Posted on 09/20/2013 7:39:05 AM PDT by Kaslin
After every mass shooting, I write a variant of the same column. Perhaps I'll republish this one when the next attack happens.
The increase in mass shootings over the course of the past several decades is not imaginary. In 2000, The New York Times analyzed 100 mass shootings between 1949 and 1999 and found that 73 of them had happened since 1990. Since 2000, according to Mother Jones magazine, there have been 33 more, including the recent massacre at the Navy Yard. The majority of the killers have untreated mental illness.
A significant portion of the political and journalistic worlds pretends that the solution to mass shootings is gun control. It would be too much to call this response insane, but it is doctrinaire, barren thinking. For good or ill, guns have always been readily available in the United States. That has not changed in the past 50 years. The number of gun deaths has actually been declining quite steeply over the past two decades. Pew Research on Social and Demographic Trends found that the firearms homicide rate was 49 percent lower in 2010 than in 1993.
Following the latest mass attack, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank decried the "loss of hope for gun control." Sen. Jay Rockefeller demanded: "When will enough be enough?" These "repeated incidents" of "tragic, senseless violence ... demand our attention."
Yes, they do, but defenders as well as opponents of gun rights in America need to lift their eyes from their prepared talking points and look at what is staring them in the face.
The guns-blazing mass attack has become the American psychosis.
Every society has mentally ill people. But the way mental illness gets expressed varies tremendously by culture. In China, Malaya, Indonesia, and parts of India, patients suffer from a variety of fertility-related phobias called "genital shrinking" anxiety. Among the Japanese and Koreans, doctors often see a morbid fear of giving offense by one's appearance. In the 20th century, many parts of the third world saw a pathological startle reaction that led to wild, dissociative behaviors called variously "running amok," "Lapp panic" or "latah."
Anorexia nervosa spread throughout the developed world in the latter part of the 20th century when thinness became the fashion ideal. Culture shapes behavior -- even, or maybe especially, among the mentally ill. Extreme behavior like anorexia is the distorted response to a real stimulus.
American entertainment is steeped in gun violence. Most young men who spend hours playing first person shooter games and watching endless gun violence in movies and television will never hurt anyone. But it is reasonable to wonder whether this menu of mayhem is distorted into implied permission by unsteady minds, particularly those without the guiding hand of a father at home.
Twenty-first century America prizes fame indiscriminately -- to the point that the word infamy must soon disappear. We have no use for the idea it expresses. Elliott Spitzer, John McCain, Paris Hilton, Bill Gates, Aaron Alexis -- they all belong to the famous club. It doesn't matter what they did to gain admission.
Shoot a lot of innocent people and you are guaranteed to enter the club. You may die in the act, but everyone will know your name.
We have betrayed the mentally ill by drastically reducing the availability of treatment. America has roughly 5 percent of the psychiatric beds it had in the late 1950s. When Aaron Alexis called police in Rhode Island last month and complained that he had moved to three different hotel rooms in a single night to elude the "voices" in his head and the "people who were sending vibrations to his body" with a "microwave machine," he ought to have been taken to a psych unit for evaluation. Instead, police told him to avoid the "people" who were bothering him and went on their way.
Like many states, Rhode Island has only a fraction of the beds it needs for psychiatric cases. That's why the mentally ill comprise 400,000 of the nation's 2.2 million prison inmates. That's why they account for one third of the nation's homeless. That's why the number of mass shootings continues to climb. In many states, even if the family members of paranoid schizophrenics beg police and medical authorities to commit someone for short-term evaluation and treatment, civil commitment laws forbid it.
With modern drugs and "Assisted Outpatient Treatment" as championed by the Treatment Advocacy Center, long-term commitment for the mentally ill is not necessary. A few simple reforms of involuntary commitment laws and mental health treatment could relieve a great deal of unnecessary suffering and avoid more awful tragedies.
Alternatively, we can continue our sterile and irrelevant gun control spitting match.
Sooooo much better than confining them to mental institutions where they were forced, forced to get treatment...
.....Better yet, greater efforts for prayers for healing and diliverance from the forces that attack the mind.
mass killers target “gun-free” zones. There is nothing complicated about that. They will not attack an area in which they will find their targets armed, or possibly armed.
So, what is the solution class?? Of course, do away with “gun free” buildings, schools and other possible targets.
Charts: Half the deadliest shootings in U.S. history happened in past six years
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3068218/posts
Obama’s fault!
No, no, no. The answer is to make MORE gun free zones. Liberal logic says if you do something stupid (like making gun free zones) and it makes things worse, then "You didn't go far enough." You have to increase whatever original stupid idea you implemented then it will get better. Liberal though processes in action.
The two best things about government work are
A very good case can be made that it is the MSM’s insane desire to disarm American citizens that leads to these mass attacks.
No other mass killing is promoted by story after story in the MSM, because they see them as a way to promote citizen disarmament.
Not even the Boston Bombings received as much coverage,though the MSM tried to tie them to citizen disarmament as well.
It is the media spotlight that attracts those on the edge to commit these attacks. It is well known and documented as the “copycat effect”.
It is the MSM that has blood on its hands, not the NRA.
http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2013/01/stop-school-shootings-hold-media.html
Decent men and women need guns to protect themselves from all the deranged people out there whacked out on legal and illegal drugs, the poisons in the food and water, and the putrescence vomited out by the Corporate Media.
The problem is TREATED mental illness.
Paranoid/schizo/hostile/aggressive behavior ARE LISTED, KNOWN SIDE EFFECTS for nearly all of these psychotropic drug that are prescribed these days.
Can't really disagree. But then there are the liberals in government who goose step in lockstep with the media on these matters. Their view of utopia is a totally controlled society with government bureaucrats and regulations controlling every non-trivial aspect of every's citizen's life (except of course for the bureaucrats themselves). their idea of utopia, my idea of hell.
“Treatment” in such facilities is typically done against a backdrop of despair and hopelessness. The bitter truth is, these maladies are viewed by many in the mental health profession as incurable, life-long conditions, and the only viable treatment is chemical lobotomy via Psychotropics. So they get them in during a psychotic break, mainly to get them on meds that make them totally miserable, but hopefully less violent. Once they are released, they decide not to be miserable and stop the meds. I get that. Who in their right mind would stay on a regimen that results in involuntary tongue twitching ... for life. It’s a horror show. So the cycle continues.
And permanently locking “them” up en masse is not so easy a solution either, because first you have to figure out who “they” are. Not everyone who “hears voices” or is otherwise psychotic is dangerous to others in the sense of directed aggression. Most that I have dealt with are simply out of touch with reality, but in a very passive way. They do need help, but often their condition can be improved more by living among normal people than by incarceration and isolation.
So who gets to determine who is “dangerous” and who is not? A “dangerous to self or others” classification is so broad I can envision a soviet style approach to tea party members as “dangerously psychotic.” You can already see that language being used in the struggle to overcome Obamacare.
So that easy sounding “lock em up” solution has its own pitfalls. A better long term solution, IMHO, is 1) to start backing off knee-jerk psychotropic treatments. Many nasty psychoses can be treated more effectively by methods that approach the patient as a responsible moral agent, not simply a miswired brain that must be shut down to be “saved.” It is even possible that prolonged use of psychotropics does lasting damage that makes the disease hang on much longer than it would have otherwise.
And 2) the legal grounds for compulsory treatment must be carefully reviewed and revised to define “dangerousness” in terms of demonstrated capacity for directed aggression. The shooters have all been highly functional persons, able to stage fairly well thought out attacks. These individuals are far more dangerous than the “violent” individual whose acts are things like shoving a case worker etc. It would be easy to dump them all in the same bin and call the problem solved. But it would be wrong.
And finally 3) we cannot abandon our long history of holding people criminally accountable only AFTER they have committed a criminal act. Our entire system of individual rights would collapse if we ever give the government permission to lock us up if they think we might be “dangerous” at some point in the future. Under the wrong regime, it would be trivial to get a psychiatric evaluation of “dangerousness” on anyone out of favor with the regime.
So, as hard as it is, we need to stick to the longstanding pattern of criminal punishment only for actual criminal acts. Mentally ill people are still humans made in God’s image, just like us, and still have rights, including the right to live free, to the extent possible for each individual. The law needs to sustain those rights by getting to a more exact and narrow definition of “dangerousness,” one that will give us early warning on those who present an imminent threat to innocent people, while not trampling on the right to live free.
Fatherless families, gangs, violent video games, lax crime policies, disarming citizens, and other factors all combine to create these monsters. It’s a sad cultural phenomenon, all of it created and encouraged by liberals.
But have you noticed how often these events occur shortly after some political setback for the gun grabbers?
No, Mona, it wouldn't.
I’ve had a few as roommates, have you?
“With modern drugs and “Assisted Outpatient Treatment” as championed by the Treatment Advocacy Center, long-term commitment for the mentally ill is not necessary.”
I disagree. Many mass shooters have gone off their mind-bending meds. They should have been confined in an institution to begin with.
I did regular benevolent work in a mental institution back in 1972. The people I saw living there were better off than living under a bridge. And society was also safer for it.
LOL! In fact, I have. My first roommate at Moody was an extraordinary individual who was in constant communication with someone called “Boss,” but if you caught him in the act he could give you a stare to match anything you’ve ever seen in a horror flick. I also had a roommate who was, apparently, a pathological lothario. Both of these folks were eventually kicked out.
I also had a neighbor I went to school with. En route to the school bus every day, he would curse at me incessantly and had started throwing stones at me, for no provocation. I was familiar with the biblical accounts of demons etc, so one morning, when I saw him, at a great distance, looking my way and holding a large block of snow, I decided to conduct a scientific experiment. I reasoned that if it was a demon, it wouldn’t matter if I didn’t raise my voice, because this would be a matter between the demon and Jesus. So I decided to whisper, under my breath as it were, a command to the demon to leave in the name of Jesus, believing that the result of the experiment would be determined by God, not me.
And what do you supposed happened? The instant, the very instant I finished my experimental command, I could see my young friend immediately go limp, drop the chunk of snow, and just stand there with his head down. So I walked until I was next to him, then we walked together in peace up to the bus. As we were about to board the bus, he turned to me and asked, ‘ How can I become a Christian?” I told as best I knew how at the time to believe in Jesus. We never had trouble after that. The problem was over. You might be able to guess what conclusions I drew regarding the outcome of my experiment.
Having said all that, I do recognize there are biological aspects to some forms of mental illness. But I also think the science of psychiatric treatment is flawed in two major ways. First, it presumes an entirely materialistic solution set, which leads it down many dead ends. Second, in part because the premise of materialism is so damaging to research, the state of the art is primitive at best, about where we were with using leeches few centuries ago for various maladies. Future generations will mock us for our barbarism. It’s time for a change.
These people ain’t so far kuhrayzee they can’t figure out where the maximum number of defenseless people are who they can prey on.
Apparently invoking the Name doesn’t always work, else it would be standard practice, wouldn’t it?
Well done, in that case, though...
Wow- amazing story !
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