雅思时事阅读：亚当.兰扎为何袭击学校？

　　2012年12月14日，美国举国上下沉浸在一篇悲痛的情绪中，在美国康涅狄格州纽敦市的桑迪.胡克小学发生了一起严重的枪击案，一名20岁的少年持枪闯入桑迪.胡克小学，杀害了包括枪手在内的28人，其中20人为儿童，系美国历史上死伤最惨重的校园枪击案之一。美国政府和媒体对此事几位关注，并在顿短间内做出了详细的报道。下面雅思从国外网站上收集整理了雅思时事阅读系列之康涅狄格州校园枪击案系列报道，供考生们使用，这些文章都是很好的雅思阅读材料，考生可以先泛读掌握其大意，再精读学习其中的词汇用法，以下为详细内容。

　　康涅狄格州校园枪击案：亚当.兰扎为何袭击学校？

　　Sandy Hook Shooting: Why Did Lanza Target A School?

　　The killing of 26 people, including 20 children, at the Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut has understandably shocked the nation, and details are just beginning to emerge about the shooter, Adam Lanza, a 20-year old man who also murdered his mother. Events such as these inevitably re-open up debates about gun control, or more tenuously lead people to complain about American culture itself. Yet on the very same day, a 36-year-old Chinese man attacked 22 children with a knife at a primary school in China, suggesting that there is a critical factor with mass homicides that gets far less attention.

　　For all the disbelief and dismay, we actually know pretty well that most such events are committed by individuals with a particular set of characteristics. As my colleagues Mark Coulson, Jane Barnett and I noted in a 2011 article in the Journal of Police Crisis Negotiations, school shooters have generally been found to 1) have a history of antisocial personality traits, 2) suffer from mental illnesses such as depression or psychosis and 3) tend to obsess about how others, whether other individuals or society at large, have wronged them. These individuals seethe with rage and hatred and despondency, until they decide to lash out at individuals or a society they believe has done them great wrong. Mental health, and our failure to address it as a society, is at the core of these events.

　　Not all mass homicide perpetrators target schools, but schools do seem to be an unusually common target. People wonder why angry men so often target innocent children who have done them no wrong. In the case of Sandy Hook, although early reports suggested that Lanzas mother, Nancy Lanza, may have worked there, the school superintendent has since clarified that she was not a teacher or a substitute. In many other cases, there is no obvious connection. Watching the horror and great sadness that has descended over the nation in the last 24 hours, we have our answer. These perpetrators have lashed out against society in the most vicious way possible, inflicting the most pain that they could. That is the point of targeting a school.

　　Gun control may potentially remove one tool from the hands of potential perpetrators, but mass homicides occur in every part of the globeScotland, Norway, Germany, China. So while it may indeed be the right time to talk about gun control, as many are saying, it is also the right time to talk about mental health care in our country. Our countrys funding for mental health services has only gotten worse since the 2008 recession. As the National Alliance on Mental Illness has been warning for some time, the existing level of funding is inadequate, so our nations ability to identify and care for the severely mentally ill has been hamstrung.

　　In my own clinical work, Ive seen individuals Ive identified as being potentially at risk for future criminal behavior due to their mental illness. Very often, there are simply few to no resources for them until they come to the attention of the criminal justice system. Obviously, the vast majority of the chronically mentally ill wont commit crimes, certainly not of the severity of the Sandy Hook shooting. But by leaving the mentally ill adrift to fend for themselves, we miss the opportunity to identify and treat some of these at-risk individuals before they escalate. Granted, neither gun control nor a well-funded mental health system will prevent every mass homicide. But we leave ourselvesand more innocent childrenvulnerable until we address both of those issues.