That person, Ms. F., says she is a divorced minister and quilting enthusiast who moved to Saint Charles to be closer to her family. She says she doesn’t know the alleged Twitter, nor does she use Twitter. “I am 71 years old I don’t do social networking,” she told the Daily Beast Tuesday. She said she has tried to contact Twitter about the mix up, but thus far the number she has been calling has been a fax line.

Ms. F. has also called the local police, who are now investigating the case for cyber-harassment. Lt. Craig McGuire of the Saint Charles County Sheriff's Department confirmed that she lives at that address and said the department's cyber-crimes unit is handling the case. "There were hackers who identified what they thought was a good phone number and a good address for this guy on Twitter," he said. "But the phone number is no good and he doesn’t live at that address anymore. Now all these knuckleheads get on there and want to call and have their voices heard and threaten these people," he added. "But we want to tell them you can’t believe everything you see on the Internet.” The head of the cyber-crimes unit, Chris Mateja, said the unit is going through the answering-machine messages to determine whether they constitute harassment.

The ordeal has forced Ms. F to change her outgoing message, she says. It now says, “If you are trying to reach Jacob you have the wrong number. I am a 71-year-old woman living with my dog. All of you who are calling have been fooled into thinking I am Jacob.”

In the interview she said she just wanted all the hateful answering-machine messages to stop. She said she is thinking of adding a new line to her answering-machine message: “When you are leaving threatening, hateful messages that many of you have left, you are perpetrating the same kind of hateful thinking that caused this horrendous event in Connecticut to have happened in the first place.”

The Huffington Post published a corrective article, “No Link Between Asperger’s Syndrome And Violence, Experts Say.” But to date, the corrective article has only received 2,500 Facebook “likes” compared to the more than a million received by Long’s original piece. The misinformation had circled the virtual world before the truth had even begun to get its cyber-boots on.

By Sunday, the line had grown into a swelling chorus. Erik Erickson, the founder and editor of the popular Republican website Redstate, was averring: “Discussions of gun control are easier to have than discussions about mental health.” The owner of one of the many gun ranges in the rural rolling hills around Newtown, Conn., was telling The New York Times: “A gun didn’t kill all those children, a disturbed man killed all those children.” David Rivkin, a constitutional lawyer who served in both the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations, appeared on the BBC World Service to tell millions of listeners overseas: “It’s not about gun ownership, it is about mental illness.” “If there’s one unifying feature of all these atrocities,” Rivkin stated in an interview for the popular Newshour program on Monday night, “it’s that they were all committed by mentally unbalanced people who need to be confined for the protection of those around them and other people.”

The only problem with this argument is that it has no basis in fact. If mental illness was the key factor in multiple gun homicides like Newtown, then other countries would regularly experience the kind of carnage visited on towns and cities in the U.S. on almost on a monthly basis. But they don’t. In Britain, an advanced study by Manchester University into “Suicide and Homicide by People with Mental Illness” has found most people who kill more than one person are neither mentally ill, nor mental health patients, As Dr. David H. Barlow, a senior expert in comparative mental health-care systems and Emeritus Professor at Boston University, told The Daily Beast, “the incidence of mental illness is quite consistent across Europe and America.” Yet the statistics for the homicide and suicide rates are much higher in the U.S. than most of the rest of Europe, with Americans 100 times more likely to die to a gun-related death than in the U.K.

Despite the promise of a conversation about mental health, misinformation and ignorance became the norm in the aftermath of the Newtown tragedy.  British CNN host Piers Morgan suggested that anyone with a history of mental illness should be banned from owning a gun in the U.S., but that would include almost 50 per cent of Americans who are expected to suffer from some condition in their lifetime.  The Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about 25 percent of U.S. adults currently suffer from some kind of mental ilnness—though this would include phobias and obsessive disorders. In 2011, government data calculated that around 5 percent of the U.S. population suffered from severe mental illness, while Professor Barlow estimates that somewhere around 1 percent  of the U.S. population will be suffering from psychosis—including delusions and hallucinations—at any one time. “But even they show an only slightly elevated risk of violence,” Barlow told The Daily Beast, “with a small increased risk of around 5 or 10 percent above normal.” Meanwhile, those who suffer from psychosis are much more likely to be the victims of homicide or kill themselves.

Every parent, including me, has been agonizing over how our schools can be made safer. We can no longer get on an airplane without taking off our shoes and packing tiny tubes of toothpaste; should Newtown be to school safety what 9/11 was to airline travel? Is it even possible?

Think about the implications: whether gun laws are tightened or not, you would need armed guards at every school entrance in case an intruder tries to shoot his way in. You would need metal detectors in case a disgruntled student tried to smuggle in a weapon. We could make our schools safer by taking drastic measures. But at what price? Would we be robbing our children of their innocence by turning their places of learning into an armed camp?

Tom Fuentes, a former FBI agent, tells me that not only would the armed guards need to be at the entrance; they would have to be “gun ready” for their presence to dissuade an armed intruder. “That’s what the kids would be seeing every day.” Not a pleasant thought.

Ron Stevens, executive director of the nonprofit National School Safety Center, which provides training for school crime prevention, agrees the premise is faulty.

“We have determined to immediately engage in a formal process to sell our investment in Freedom Group.” That way, Cerberus can give the money back to its investors, and go about its business “without being drawn into the national debate that is more properly pursued by those with the formal charter and public responsibility to do so.”

While welcome, the statement is troubling. And while it is tempting, even satisfying, to lash out at a secretive private-equity firm that profits from the sale of automatic weapons, a deeper look should cause us to pose questions to others, and to ourselves. The rich guys in New York weren’t the only beneficiaries of Freedom Group’s growth. In fact, many of the indirect beneficiaries are people of much more humble means.

Let’s start with the obvious.  Cerberus claims that “as a firm, we are investors, not statesmen or policy makers.” But of course, Cerberus’s small leadership team includes statesmen and former policymakers like Dan Quayle, a former vice president of the United States, and John Snow, a former Treasury secretary. In recent years, Cerberus has purposely become involved with companies that benefit from, and rely on, public policy. One of its more successful investments has been in Air Canada, for example.

Private-equity executives, including the folks at Cerberus, have very strong opinions on matters of public policy when it comes to tax rates, the treatment of carried interest, and entitlement spending. Cerberus executives, including its founder, Stephen Feinberg, have given heavily to political campaigns (virtually all of it to Republicans). For people who chose to operate in regulated industries, who choose to invest in government contractors, and who participate in the political process at a high level to suddenly plead a lack of interest and competency in such areas now that there’s a national debate on gun control is highly convenient.

Suddenly, Toucey found herself fielding phone calls from friends and acquaintances wondering about the link between Asperger’s and violent behavior. Postings on the LSU-themed message board she frequents were calling for Asperger’s individuals to be locked up. As for the sensationalistic media coverage: “I had to turn the news off. I wanted to punch people in the face, they were so ignorant,” she says. “Some psychiatrist was on CNN, making it sound like people with Asperger’s have violent outbursts all the time.”

This is, in fact, far from the case, say experts.

The vast majority of individuals with Asperger’s are “struggling with a significant disability and doing the best they can. They are not violent. They are not criminals,” says Dr. Fred Volkmar, director of the Child Study Center at Yale University’s school of medicine.

“Having any kind of chronic developmental trouble increases the likelihood of having other troubles,” acknowledges Volkmar, chief of child psychiatry at New Haven Hospital. But he notes that “in kids strictly diagnosed with Asperger’s, the most frequent thing you see is depression.” Unlike lower-functioning individuals, who are often not as aware of their surroundings, kids with Asperger’s “know they’re missing out. They just can’t figure out how to work within the system,” explains Volkmar. “The reality is that they are much more likely to be the butt of jokes or teased or the victim rather than the victimizer.”

William O’Neil’s son, Daniel, was one of 32 people killed by Seung-Hui Cho when the 23-year-old student attacked the Virginia Tech University campus on April 16, 2007. Daniel was 22 and working on his master’s degree in environmental engineering when he died.

We lived in Lincoln, Rhode Island for a long time, our children were raised there. The Virginia Tech massacre certainly had some effect on our decision to move to a town called Westerly, but before the massacre I changed jobs and started working in New London, Connecticut. So moving was as much about convenience as anything else.

I am much more cynical, in general, than I was before. I am not hopeful. I have the feeling that we are willing to sacrifice people every so often in this country so that we can protect our gun laws. Basically, my view of the government is not very positive. Government isn’t the enemy. But I’m cynical about whether the government is going to get anything done and if what they’re getting done is for the benefit of the populace. With this latest horrible tragedy in Newtown maybe we can get some meaningful gun laws. 

I’m not opposed to all guns. I understand hunting, I understand that people hunt for good reasons and I even understand people who have guns in their homes for good reasons—though I would never have one. But there is no reason for assault weapons. The only purpose for assault weapons is to kill other people.

Well, you’d better believe that most states got into line pretty quickly. The law was challenged by South Dakota in short order, but in South Dakota v. Dole, the Supreme Court upheld—this is important to remember—the right of the federal government to influence individual states’ laws. The majority agreed, by a 7-2 margin, that indirect action by Washington toward the end of making states do this or that was within constitutional bounds.

So here’s what should happen now. Congress should tell states, in the wake of this surely worse epidemic of gun violence, that they must put some substance into the phrase “well-regulated militia.” They must define well-regulated militia to include not only the National Guard, but all legally registered gun-owners in the state. If they fail to do so, and in line with the precedent set by the drinking-age act, they risk losing 10 percent of their federal law-enforcement funding.

Why not? Who could argue with such a move? It would be precisely in the spirit of the Second Amendment as worded, in which the right to keep and bear arms is granted within the context of the existence of such a militia. The founders spoke explicitly of said militia. So, let’s make it!

Legally registered gun-owners would become members of each state’s more broadly construed militia. They would not, obviously, be required to report for service on certain weekends like Guard members do. But their membership in this broader militia would come with certain responsibilities.

It’s time for a history lesson about one of America’s most popular and least understood rights. It’s also long past time to expose the hollow, ignorant fawning over the Second Amendment by gun-rights advocates for what it is.

In contrast to the libertarian fantasies that drive the contemporary debate about firearms in America, the Founders understood that liberty without regulation leads not to freedom, but anarchy. They understood that an armed body of citizens easily becomes a mob. In other words, a bunch of guys grabbing their guns and waving a flag emblazoned with a rattlesnake is not a militia.

A cursory look at the history of the Second Amendment shows that regulation was a central part of its rationale—putting “well regulated” at the very start of the amendment was no accident. For instance, starting in the colonial period, states enacted a variety of “safe-storage” measures to deal with the danger posed by stored gunpowder. A 1786 law went as far as prohibiting the storage of a loaded gun in any building in Boston.

But many people who defend gun rights today are more than happy to skim over the first part of the amendment in their zeal to embrace the second. (The NRA itself literally chopped off that pesky first half when it chiseled the words on the face of its old headquarters.) As a result, our modern gun-rights ideology is often unmoored from any sense of corresponding civic obligation.

By lopping off the first half of the sentence, the pro-gun lobby and its apologists have eliminated the Founders’ rationale for this amendment: That those who bore arms did so as members of a well-regulated militia. This was never a license for freelance vigilantism.

Just months before the Constitution was forged, our new nation endured Shays’ Rebellion of 1786-7, in which a militia had to be called out in Massachusetts to suppress an uprising against the government’s fiscal policies before order was restored. The purpose of the Second Amendment was to subdue violent dissent, not enhance it. At the time, we hardly had an army to speak of, so the safest way to ensure the security of the federal and state governments against subversion was “a well-regulated militia.” It derives from Article One of the Constitution, which gives Congress the power “To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” The Second Amendment says nothing about administering personal justice or taking the law into one’s own hands.

One of the ironies of its deification by the current Supreme Court is that Justice Antonin Scalia, a self-styled “originalist,” has ignored the historical context and the clear intent of the Founders in providing legalistic cover for the gun lobby.

There is, however, one sort of militia that benefits from the arsenal of heavy weaponry available to all comers. It is the paramilitary groups that practice secretly for a final reckoning with the federal government in the name of a “liberty” known only to them. Who else would need such an arsenal? Yet it is these very anarchic groups that the Second Amendment was incorporated to subdue.

These are not just fringe figures but elected officials and other leaders of the Tea-vangelist wing of the GOP.

Former presidential candidate and Arkansas ex-governor Mike Huckabee instinctively blamed the separation of church and state for the mass murder. “We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools,” Huckabee said on Fox News. “Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage? … Maybe we ought to let [God] in on the front end and we wouldn’t have to call him to show up when it’s all said and done at the back end.”

Surprisingly, some people had a problem with this.

Those ranks included the always-thoughtful conservative Pete Wehner, writing at Commentary.

The discrepancy in organizing capacity between the opposing sides of the gun debate has been underscored in recent days, as many Americans have found themselves anxious to join the fight against the NRA and to start pushing for stricter gun-control laws.

The problem is, there isn’t much of a fight to join. Besides the Brady Campaign, dozens of groups are fighting for gun safety, all of which have different agendas, leadership styles, and supporters. The most prominent group of the moment is the Mike Bloomberg-backed Mayors Against Illegal Guns. But if it wasn’t clear from the name, that group is focused mostly on mayors and other elected officials, and less on building a mass movement.

In its six years in existence, Mayors Against Illegal Guns has had a decent run. The group defeated a bill that would have forced states to honor out-of-state concealed-carry permits. It also racked up a handful of victories over pro-gun lawmakers in the 2012 elections after pouring millions of Bloomberg’s money into a super PAC. The group has launched a new ad campaign, and the New York City mayor has pledged to keep his wallet open in the next round of elections —“shame on me if I don’t,” he said at a press conference Monday, surrounded by dozens of family members of shooting victims—but the group hasn’t done anything yet to approach the organizing power of the NRA.

“We thought that what was needed in this broken debate was an outsider,” said Arkadi Gerney, who as a City Hall aide was one of the original organizers of MAIG. “And those outsiders, the core of them, are mayors. If you are a mayor, you can’t ignore the crime issue. And instead of fighting these battles city by city, we bring these ideas to Washington. I think it has helped change the discussion.”