James Holmes probably one of them autistics, Joe Scarborough speculates responsibly

 "I'm not a high-functioning sociopath, I'm an Aspie, get it right."

I generally try to stay away from all cable news channels, for different reasons. Fox is Fox, MSNBC wants to be a liberal alternative to Fox but they think that all that means is having a bunch of their own loud dicks to compete with Fox's (I'm excluding Rachel Maddow, who is, for all intents and purposes, Wonder Woman), and CNN is utterly terrified of being accused of bias, to the point that they hired a conservative blogger so comically privileged that he thinks of himself as a working stiff because he's responsible for a blog AND a talk radio show.

So, anyway, I didn't learn until a couple days after the fact that MSNBC's congressman cum morning show idiot (that's a specific kind of idiot that all of these channels are required to have, apparently-- you're still waking up, you don't care) Joe Scarborough had said of James Holmes, the accused shooter in last week's Aurora, Colo. massacre:

As soon as I heard about this shooting, I knew who it was. I knew it was a young, white male, probably from an affluent neighborhood, disconnected from society -- it happens time and time again. Most of it has to do with mental health; you have these people that are somewhere, I believe, on the autism scale. I don't know if that's the case here, but it happens more often than not.

I'm not sure if it's a step up or a step down that it's apparently now de rigeur to identify your baseless speculation as such while you're doing it, but either way, JESUS, Joe.  After anything like this happens, it's true that people immediately start scrambling to find something that they think explains why the shooter did it, and they invariably come up with all kinds of things (except the ready availability of guns because WHY DO YOU HATE FREEDOM?), and yes, because we are judgmental dicks who don't understand much, mental/neurological health issues are one of the things we tend to settle on. I was a senior in high school after the Virginia Tech massacre, and I remember hearing similar speculation about Seung-Hui Cho; I'll never forget a few days after, when a classmate said he could totally see me snapping and doing something similar. Weirdly enough, he was joking, in what he apparently thought was a good-natured way, and I'm not even sure he knew I was on the spectrum, but it was still a weird, early brush with the idea that behavior I perceive as normal can frighten other people.

Another really irresponsible thing about Scarborough's statement is that his descriptions ("disconnected from society") combined with what Holmes has done make it sound like he's equating being on the autism spectrum with being a sociopath. Indeed, his "profile" of the shooter brings to mind Leopold & Loeb or the Menendez brothers. Yes, it's true that autism spectrum disorders usually involve having issues with empathy; that said, in the context of autism or Asperger's, that generally means things like honesty to the point of rudeness, or failing to notice that somebody's upset. Not really the same thing.

Like a lot of disabilities, we stigmatize autism on two levels: kids (or uneducated adults) don't get that the weird kid who really likes Star Wars and has to arrange his pencils by height has a neurological disorder; they just know he's the weird kid, and when you're young, even if you're not a bully, you can have a difficult time processing the idea that somebody has a disability that you can't identify by looking at them.

The second level is adults who understand that autism is a thing, but have no experience with it beyond what they're told in the mass media, which, in its current form, is all about packaging the densest, shortest version of everything, nuance be damned; that's the reason so many adults, upon being told that I have autism, say "Oh, like Rain Man!", and also why I usually have to clarify "No, more like Sheldon Cooper/Spock/Abed." And now those same people have added "mass murderer" to their mental word-association algorithm.

And another really horrible thing that a lot of people haven't talked about is the effect this kind of thing has on actual autistic people. If you read Scarborough's remarks, despite their stupidity and insensitivity, he's clearly not saying that Holmes is definitely autistic, or that people on the spectrum are by definition spree killers. But did he ever consider that a person with a disorder that affects their communication skills and how they perceive the meaning of what people say might not catch that?

Scarborough has since apologized, albeit in that all-too-common "I'm really sorry you were too dumb to get what I meant and also my son has it" way; one hopes that, regardless, he'll be a little more careful and a little less Scarborough-y in the future.

I want to add that I know the events in Colorado aren't about me and my victimization, and I really don't mean to come off that way; my main reason for writing this, rather, is the fact that when something horrible happens suddenly, ignorant shit like this precisely the wrong direction to go in for both the healing process and understanding how it happened in the first place. If you want to help the victims and their loved ones, I encourage everyone to check out some of these resources.