Which is irrelevant. Once Rodgers began making multiple death threats, AND posted them to youtube, he committed a crime, and should have been placed in custody, pending further action.
I.E. California Penal Code 422 PC defines the crime of "criminal threats" (formerly known as terrorist threats) as, quote:
A "criminal threat" is when you threaten to kill or physically harm someone and
1. that person is thereby placed in a state of reasonably sustained fear for his/her safety or for the safety of his/her immediate family,
2. the threat is specific and unequivocal and
3. you communicate the threat verbally, in writing, or via an electronically transmitted device
End quote.
Examples include: "Texting your ex that you're going to set fire to her apartment."
If "texting" a threat is a crime, so is posting death threats to Youtube.
First of all, why is that decision up to the police? Don’t the “therapists” do anything to earn their salaries?
Perhaps because police, as part of the criminal justice system, are charged with enforcing the law, while "therapists" aren't.
Secondly, it says he bought the guns legally. Did he buy them before he was diagnosed with his illness? Or did he buy them while already living in a mental health facility, because mental illness advocates (mostly the same as the “homeless” advocates) have prevented such things from being recorded in any way, and thus the gun dealer wouldn’t have found anything when he checked?
The ATF form 4473, which one fills out when purchasing a firearm, asks if one has been "adjudicated" mentally ill. That is an important distinction, as "adjudication" requires due process. Since the criminal justice system turned a blind eye to his repeated threats and other actions, and would neither prosecute him or have him adjudicated mentally ill, it is no wonder that he wasn't in the the NICS system, as a person prohibited from purchasing a firearm. (Again, it's all about due process.)
I completely agree that he should have been in custody. The death threats should certainly have been enough to do it.
But my point is that the mentally ill have been somehow misguidedly “protected” by the left to such an extent that they are even exempted from normal laws. You may not be old enough to remember this, but in the 1970s, there was a popular leftist theory that mental illness was caused by capitalism, and thus the mentally ill were the only “truly sane.” And this theory persists in dealing with the problem.
There should have been some public record of the fact that this guy was so damaged that he needed to be under supervision (fat lot of good it did, though), because the gun dealer had nothing to go on when he checked the records.
The police are very reluctant to make these decisions, and it really shouldn’t be their decision...although virtually all the people I have known who have been committed to care (I worked in the field, it’s not that my friends happen to have a high propensity for mental illness) have ended up there only through police intervention, usually before they killed somebody else but sometimes not before they themselves had been injured trying to kill somebody else.
And there are many police who have had to go through horrible trials for killing some innocent old granny - who had just tried to kill her grandson with a knife and lunged at the officers who told her to drop it, even though it was about their 20th call to the home to keep granny from killing somebody and the “mental health profession” still thought she was going to be just fine at home.
We had one of these in my town who shot to death her nephew (a very good Christian), the only person in the family who volunteered to care for her after daily threats and even considerable violence on her part over decades. She was in her 90s at that point but had been crazy and showing it since her late 40s. The family was poor and she relied on county mental health services, but even wealthy families can’t handle people like this.
She had been expelled from regular facilities for the elderly because of violence. This still did not qualify her for custody, evidently, and even after she had killed this good man and was in jail, they wanted to refer her to a regular medical residence for the elderly. None of them would accept her, of course, so they finally had to put her in a special ward of prison for the criminal mentally ill.
But why did the situation have to get to this point?