From: Mike Fahy

Do you remember when a PanAm stewardess was put through a woodchipper by her Eastern Airlines husband? That horrific November 1986 “woodchipper murder” was committed in Newtown, Connecticut. Yet this weekend’s news stories paint Newtown as a quiet, pristine, crimeless community.

The wealthy stewardess and her pilot-husband lived in a Newtown ranch home with their three children and au pair. She was murdered in her bedroom, stuffed into a freezer purchased for the occasion, then woodchipped into the river running through Newtown at 3:30 a.m. during a blizzard. Only two-thirds of an ounce of her body was ever recovered. The three-year investigation, hung-jury trial, and conviction trial made forensic examiner Henry Lee famous before he became a television star at the O.J. Simpson acquittal. The pilot-husband (with mental issues) will be released from prison in nine years.

Newtown’s Crazy Adam Lanza may have been taking the anti-psychotic drug Fanapt (iloperidone) which can have side effects including delusional and suicidal thoughts and self-inflicted wounds. During the past year, Adam Lanza was occasionally burning himself with a cigarette lighter. His mother, Nancy Lanza, never talked about his insanity. Marsha Lanza of Crystal Lake, Illinois says her nephew, the murderer, had “learning issues,” but his mother never talked about “behavioral issues.” Nancy Lanza was not as secretive about disparaging her ex-husband, Peter Lanza. She was awarded the Newtown mansion, a quarter million dollars annually in alimony, and Red Sox season tickets. Less than a week before her violent death, Nancy Lanza admitted that her son Adam “was getting worse.” But she did nothing about it.

A generation ago, Crazy Lanza would have been placed in a mental health facility. But the state closed Newtown’s large Fairfield Hills Psychiatric Hospital in 1995. This year Newtown has been debating what should be done with that expansive hospital real estate. Maybe they should use it for the graves of those 28 who would still be alive if Crazy Lanza had been institutionalized.

Since 1950, with only one exception, all mass murders (three or more victims) using bullets have occurred in venues where guns are banned. Private schools where a gun is kept by a teacher, administrator, guard, or custodian have never been targeted by the likes of Crazy Lanza. The Joker murderer in Aurora, Colorado had seven theaters in his area showing that midnight movie; he chose the only theater that banned guns. Air Force officers in that targeted theater had to leave their sidearms in their automobiles. Our societal guardrails have been torn down.

With a complete disregard of the facts, political gun-grabbers will now be leveraging their one-size-fits-all panacea of banning the instrumentality rather than preventing the evil.

Mike Fahy
– 30 –

Can’t let Bloomberg steal a march on him.

. . . Woe is us:

After failing a few weeks ago to allow women to become bishops, Anglicans have much to make them anxious about their place in the modern world this Christmas season. They do, however, as our Religion editor, Rupert Shortt, points out, at least have a long and successful experience of translating liturgy into language which those without Latin can understand.

This expertise has not been emulated, he complains, in the latest attempt by Roman Catholics to translate their Mass. The Vatican has centralized its control over all future translations intended for use in the anglophone world and the version under review, The CTS New Sunday Missal, is, Shortt says, a mixture of the clumsy and the outlandishly baroque.

Ignoring Anglican anxiety about failure to make bishops of women, consider their Englished liturgy. And then consider what the Vatican hath done with its various committees. And what the heaven difference does it make if we say with yr spirit and not with you, etc. The big fat translation of a year or so ago produced tempest in teapot, leaving opening for yet a new back-to-Latin movement. Short of that, “the clumsy and ‘. . . outlandishly baroque.'”

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On the other hand . . .

While it may do little to end disagreements among liturgists over recent changes to the Roman Missal, a survey conducted in September, nearly a year after controversial revisions of the English language Mass took effect, found that seven in 10 Catholics agree that the new translation of the Mass “is a good thing” (20 percent agree “strongly”).

Nearly a quarter of the Catholics surveyed (23 percent) disagreed, however, and an additional 7 percent “strongly” disagree with the view that the changes were for the better.

Which goes to show . . .  what?