it’s so incredibly absurd.

I actually wonder how many non-autistic males would restrain themselves under the same internal pressure as the author’s brother sometimes experiences. Boys and men getting into fistfights wouldn’t be such a common occurrence in books, TV, and movies, and wouldn’t be presented in the ways it is presented, if it wasn’t so widespread in our culture. People lash out at other people all the time – usually at specific people, the objects of their immediate emotion. I wish they didn’t, but they do, and they’re not suspected to have the capacity for mass murder because they scream at someone, hit someone, or even kill someone. The author’s brother hasn’t been violent at all and has shown more restraint than so many boys and men without autism who have lashed out due to extreme frustration and anger, and he is suspected to be one hypothetical trigger away from imaginary mass murder. How does that makes sense?

There is no other evidence.

One question.Where is there any evidence, beyond two comments, off hand in the instance of his brother, unsubstantiated in the instance of the divorce mediator, that Lanza had Aspergers, or was anywhere on the spectrum?Cos ive not read of it.