Gun Control & the urgency of "Doing Something"

On the other hand, I think a case can be made that if you live in a home with a psycho, you shouldn't have guns anywhere in the house. Nancy Lanza, take note.

Oops, too late.

 

Spengler, the "friendly neighborhood" hammer killer, that the parole board was uncomfortable letting out.

 

I also do not disagree with what you are saying. The point I was making was that people in Iowa know the cutural norms there better than someone in DC would. Mental health (like physical health) procedures should be regionally established, as opposed to federally mandated or controlled. We have terrible systems in place to help those that need it, much less for those that may pose a threat to the common good. We may never have accurate or reliable indicators of what someone is going to do in the future, but I think that helping people would be better accomplished on a local level. The insurance angle is another power grab/money play. If mental "illnesses" become something that is an incarcerable offense, then there will be huge money in it, just like the penal systems now. Someone, somewhere will make tons of money off of imprisoning people for being diagnosed with mental challenges, just like they do off of theives, murderers and other sundry criminals that are convicted.

Before anything else, we should focus on improving our ability to help those that need it. If we do a better job of focusing on that, we will prevent more than if we wrongly focus on predictive methods. Predictives can only give you a chance of finding someone that "may" be more prone to doing something outside the cultural norms, and then with only a certain percentage, and it could always be wrong.

 

I'm torn about the mental health issue. I know there are a handful of severely ill people who need their meds to function. On the other hand, Psychiatrists have been very busy labeling various normal human conditions as diseases that must be treated with drugs. Well people should not be taking psychotropic drugs. Psychotropic drugs should be the treatment of last result; they are very dangerous.

Remember earlier this year, when domestic spying was in overdrive, and the DHS was fingering veterans for abuse from local law enforcement? They were kidnapping veterans, stealing their guns and locking them up in VA and state mental hospitals on very flimsy pretexts. At least some of the victims were threatened with involuntary drugging by pschiatrists who seemed to have no concept of appropriate interpersonal boundaries or human rights. It was sickening.

Time after time we see that the psychotropic drugs are the problem, not the solution. Furthermore, stopping crime by committing crime makes absolutely no sense.

 

I share your concern about abuse of lock-up, marginally better than being shot dead by police. An interesting recent conversation in comments (just one foamer) and PBS story here that bears on civl rights and involuntary aid, re: one law example.

Making mental illness an incareratable "crime" that the taxpayer shells out for, (more than they do now), seems like a very twisted (and expensive) way of correcting a for-profit health care system. Incarceration wouldn't be medical care, but you can bet it would be billed-out as that!

Drugs are the only treatment, "help" anyone gets right now.

There is next to no system in place now. People who pose a threat are the only ones guaranteed to be seen. People have to deteriorate to such a degree and be disposed to violence to get "treatment", and even then are just held for 72 hours max and released.
The rest, who fall short of thinking of killing someone, are SOL, along with their families. (Wonder what the US ranking is on that health care scale).

If that even worked. The woman who killed the child in Las Vegas tried to check herself in to a hospital.

 

In the best traditions of the U.S.S.R.!

 

Sometimes doing nothing is much better than doing something in a knee-jerk reaction.

 

How true, knee-jerking got us TSA.

 

Agreed. If we would focus on the root issues to things, we could solve many of our problems almost overnight, and make a huge dent in the things we can't necessarily solve. Making snap changes to the rules based on small percentages, while politically expedient (sadly), is not a well thought out process.