This horribly botched attempt at an apology by the mother of Vaughn Foods beheading suspect Alton Nolan is only tangentially related to the Second Amendment (Nolan was shot and stopped while hacking on his second victim by a company officer who is also a reserve deputy). We’re posting it as an eye-opening look at power of psychological denial which seems to affect the family members of so many of the criminals we end up writing about in our “Guns Saving Lives” section… several of whom have written us in protest for the “unfair” way we’ve treated their criminal relations.

In regards to this mother’s tortured attempted apology, our very compassionate and devout friend Ed Morrissey of Hot Air points out:

It would be impossible to not feel sympathy for what the Nolens must be enduring at the moment. I’ve been trying to imagine what it would be like to find out a family member was responsible for a brutal, barbaric attack like this, and can’t comprehend the horror. The denial stage would last a very long time for me, and I’d be inclined to tell everyone to wait for all of the facts to come out, too. “What they’re saying Alton has done” is also a construct I’d be inclined to use under those circumstances, and maybe all the way through to a guilty verdict in court.

That being said, I’d have waited to do a YouTube video until that point, too. There may well be many sides to this story, but none of them will validate the beheading of an unarmed co-worker under any circumstances, let alone for the apparent Islamist motives that were in evidence on Nolen’s Facebook page. Perhaps the family means that Nolen was so insane as to not be responsible for his actions, and that may well be his defense when the case comes to court. But as far as the public is concerned, they will only want to know that police got the actual perpetrator and that’s he’s not going to get the chance to do it again. Beyond that, they’re not interested in the second side to the story, no more than they were interested in Nidal Hasan’s side to the Fort Hood shooting.

While we feel a certain measure of sympathy for her, it’s very hard not to find her sentiments repellent as she seems to hope for some justification for her son’s actions, and perhaps what she perceives as her own failed parenting.

Nolan’s is not the first attack on unsuspecting American citizen’s by a radical Muslim convert, nor is it the most spectacular, and it certainly, sadly, won’t be the last.

Expect more protesting half-apologies after the next attack, and hope that when that next attack does come that it—like the attack in Oklahoma City—is cut short by a good guy with a gun.