An interesting piece in the Opinion Journal:
Diagnosis from afar is the purview of talk-shows hosts and other charlatans, and I will not attempt to detail the psyche of the Virginia Tech slaughterer. But I will hazard that much of what has been reported about his pre-massacre behavior–prolonged periods of asocial mutism and withdrawal, irrational anger and hatred, bizarre writing and speech–is not at odds with the picture of a fulminating, serious mental disease. And his age falls squarely within the most common period when psychosis blossoms.
No one who knew him seems surprised by what he did. On the contrary, dorm chatter characterized him explicitly as a future school-shooter. One of his professors, the poet Nikki Giovanni, saw him as a disruptive bully and kicked him out of her class. Other teachers viewed him as disturbed and referred him for the ubiquitous “counseling”–an outcome that is ambiguous to the point of meaninglessness and akin to “treatment” for a patient with metastasized cancer.
But even that minimal care wasn’t given. The shooter didn’t want it and no one tried to force him to get it. While it’s been reported that he was involuntarily committed to a “Behavioral Health Center” in December 2005, those reports also say he was released the very next morning. Even if the will to segregate an obvious menace had been in place, the legal mechanisms to provide even temporary “warehousing” were absent. The rest is terrible history.
That is not to say that anyone who pens violence-laden poetry or lets slip the occasional hostile remark should be protectively incarcerated. But when the level of threat rises to college freshmen and faculty prophesying accurately, perhaps we should err on the side of public safety rather than protect individual liberty at all costs.
If the Virginia Tech shooter had been locked up for careful observation in a humane mental hospital, the worst-case scenario would’ve been a minor league civil liberties goof: an unpleasant semester break for an odd and hostile young misanthrope who might’ve even have learned to be more polite. Yes, it’s possible confinement would’ve been futile or even stoked his rage. But a third outcome is also possible: Simply getting a patient through a crisis point can prevent disaster, as happens with suicidal people restrained from self-destruction who lose their enthusiasm for repeat performances.
I think that the most rational response to the shootings last week is to look at the current status of mental health treatment- not to freak out about guns, an issue we have shown we can not and will not resolve.
Ted
It certainly is interesting to see a piece in Opinion Journal that’s not totally batshit. They’re slipping.
Jimmmm
The question NOBODY is asking about this deranged psychopath: What was Cho’s LGF screenname?
Mr Furious
No, No, NO! John, this is clearly an immigration problem!
Or because of liberalism…
Not enough church chocolate in my state peanut butter?
The gays?
curtadams
How about trying both tacks? Better diagnosis and treatment for the mentally ill, *and* reducing the availability of handguns, which are basically designed to evade gun carry laws, and which have a primary use of suicide and a secondary use of killing innocent people? Progress on either front is better than progress on neither, and progress on both is better than progress on just one.
Jimmmm
Lost in all this is the counter-argument to the hoary RW talking point, “If just one more person had a gun, they could have shot Cho”: If there had been just one LESS gun, Cho wouldn’t have gone on his rampage.
The Other Steve
We stopped treating people in institutions because it was inhumane, and it cost a lot of money.
It’s much cheaper to let the families care for them.
The Other Steve
HEADSHOT! PWNED!
Decided FenceSitter
Two less actually.
BlogReeder
Do you have sources or are you just making this up?
I don’t understand what you mean by evade gun carry laws.
Are you saying the primary use of hand guns is suicide? So in order for this to be true, Most people who get hand guns mean to kill themselves? If just a few people get guns to kill themselves, it wouldn’t be a primary purpose. Or are you just referring to the mentally ill?
S.W. Anderson
The Other Steve wrote:
It was only inhumane when done unnecessarily and/or badly, which unfortunately was sometimes the case. That consideration probably started the trend, but the money angle surely pushed it to the point we’re at now: society’s near total shirking of its responsibility to see to the safety of seriously mentally ill people like Cho and the safety of everyone else.
What we do is pack most of the mentally ill off to jails and prisons, where what’s wrong with them is intensified and where they can enhance their criminal skills. This isn’t cheap, but it’s much cheaper than the network of mental institutions we need.
This perverse system we have is high risk, although most people don’t realize it unless an outrage like the Virginia Tech killings touches them or their loved ones. The public enjoys the benefits of lower taxes and insurance costs, which is great — as long as a Cho, a Charles Manson or a Ted Bundy doesn’t come along to spoil things. But if a crazed killer does come along, well, the benefits of lower taxes and insurance costs don’t seem like such a great deal anymore.
Just ask the loved ones of those slain at Virginia Tech.
The Other Steve
This is a conservative blog. By definition that means one doesn’t need sources for ridiculous claims.
The Other Steve
Aye, it was perhaps the last time we had true bipartisan cooperation on domestic policy.
When I wrote… “It’s much cheaper to let the families care for them.”
I meant to also add… “, and they can’t complain to the government about the quality of care given.”
ThymeZone
No doubt the Opinion Journal will now follow with a series of pieces on how adequate funding and appropriate lawmaking in the field of mental health will now become a priority for the political parties and their candidates?
Mental health in this country is a bleak tapestry of failure and a legacy of treating people and families as disposable.
And the story is not the story of the occasional madman who goes out and shoots a whole bunch of people. It’s actually a story of everyday madness and abuse, and damage to lives, families, jobs, coworkers and the general public, that is largely — and more and more — avoidable, but isn’t avoided, because we don’t have the will to do the right things.
gex
Also, don’t forget that as bad as the health insurance/coverage system in this country is for regular medical issues, it is so much worse for mental health issues. It is not uncommon for mental health problems to not be covered, or to have ridiculously low coverage caps, and so on. Further, the way the system is run now, with the need to move the people through like cattle makes it very uncommon for health care workers to actually follow up on patients. As a person who suffers from depression, it does not escape my notice that I can just stop going to see my doctors and therapists, stop refilling my prescriptions, etc. when things are going badly. They don’t notice.
Porco Rosso
At the link (on my name) is a Washington Post story about how people in India with mental illnesses can expect better outcomes than folks in America.
Part of the issue is also responsibility and how our system finds ways to wash our hands of responsibility and ultimately avoid it, leaving people to fall through the cracks and misery to result.
We may learn that everybody did exactly what they were supposed to do. But no more…
Dreggas
No joke, and let’s not forget the insane cost of said prescriptions. I have to take Welbutrin and Efexxor. Fortunately there is now a generic Welbutrin, not so for Efexxor and because the insurance company that my work uses charges an outrageous amount of money for any non-generic drug the cost of my efexxor is insane.
(insert name of deity) help me and those around me if I ever run into a situation where I can’t afford my meds, if I miss even 3 days I suffer extreme panic attacks, mood swings and shit. I have to say the doctors did well getting me this cocktail since I have been doing really good with it, but the freaking cost is killing me.
Zifnab
No, in order for that to be true the most common result of a gun being discharge must be for the bullet to enter the gunman’s own brain.
Frankly, I always assumed hunting was the number one use of firearms, but if suicide takes the lead, I’d love to see the statistics.
The second statistic I have no trouble believing, but I’d still love to see in writing. I’d like to see the number of alleged criminals who’ve received gunshot wounds compared to the number of innocent bystanders.
curtadams
The source is the US Department of Justice: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/tables/frmdth.htm Suicide is the majority of deaths by guns. No doubt many purchasers fantasize about self-defense, but the reality is that the primary use is suicide.
What I mean by “evade carry laws” is that handguns are unique in being highly concealable. There are many places guns don’t belong (schools, courts, movie theaters, etc.) There are (generally) laws and policies forbidding carrying guns into such places. But while such laws are readily enforceable against rifles, enforcing them against handguns requires invasive searches because handguns are so concealable. Basically, the only reason for a citizen to prefer a handgun over a rifle is to be able to hide it – and obviously, they are thus a huge benefit for those who seek to hide them for nefarious purposes.
Handguns should be restricted to police. While I could see deputies carrying handguns, no citizen should have one unless they have formal, adequately supervised relationship with the police. And no, a background check doesn’t suffice. People change and so ongoing supervision is essential, plus (as we saw with Cho) often the formal information available with a background check doesn’t adequately describe whether somebody’s suitable to carry a gun.
Tsulagi
No need to look for answers, the American Family Association has them all. Conveniently put into this video.
What caused Columbine, Virginia Tech and doubtless more in the future is because God was kicked out of the schools. Bible too. Replaced by abortions for girls and condoms for boys. Of course, Clinton’s hummer played a part too.
Dreggas
See this is where people see big brotherism. Basically you are saying you don’t trust anyone but the police and your judgment is better than anyone else’s. Of course given that cops are just as quick in many cases to shoot first and ask questions later (or at least that is the appearance here in California) I guess we can’t trust them with handguns either?
S.W. Anderson
A personal favorite among these incidents happened in August, 1999. Neo-Nazi Buford Furrow Jr. actually, voluntarily, went to a mental health clinic in Washington state seeking help. Furrow was clearly a disturbed person — and one with a criminal history. He told the clinic folks he was having thoughts of killing people.
Furrow was not only from out of town, but out of state, so he was talked to, given some pills and sent on his way. The clinic staff next heard about Furrow after he had shot up a Jewish community center in Los Angeles with an Uzi-type automatic weapon, wounding two adults and three children, and had gone on from there to kill a hapless mail carrier.
I think this is the epitome of our modern mental health care “system,” the driving principle of which seems to be cost containment at any price.
HyperIon
i’m not following the reasoning here. NOW (after the fact) some people state that they thought this homicidally crazy guy was…homicidally crazy. that would be the “prophesying accurately” part, i guess. except for all the people who did NOT think he was homicidally crazy.
how does this translate into a preemptive policy of involuntary commitment?
maybe a American Idol approach: take a vote.
well, maybe. if we had an adequate supply of “humane mental hospitals”. and a rational national mental health policy. and enough trained professionals in place to make decisions. but it is going to cost a lot of money.
wow. a twofer. no killings AND more polite.
as for this:
the individual liberty i heard most debated was the right to bear arms. and protecting that at all costs does seem to be the NRA position.
Rudi
Cho probably wasn’t legally insane, his problems started with a developemental disorder – Asperger’s Syndrome or HFA. People calling him EVIL are just sheep or lemmings. All the pundits want to liken him to Manson or worse, but very few have addressed the HFA angle. What’s the status of our missing BlondeTeenSweetheart in Aruba. Has anyone been thrown off a cruise ship?
ThymeZone
When easy gun access is made out to be crazy, only crazy people will have guns.
That’s why everybody needs to be packing all the time.
Enlightened Layperson
We have no idea how many people contemplate pulling a Cho versus how many people actually do. If we start involuntarily committing people acting the way Cho was acting, we have no idea how many people that is.
This is not necessarily an argument that we shouldn’t make involuntary commitment easier. It is an argument that we make some attempt to understand what we are advocating before we advocate (or oppose) it.
Dominyk
We have to avoid blame placing knee jerk reactions. We can’t lay this at the feet of mental health professionals.
http://dominyk.livejournal.com/108735.html
Jake
If I were going to pick issues that are just as unlikely to be resolved as gun control, mental health treatment would be way the hell up there on the list.
But I missed where it was shown that we can’t resolve the gun control issue.
ThymeZone
This is the wrong case upon which to base the decision-making process. It’s the everyday, ordinary, ubiquitous cases of mental illness that require our attention, and require changed laws and more resources.
If the everyday cases were handled properly, the liklihood of a Cho turning into a mass killer would be reduced, yes, but more importantly, the daily damage to patients, families, friends, coworkers and employers … and the community …. would be abated.
It costs a lot more to throw the mentally ill way by throwing them into jail, than it would cost to take care of them properly in the first place.
HyperIon
sounds like nuance to me.
which is never a good thing (Known Truth).
sorry for the snark but obviously, we would not be where we are now if we had followed this advice. how do we get back to a reality-based approach from here?
RSA
Your Almighty God is sorry that He cannot come within 1,000 feet of a school; rules are rules, after all. (Being omnipotent doesn’t mean, you know, like you’re all powerful or something.)
Or possible just a onesie: a polite killer. (WTF is the obsession with politeness on the right?)
grumpy realist
There’s also the question of allowing guns into the hands of people with poor anger control….I saw someone explode the other day at the post office (for once on the customers’ side of the counter), physically attack one of us standing in line, and then storm off. I would hate to think what that sort of woman would have done if she had been packing heat.
curtadams
Appearances are deceiving, perhaps. Police certainly aren’t perfect, but they do have pretty good judgement. Only about 400 people per year are killed by police, in contrast to over 10,000 by other citizens and 16,000 by themselves. In addition, police killings are almost always justified, while citizen killings almost never are. Given what police do for a living, that’s pretty good.
This isn’t my judgement, it’s the judgement of police departments, backed up by national statistics. Guns in the hands of a small number of carefully screened and supervised individuals are not a major hazard to citizens. Guns in the general populace *are* a major hazard to citizens.
The sad truth is that the perception that “death by cop” is important compared to suicide/murder reflects media bias. Gun suicide is so common it’s not news. Statistically more people, probably, blew their *own* brains out on April 16 than got their brains blown out by Cho. But, since it happens every day, it doesn’t get reported. Likewise when cops kill it’s exceptional and big news. If somebody kills his ex-wife, *maybe* it gets a paragraph on page 6 of local news.
gex
Not too long ago here in Minnesota, a family sought to have their son/brother committed because they feared he would harm himself or others. He didn’t meet the legal criteria to be contained until after he went a-shootin.
Dreggas
Statistically more people probably did shoot themselves and it won’t be reported because they most likely did not do so in a public place and no police were called so there would be no media coverage, however if said person jumped off a building in order to kill themselves then that would be news. Of course if it’s a celebrity that shot themselves, that is another story.
While I can see your point, and there is a case to be made that hand guns only facilitate crime (robbery, murder) and suicide there’s also a case to be made for home defense, as well as recreational sport (target shooting) and even hunting (ask anyone who has gone bear hunting, a high caliber pistol IS handy when dealing with a bear).
I do believe everyone who wants a handgun should have to take a course much like (at least where I grew up) anyone who wanted to get a hunting license needed to take a hunting safety course. I disagree that the answer is taking away guns period.
Zifnab
Police are also held to a higher standard of accountability than the average joe. If I remember correctly, every time a policeman fires his weapon, SOP there is a police investigation into the incident. Policemen are regularly checked for physical and mental competency. They are trained. They are knowledgeable about when and how best to use deadly force.
And this entire arguement doesn’t even really extend to hunting rifles or shotguns because they’re not the big problems.
Not that the NRA cares. They’re still trying to get assault weapons in every household and glocks in every classroom. I mean, we have such a huge gulf of reason here. On the one hand, you’ve got people arguing about the nitty-gritty of a sane policy and on the other you’ve got complete wingnuts demanding we legalize military-grade weaponry.
chopper
there are a hell of a lot more citizens out there then there are cops.
Tsulagi
Basically, that is wrong.
Much closer.
If we are to be outraged by a number of unnecessary deaths, there are plenty of sources. How about one according to Congressional testimony that causes about a million injuries and 100k deaths a year due to the Oops Factor…
All I know is if I have to go to a hospital for treatment, I’m going in packing.
Dreggas
Sadly that’s true, and even sadder is I get confused with the wingnuts arguing for a machine gun in every home which couldn’t be further from the truth (a civilian has no need to own an AK-47). Like I said I don’t have a thing against a sane policy such as licensing for handguns as well as a course, I do have an issue with prohibition of weapons, that as you put it, are non-military grade. To clarify, yeah ban the military grade weapons but leave the non-military alone.
Of course the big culprit here is the state of virginia that had such lax gun laws and did not enforce federal regulations as it should have.
Punchy
Even John Cole threw up in his mouth reading this….
srv
What if we put a webcam with a remote gun in every schools hallway, and the 101st keyboardists could be assigned to remotely guard our students?
Dreggas
I am suprised they haven’t proposed this, then again given their penchant for screaming about liberal universities..
curtadams
Right. I’m not proposing tightly restricting *all* guns, just readily concealable ones. A rifle is just as good as a handgun for home defense and superior for hunting and shooting. For an unanticipated tussle with a bear, a handgun is legitimately superior. Death by bear is a pretty rare event so perhaps we can just live with that risk. If it’s necessary to address it, I’d like to approach it in as a “temporary deputy” manner. Maybe people who need handguns for specific situations like that could own them but the guns would normally be retained in an armory. When the owner needs the handgun for a camping trip in grizzly country or whatever they get a license to carry it for the duration of the trip. At the end they return it to the armory.
I accept that guns have legitimate uses in hunting, home and self-defense, and target shooting. I’m just saying that *concealable* guns aren’t necessary for any of that (while they are sometimes useful for defense they are far *more* useful for an aggressor). I think restricting the *type* of arms available is entirely acceptable under the “well-regulated militia” clause as long as *some* arms are available for the legitimate uses.
Buck
It does not take military grade weaponry to shoot fish in a barrel.
The issue of guns is one that we have shown we can not and will not resolve.
And how folks tie the Second Amendment and hunting together has always baffled me.
Dreggas
Ummm unless the rifle or shotgun has a short barrel (which last I looked was illegal in most places for shotguns as they are then considered “assault style”) they are incredibly unwieldy in home defense. Not to say it’s not possible but in a situation like that I would take a hand gun over a rifle any day.
As for hunting bear with a rifle and pistol. In many cases more than one shot is required to fell a bear unless you are using a high powered rifle or managed to actually hit the heart/take out the throat (of course shooting it in the head would be all well and good if the skull was not so thick). I can specifically remember a cousin of mine taking out a bear not just with a .308 but also needing to use a .357 magnum to finish the job because the bear would not drop.
Massacre’s on college campuses are pretty rare too in fact death by bear is probably statistically more common. I agree that restricting some firearms such as AK-47’s, Uzi’s, tech-9’s, M-16’s, AR-15’s, and other military weaponry is perfectly acceptable. I disagree when it comes to pistols but would be comfortable with the implementation of having to obtain a pistol permit (and the necessary training that getting one would entail) vs. the all or nothing black and white of BAN ALL OF THEM.
Dreggas
A firearm is used for hunting. therefore the right to keep and bear arms enables the ownership of hunting firearms. Of course I don’t believe the second amendment was one that was written with hunting in mind, after all people long before then had owned and could own firearms for that purpose.
However what the framers most likely intended was the belief that an armed citizenry would be better enabled to throw off encroachments against them by a dictatorial state and better able to, when called upon, form groups to fight against said tyranny.
Just looking at the history of the Revolution this is obviously the case, after all it was the creation of rag-tag town militias that eventually turned into what became the revolutionary army. The framers, having seen how the people rose as local militia and later turned into an Army (thanks in large part to the assistance of a german officer/general (whose name escapes me)) worded the second amendment to facilitate any future incidence should the need arise.
louisms
My only problem with the right to bear arms is that the people who most want guns are the very people who probably shouldn’t be trusted with them.
Think about it. These are the folks with persecution complexes, or folks whose abrasive, pugnacious personalities get them into arguments, or people suffering from sub-clinical paranoid delusions. I’ve got no problem with most people owning guns, and I’ll acknowledge that many, perhaps even a simple majority, of those who do feel the need to keep a gun for home protection do not fit the above description. But the jerks and paranoids certainly represent a very sizable percentage of those who feel most passionately about the issue.
So I suspect that if there were some way to identify those with sub-clinical affective disorders and paranoid ideations, and restrict those folks from buying guns, the size of the gun-packing public would shrink considerably. Certainly, the professional criminals will always have guns- tools of their trade- but most gun deaths aren’t the result of shootings by criminals. It’s the folks with explosive tempers, the borderline nutsos who think the neighbor is out to get him, the quiet mal-adjusted loners who do the shooting.
HyperIon
This just in: Camille Paglia is still an idiot.
Andrew
Dreggas,
Not true at all. I live in Seattle. There is a bridge here (the Aurora bridge of highway 99 over the ship canal) that people jump off of very often. If they get lucky and hit the water they live. More often they land in the Adobe parking lot. This happens at least once a month, and is never reported. The reason is that they are afraid of copycat jumpers.
I can only remember a few times suicides were reported here. It either has to be a murder suicide, be someone of notable interest, or the suicide has to be so bizarre they have to report it. An example being someone jumping off the macy’s parking garage, hitting the electrified bus cables and landing in the middle of a down town street while leaving her son in the store.
Dreggas
*nods* point taken. My experience has been if they did it somewhere publicly (or by cop for example) then that was reported.
Face
Pretty sure the right to bear arms guarantees my right to sport a wife-beater in a fancy restaurant.
Dreggas
that would be the right to bare arms.
Zifnab
Of course! It’s so clear to me now! Cho became a homocidal maniac because of lawyers and the cast of Office Space!
Oh! And because college girls are sluts!
My god, can people really be this shallow and stupid? I don’t know whether the past six years just pulled this nonsense out of the woodwork or whether I just haven’t noticed it until now, but these people are DUMB. Obnoxiously so. It’s staggering.
Jake
Wha? I assume (first of all) you’re a spoofin’ if not, I assume you mean handguns not rifles (especially those used to hunt). If I’m wrong on both counts, you’re going to need to do a bit more than say “Wants gun = should not have gun.”
OK, you are a spoofin’, my bad.
Dreggas
trust me it’s been there all this time, it’s just at one point this type was kept on the fringe. These are the “why in my day” types.
Zifnab
The Right to Bear Arms
louisms
Deinstitutionalization was the result of an unholy alliance of misinformed bleeding heart liberals and cold-blooded conservatives who hated spending tax dollars on human services. I’ve been a mental health professional for many years, and I remember when the increased success of drug-based treatment (owing to the introduction of effective anti-psychotic meds) caused mental health administrators and government officials to realize that many of those currently housed in long-term in-patient facilities might be able to function in a out-patient setting. So they picked the best test candidates (those with a good family support system and demonstrated med-compliance), discharged them to newly-opened community based mental health out-patient centers, and found that, for these people the cheaper and supposedly more humane out-patient setting worked well. This delighted liberals whose hearts bled for the poor mental patients locked up in those dreary bedlams, as well as conservatives, who were thrilled by the potential for tax savings.
So they then proceeded to discharge more and more patients and patients who weren’t such good candidates for such treatment, patients without family, and/or with no inclination to remain on their meds, thus overwhelming the typically under-funded existing out-patient facilities. And that’s how we got where we are today. That’s why we see so many lost homeless souls wandering the streets talking to themselves
The Other Steve
Honestly, I suspect that the number one use of handguns nationwide is in target shooting.
If you don’t understand why. Do this… Go try to find a shooting range in an urban area. you’ll find pistol ranges much easier to come by.
Joel
Permit me to point out that the LAST thing we want to do right now is give the government more power to incarcerate people who have not committed any crime. How long do you think it would take before President Bush (or his ideological successor) starts declaring his political enemies to be “potentially violent/in need of remedial treatment”? How long before people who write dissenting political views are accused of “deranged psychopathic writings” and locked up “for public safety”?
We are much better off living in a society with occasional violence than one in which the government has that sort of power over people.
The Other Steve
I don’t know. I read thorugh that booman thing, and I found a lot of truth to Camile’s points.
The question is how to deal with it. Saying “it doesn’t exist” isn’t helpful… saying “we will ban it!” isn’t helpful. you have to teach people how to deal with it. It comes down to understanding how to build someone’s self-esteem.
Punchy
What college is this, and why couldn’t I have known about this culture back as an undergrad? Why was this incredibly important info hidden from me? Dear lord…think of all the hand lotion needlessly wasted….
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
We also didn’t have a standing army back in them days. I think that, at the time, the idea was something the Founding Fathers were a little bit leery of. Hard to imagine why… Come to think of it, translating the vision of the Founders into modern times might just be an AK-47 in every household, no standing army, no nuclear arsenal, and no overseas bases anywhere. Or, maybe not. After all, it is pretty hard to generalize the views of a couple hundred guys who died 200 years ago.
Originalism is FUN!
The Other Steve
Preach it, brother!
You are right. Some of our worst policies have been a result of bipartisanship. :-)
The Other Steve
12 minutes?
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
This is bullshit. Clinton got laid tons of times, but he still whacked Vince Foster.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
If that fucking jellyfish Daschle hadn’t back Bush on Iraq, we wouldn’t be in the fix we’re in today.
RSA
This is my understanding, too. It doesn’t sound too compelling, today, though. I wonder what the framers would have written if they’d been able to envision modern weaponry; would they have included IED materials in the Second Amendment?
What I hear from a lot of Second Amendment folks is something less “originalist”: it’s immoral for the government to take away from its citizens the means by which they can protect themselves from criminals (including, for example, muggers, for which long guns [if that’s the term] aren’t really practical). For what it’s worth.
And on bear deaths: Not as likely as being shot on a college campus, by my count.
The Other Steve
I think people are overreacting to what the original intent was of the founding fathers.
Really think about it. Causualty rates have declined as the weaponry got better. That’s because modern weapons actually suck.
Look at the movies. Robin Hood… Damn accurate with a bow… Storm Troopers on the Deathstar, couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn.
Kind of makes you wonder why they aren’t handing out bows at the military academy. Rambo and the Bo and Luke Duke did tremendous damage with those things, compared to all the bullets flying from the A-Team.
The Other Steve
Psst… Hillary had Vince whacked, to cover up their love affair.
Dan Burton told me so, so it must be true.
The Other Steve
Not if you are a seal.
When was the last time you heard of a seal being shot on campus?
Dreggas
When I first read the whole thing and thought back on why there was a de-institutionalization, this is the first thing that came to mind. Of course mental hospitals and asylums were notoriously cruel etc, just look at some of the histories. People thought they were horrible (notably the bleeding hearts) and thus there was a movement to shut them down.
Of course back when these places were open the science was not as good as it is today with regards to treatments. You had those who came from the school of Kellog where enemas and shock treatment were the cures for everything, as well as isolation, rubber rooms and straight jackets (although the idea of being able to bounce off walls in a rubber room sounds like fun after some days at work).
now they just have small psych wards and there aren’t any places staffed with Nurse Ratchet’s. The lobatomy is not seen as a really good thing and shock therapy, last I heard wasn’t seen as a viable treatment.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
Iraq is closer to the Framers’ vision than America is. That’s proof that the war has been successful.
That’s why I need my Glock with the 20-round clip. You never know when 20 prowlers might try to break into your house at the same time.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
If Iran or North Korea ever get their hands on the Boulder, we’re fucking doomed.
Dreggas
Yes they would have. Look at the bombs made by the revolutionaries during the American revolution, hell look at how they fought most of the war. They were fighting the modern equivalent of an insurgency. Some of the best revolutionary units were long riflemen who would be the modern equivalent of a sniper. Why? Well when you have the british marching across and open field what better way to take em out than from a distance aiming for those of officer rank because without them the well ordered units tended to break up.
See I don’t believe the government should take away my right to own rifles and even handguns. However that doesn’t mean I don’t recognize the fact that with that right comes a responsibility, just as with all other rights, and believe that it should be a responsibility to be trained in the use of the firearms I can have.
Probably hard to dig up the number of people mauled by a bear on a yearly basis, but I bet the statistics would say that being mauled by the bear is more likely than being the victim in a school shooting like the one at VT. Of course I could be wrong too.
Dreggas
Ya know, I agree. Of course Hollywood likes going for the bullet count. I am a personal believer in 1 shot 1 kill and if you need an exceptionally large magazine of ammo to hit a target you have no business having a firearm.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
Dan Burton’s full of shit. Bill killed Vince when he found out about the affair. Jealous, psychotic motherfucker, yet you liberals love him. Meanwhile, Bush has Saddam killed, and you criticize him for it. Fucking hypocrites.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
How many people are shot to death by bears every year, I wonder…
p.lukasiak
Wrong. The most rational response was to say “oh, those poor student! Oh those poor parents”, and then watch reruns of Will and Grace, or whatever else constitutes “getting on with YOUR OWN life.”
Just because the media covers it does not mean it is significant. An infotainment extravanganza (“with special guest star, The President of the United States“) based on a Dean Koontz novel doesn’t make an event relevant to our real lives.
curtadams
In the 80’s I lived within screaming distance (on quiet nights) of an asylum. It was very disturbing. I find it easy to understand why they wanted people out of there whenever possible. I know many homeless “mentally ill” would prefer being on the street to treatment and, honestly, that preference isn’t insane (haha) given what living there must have been like. Even on an outpatient basis the antipsychotics have nasty side effects. Maybe an approach would be more aggressive institutionalization but allowing patients regular public hearings where they could argue their case for release, with the benefit of the doubt going to the committed. That kind of policy would have picked up Cho, although, as several people have mentioned, he was an exceptional case and not a good one to base policy on.
curtadams
The problem, though, is that we really don’t know any good way to train people to use firearms properly – because we simply don’t know how to train people to never be suicidal and never be homicidal. I assume you agree with policies tightly limiting the availability of full-automatic guns, RPG launchers, etc., so you don’t disagree with limiting the availability of particular weapons if their possibility for misuse greatly exceeds the benefits of adding them to the current suite. The dispute is only whether handguns serve some essential role which they can’t serve if every handgun sold in the country is under the effective control of the police.
In terms of bear deaths, my point was that can be dealt with even if handgun availability is stringently limited. You don’t have to allow handgun sales to the general public for that problem. In terms of home defense, my personal impression (no statistics) is that defenders are usually using long guns and invaders handguns, so a long gun only environment will benefit home defenders. Do you have any evidence that restricting widely available guns to long guns would impair home defenders more than home attackers (even to the extent of anecdote)?
Grrr
Dreggas said:
Generic venlafaxine has been available in the US since August 2006.
Wyeth did the usual molecular juggle when faced with a patent run-out, and came up with Lexapro.
Which, as any doctor worth his insurance payments will tell you, beats the pants off of that lame generic crap any day of the week.
Face
Thanks, Noah Webster.
chopper
noah webster never wore wifebeaters.
ThymeZone
Lou Dobbs, Live as I write, CNN
(Topics: H1B program, and FDA food and supplement inspections).
At what point, indeed?
(Dobbs paraphrased slightly, check the transcript later if available).
D. Mason
Curtadams:
By your stats there are 25 times as many people killed by other citizens than by police. So in order for the statistics to balance out favorably for the police there would need to be no more than 25 people for every police officer. Without looking up stats I will go out on a limb here and say there are considerably more than 25 people per police officer(I really hope so). No doubt you were simply repeating these stats as talking points, but they’re faulty. Also I find suicides irrelevant regarding gun control arguments, so I think you should justify the use of that particular statistic here, please.
Buck:
Well it’s definitely not mentioned there, but it’s also well known that the rights guaranteed in the Constitution were not the only rights considered to be inalienable. I can hardly imagine an argument that the Founding Fathers wouldn’t have considered hunting a god given right. So while you can certainly argue that hunting is not included in the second amendment, I would argue that you were being intellectually dishonest. Either that or you consider the Founding Fathers to be simpletons. Also, I would suggest you gain a better understanding of the spirit in which the Constitution was written.
ThymeZone
In the future, please use the telephone.
(sorry, but BJ policy requires that all straightlines be utilized to the fullest).
Dreggas
Tell that to express scrips which is currently bending me over a barrel because they only have the full on Efexxor controlled release made by Wyeth, not the generic. Hopefully that will change soon.
Dreggas
I’ll take the generic if it doesn’t mean spending 300 for a three month supply.
Dreggas
Training people not to be suicidal: get them the mental health care they need and make it readily available.
Training people not to be homicidal: Parents can do this quite well.
Any average person can be homicidal or suicidal at any given point in time. It’s how they act upon these feelings that matters. I grew up having mood swings of both mostly as a result of the shit I went through in school (and this is not a poor me story). I went from fantasies (key word being fantasies) of blowing up the school or in some indulgently violent manner of having my revenge to feeling completely worthless and feeling like life wasn’t worth living. Through that entire period I had plenty of access not only to rifles but to a .44 revolver (big bada boom).
Why did I never carry through on any of these thoughts? Because I had a family that taught me that suicide was a cowards way out and the permanent solution to a temporary problem, and because I was raised with some modicum (though not much) of respect for my fellow human beings. I also was raised to know that a gun or rifle does not solve my problems, it only compounds them.
In todays world it’s more dog eat dog and survival of the fittest. The support systems people have growing up especially, are ephemeral in most cases and without them it’s a wonder that there aren’t more nihilists in society.
Banning something under the guise of “it’s for your own good” is not the answer here, it’s just addressing a smaller symptom of the overall disease.
Perry Como
Fixed it for you, moonbat.
Dreggas
To be clear on this one, I don’t believe that these particular weapons should be banned because of their potential for misuse (you don’t misuse a rocket launcher). I believe that the average person, for sport/hunting/home defense, would not need an RPG, full auto-machine gun or other military weapon. Hand guns and rifles work fine.
This is not based on the potential for misuse or the belief that somehow banning these weapons makes the world safer (it doesn’t because they can still be acquired). I believe they should not be allowed into the hands of Joe Schmoe off the street because common sense says you don’t hunt a deer with an RPG or automatic weapon unless you want to make hamburger and you don’t use one to defend your home unless you want to (in the case of an RPG) remodel afterwards.
S.W. Anderson
A respectful hat tip to louisms, whose comment above is an excellent capsule explanation of what’s wrong and how it got that way. That it’s based on personal involvement gives it all the more weight. I hope everyone will read and maybe even re-read it.
S.W. Anderson
The way this discussion has evolved is depressingly typical — into Second Amendments rights rants, about the usefulness of handguns in dealing with bears, about training toddlers not to grow up to be mass murderers.
Nausea pills, anyone?
Passing laws that will keep handguns or any other guns, out of the hands of the next Cho isn’t an option, so why waste keystrokes and bandwidth going on about it? What’s more, even with much tougher laws, anyone determined to get hold of a gun is going to do it.(Special note to those who oppose the NRA and its fanaticism: Get good and loud and hysterical about really stiff gun laws, and you’re doing the NRA’s recruiting and fund-raising for it. Think about that.)
Some children, tragically, can get loads of love and a conscientious upbringing, and still become homicidal maniacs.
What’s needed is consensus across our society about the need to have enough facilities and professionals to provide a very good level of detection and care for people with serious mental and emotional problems, including longterm and even lifelong care, if that’s what’s called for. At the same time, we need more and better research into how and why people become insane, especially criminally insane.
The kind of broad, deep public consensus I’m talking about eventually helps give politicians the cojones to allocate the money and other incentives required to make things happen.
Krista
Paging Doctor Frist…
Grrr
Sorry, I was being facetious. I am really sick of big pharma jiggery-pokery and their cash-beholden enablers.
The efficacy of “controlled release” is debatable, yet it is a common justification for sticking with the more expensive option.
Incidentally, the last time I got involved in this issue was when a friend of mine’s “business of ferrets” managed to eat most of his girlfriend’s Efexxor sample pack. So I had to make a bunch of phone calls while he panicked trying to round up a bunch of backwards-running, weirded-out ferrets to take them to the vet.
As it turned out, her doctor had also told her there was no generic. She’s on it now.
True story.
bago
So is this the thread about arming bears?
DougJ
You lost me at “Opinion Journal”.
DougJ
Fuck it, I read on. This hit me as particularly dumb:
Let’s just lock up every kid who ever sang along with “I Used To Love Her But I Had To Kill Her”. That’s easier than having sane handgun laws, right?
srv
David Halberstam killed in a car wreck this morning in Menlo Park.
Grrr
Everett: “I don’t get it, Big Dan.”
[whack]
[thump]
James Gary
“By your stats there are 25 times as many people killed by other citizens than by police. So in order for the statistics to balance out favorably for the police there would need to be no more than 25 people for every police officer.”
Also, in order to really balance out, every citizen who is not a policeman would be required to spend an equal number of hours doing police duty (with a gun) as the average policeman does. (Or are you arguing that policemen are only present in situations where a gun may be required by coincidence?)
The initial assertion is such a flagrantly ridiculous misuse of statistical analysis that it should qualify for some kind of award.
HyperIon
thank you. i thought for several minutes about how one could construct a meaningful statistical test with the data cited…and then gave up when the number of assumptions got large.
but D. Mason was a little supercilious in his response to the initial post. and even his revision of assumptions does not render robust this comparison of apples to oranges.
tBone
Maybe if we trained toddlers to shoot bears, it would help the young tykes channel their aggression and prevent any future mass-homicide urges.
I remain adamantly opposed to concealed-carry permits for the Playskool crowd, however.
louisms
Thanks for the kind words, SW.
DREGGAS is right. Mental hospitals have changed dramatically. The pendulum has swung from the extreme of frank brutalization of mental patients to a scrupulous protection of their rights. Unless court-ordered for the purpose of restoring them to competency prior to trial, even the most severely ill patients/clients (we call them “consumers” and our treatments “product lines” [!]) are permitted to refuse medication. In-house Client’s Rights advocates have near-unlimited authority to dictate what rules we can and cannot enforce. My facility in chock-full of NGRI (Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity) murderers, the significant majority of which have anti-social personality disorders. these “consumers” tend to be intensely aware of and concerned for the full panoply of their rights, usually refusing to acknowledge any responsibility for their actions, past or present. The institution, and the way they are protected from any logical consequences of their actions, re-enforces the idea that they bear no responsibility for anything they do. Many of these patients have no actual psychosis, often need (and take) no psych meds, yet cannot be discharged because of police holds/forensic commitment.
Yet many who are profoundly schizophrenic and genuinely in need of in-patient care (as opposed to the simple imprisonment more appropriate for the entirely sane but anti-social), and have been admitted 30-40 times over many years are routinely discharged over and over. In fact, our policy states that discharge planning must begin within 48 hours of their admission! In-patient hospitalization cost at least $350/day, so budget pressures dictate speedy discharge. Problem is, no really effective continuum of care is available. The halfway houses and group homes to which they’re discharged (those who aren’t discharged to homeless shelters or often-abusive families) are grossly understaffed and have laughably poor security. So these fragile folks go from an almost prohibitably expensive environment in which they’re served by an unnecessarily large, highly paid staff of MDs, Psychlogists, RNs etc to a group home manned by a couple of marginally trained $10/hour aides, who often have to undergo no backround checks to be so employed. There is no middle ground between the extravagance of a full, professionally staffed hospital and a almost unmanaged group home in a lousy crack-infested neighborhood.
Solution? Locked-door nursing home-like facilities with compassionate, well-trained aides, an LPN or two on duty and an MD on call. We need cost-effective long-term in-patient care for the chronically mentally ill. And the merely anti-social murderers who managed to convince a jury that they were crazy when they killed somebody, but who instantly “get better” once they hear the NGRI verdict (ie, those whose only discernable mental illness is the situational depression attendant to getting caught) need to get their care in psych wings of prisons.
Sorry to ramble on. 20 years working in a state-run psych facility has given me a backlog of frustrations. Thanks, y’all for letting me get that off my chest.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
If I’d had my way, it would’ve been.
curtadams
The citizen and police kill rates are very apples-to-apples. The question is comparing *policies*. Based on available statistics if society prohibits firearms to citizens but allows them to police gun homicide and suicide will be reduced to a small percent of the current numbers (25,000 to 400), and literally tens of thousands will be saved every year. Restricting handguns to police (my specific proposal) will not generate all this benefit but will probably generate most of it.
curtadams
Sorry, that doesn’t hold water. Everybody trains their children as well as they can to be neither suicidal nor homicidal but they don’t always succeed. While some things improve the chances, there’s no magic bullet for either, and the fact that you (or any other particular person) are neither says virtually nothing about how to prevent it. There are literally thousands of smart, good, people working on this problem but the magic answers largely continue too elude us.
DougJ
Got to disagree there. You think a three year-old would throw a tantrum at day care if he knew the other kids were packing?
louisms
We’d really have to drill the kids, though, on proper gun cleaning. God forbid some 6 year old find out the hard way how badly sand from the sand box could clog up his 9.
tBone
You raise an excellent point. Retaliatory gunfire is a quick and easy way to reinforce core concepts like sharing, taking turns and being kind to others.
RSA
Toddlers can’t have such enormous responsibility dumped on them all at once. Perhaps they could start out small, with .22s. I understand from the NRO that these don’t do much damage.
D. Mason
Curtadams, you make one outlandish assumption after another, failing to account for serious fact based stumbling blocks on the road to what I will graciously describe as a farcical version of American reality.
Disregarding the fact that this might be one of a very few issues that could cause an American civil war. The idea that our inept federal circus could manage the confiscation of even the registered guns from an entirely compliant populace is laughable at best.
Speaking of the clowns in office, you must have alot of trust and faith in these guys …
DougJ
Good point. That way, a grumpy toddler couldn’t take out that many of his classmates…as long as one of those little punks was man enough to jump him before he mowed them all down.
tBone
Toddlers heal quickly, too. After a couple of days you wouldn’t even be able to see any marks from a peppering of the face, neck and torso.
tBone
I doubt it. With this feminized generation, the most we can realistically hope for is that they might swat at the gunman with Tinky-Winky’s purse.
DougJ
That makes their cowardice that much more reprehensible. You can’t blame Jonah Goldberg for cowering in the safety of his NRO-issue Aeron chair — at his age, even a mild peppering could be fatal. But what about the three year-olds? When are they are going to realize it’s never to soon to start fighting for your freedom?
Doug H.
And being quiet and calm has done what to stop the
National Gun Manufacturers AssociationNRA these past few years?Bubblegum Tate
I finally got around to watching this, and holy shit is it funny. The wingnuttery, the Reverb of Gravitas, the snide-ass remarks…classic material.
Zifnab
Completely off topic and non-sequitur, but LotR: Shadows of Angmar – the new MMORPG – is freak’n awesometastic!
For all you WoW kiddies out there, check the game out. I give it four stars out of five. Very entertaining. They do a great job of weaving the cutscenes into the action and you get more of a FF “I’m really a hero here” vibe out of it than playing one of the faceless hordes of Azuroth.
Zifnab
Completely off topic and non-sequitur, but LotR: Shadows of Angmar – the new MMORPG – is freak’n awesometastic!
For all you WoW kiddies out there, check the game out. I give it four stars out of five. Very entertaining. They do a great job of weaving the cutscenes into the action and you get more of a FF “I’m really a hero here” vibe out of it than playing one of the faceless hordes of Azuroth.
Beej
For those who haven’t looked lately (or at all), the entire Second Amendment, not just that last part that the NRA loves so much:
Amendment II
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
That’s the same thing as an Army of One, right?
Punchy
And herein lies the root basis of obesity in this country.
Zifnab
Are you calling me a fatty?
RSA
Fatty.
The Kid
Cho, despite having been involuntarily institutionalized, was still able to buy his weapons with no problem. Mental health and guncontrol are both issues here. Focusing all our attention on the one without the other is foolish.
Also, mentally disturbed people are not the only ones who can become violent. Domestic disturbances, neighbor hostilities, work stress and a whole host of everyday anxieties can and do lead to assault and murder on a daily basis in our nation. I very much doubt that the average Canadian or Brit or German is less violent than the average American (despite what uber leftie Eurotrash might say) but their rates of gun deaths are far, far below ours (per capita). The reason is simple – less access to guns. Strict gun control is just plain common sense.
John Spragge
Two random notes:
Here we have the central problem: I doubt Western doctrines of civil liberties have a more important function than protecting people whom authority figures find “odd” or “hostile”. To convince me, anyone arguing for involuntary commitment would have to accept the responsibility to make every effort to only commit those who pose a real threat, and to provide effective treatment and humane conditions to those they propose to incarcerate. Someone who starts with the attitude that the rights of “odd” and “hostile” individuals don’t really matter does not inspire this confidence.
Question (not rhetorical) do any states with concealed carry laws provide for medical/psychological monitoring of those with concealed carry licenses or pistols? Would this type of requirement violate anyone’s sense of civil liberties?