Posted on 03/12/2005 12:24:04 PM PST by ConservativeMan55
Edited on 03/12/2005 4:38:41 PM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
Eight people are dead and four others injured after gunfire broke out during a church meeting this afternoon at the Sheraton Hotel in Brookfield. Police say that the suspect is among the eight dead and no other suspects are being sought.
The dead range in age from 10 years old to 72.
It's just a damn shame these psychos have to take innocent lives down with him.
Got your Glock?
Oh...wait, it's Wisconsin, you can't protect yourself. /massive sarcasm
Perhaps it’s the other way around. The madness and evil intentions were contributing factors. They were perhaps prescribed drugs in an effort to address, at least, the organic part of the problem. Lots of folks are medically mismanaged. That is a very good point. However, some folks also get themselves and others in dangerous situations because they ARE NOT taking their meds.
There are those who assert that the drugs help these people (although they commonly are the same folks who prescribe the pharmacology to begin with),* smile * So true. Where there is profit to be made caution is the watchword of the wise. Once again though, I have witnessed first hand in my family and friends the Godsend some psychiatric medications can have on suffering individuals. but imho, you can't get your head straight by filling it with a bunch of chemicals. It really does depend on the medication. Psychiatric medications are not the silver bullet for all people and should not be relied on as a singular treatment, but they do help some people with organic imbalances.
I know a couple of folks who tried that on their own back when, and may have crossed that fine line between mind expansion and simple dissemination...
* smile * Yes, recreational drug use and medically appropriate drug use are definitely on different sides of that line.
By Captain Phil Horter:
22 rounds shot, reloaded once(??!)
No clear motive. No suicide note.
Suspect: Terry Ratzmann 44 New Berlin
May have a list of names of victims by 2p today.
Another briefing tomorrow at 4p.
9mm handgun - There were questions about registration, reporters sounds surprised by lack of registration in Wis as in New York.
Search at his home: .22 cal rifle, no other handguns, did find remaining bullets for 9mm. Fired 22 rounds, 4 live rounds left in the magazine.
Fired from one mag, reloaded another mag and then took his life. (I really wish they would indicate how many rounds the clips held.)
Lived with mother and adult sister.
LEO/investigators took computers, box with remaining 9mm ammo, and .22.
Just walked into the room and began shooting.
Possibly currently employed but that employment was about to end. Was a contract employee.
Two issues: employment status, and something during a previous service where he left the service (later speaker says he was upset by something during the service and left).
Captain(?) Jim Adlam:
Call at 12:51, 12:54 arrived, for rapid shooter, secured for EMS 12:59 50 to 60 witnesses were still inside in hysterics. Set up perimeters. People were down in various areas of room. More witnesses were outside and brought back in.
Another speaker (missed the name):
Shirley and Cheryl (mother and sister) cooperative
Files in the computers are encrypted.
Thank you for that update.
FNC just reported he left in the middle of a church service a couple of weeks ago.
Agreed, thanks for the update.
It is also 'politically incorrect' to deny the deeply troubled and potentially dangerous psychotic or paranoid schizophrenic all the aspects of a 'normal' life. People who might have been institutionalized in the past as presenting a danger to society are roaming the streets until they commit some heinous crime. In fairness, many never do.
That said, I have little doubt that many of these drugs may have deleterious side effects, ones which might exacerbate personality disorders to the point where violence occurs.
The out for the pharmaceutical industry and the prescribing doctors is that these people were in trouble/off their meds/had a more severe problem than diagnosed, or some other such babble which passes the buck.
Drug interaction may also occur, and in cases like this, the question is one of whether anyone will even check. There is no gain in it for a pharmaceutical firm which would end up possibly having to pull a product they have invested a fortune in.
The problem might even be a reaction to a drug which is not part of a pharmacotherapy for a psychological condition, as well.
My personal experience with just three doses of Bextra was finding myself extremely depressed (I'm normally a upbeat kind of guy), and not having any reason for it. Realizing I had no reason to feel depressed, and realizing that I had not felt that way until I had taken the meds, I quit taking the medicine, and was right as rain in a couple of days (my joints still hurt though).
Had I not realized I was experiencing a side effect and continued taking the drug, who knows what might have happened.
There may be more of this sort of reaction to relatively common medication than we know, and it may contribute to a mindset which is conducive to such acts, especially in those who have a predisposition toward violent behaviour.
Just as these sort of events seem to happen in waves, new pharmaceuticals hit the market in similar fashion, and I'd start looking for common threads there.
When the rash of school shootings were happening, iirc, the shooters were taking prozac, luvox, and ritalin, among other psychoactive drugs. Kip Kinkel's parents (who were the first slain before he went on his school shooting spree) were shrinks, and prescribed his meds. All of the shooters in the news had been taking some form of psychoactive drugs (as tenagers). They were lab rats,iirc: there was only test data on adults.
Imho, being a teenager is a hard enough time, with social issues, raging hormones, etc., and a period of personal volatility for many, even without a host of little understood chemicals swarming through your system. Most of us grow up and get over it. Some do not. It is pretty tough to sort through all that without the experience you get with age, and with something else tweaking your head on top of it all.
Unfortunately, where society once placed responsibility on the person who performed the act, we no longer do so, and hunt scapegoats to alleviate responsibility. While that may seem ironic in light of my previous statements, I am not seeking to place blame on anyone but the person who did the crime (social tendencies to hold the individual responsible in the past may have been sufficient to deter such murderous behaviour), but instead, to find out if maybe there were factors which led to them commiting such a heinous act which could be avoided.
I would hate to see our RKBA compromised yet again because someone was taking the wrong pills.
It is not the gun, but the clip that makes the difference, so news hounds will not have the clip capacity info until someone physically tries to see how many rounds will fit in the clip.(and that is not going to happen until later in the investigation)
Are you saying a set up?
bump
Since the beginning of the last millennium, we have been trying understand why people do these mass killings. They did not have fancy pschotrophics a hundred years ago. Killings still occurred for no particular reason.
My thinking is and has been that there is something more evil at work here. And I am not a religious person, a believer, but not into the dogma.
Somehow, I believe that people who are weak of spirit can be compromised by evil. I don't know that this evil has a name, and if it does, we rarely speak of it.
I do not think it is "pill".
Thanks for that. They had stated in the briefing how many rounds of ammo was still left in the box of 50 but I didn't catch the number. It would work out with the larger clips as they did say all the ammo from the shooting and what was left in the box would account for the one full box.
But...but...Wisconsin bans carrying a firearm so that everyone will be "safe." This cannot have happened.
Evil takes many forms, and no less evil is that which diminishes our God given ability to resist evil.
You would think that there must be some decision point where these people decide to quit teetering on the brink of mayhem and ultimate self-destruction and act on their urges to kill. Do chemicals cloud their judgement, whether they came from a pharmacy, were absorbed in the workplace, or something in the water?
There are numerous drugs which act to diminish or incapacitate human judgement, from the commonplace such as alcohol to far more exotic substances such as Ecstacy and LSD.
Even the 'date rape drug' has been known to assist those with evil intent in perpetrating their dastardly deeds on others.
No, the substance itself may not be the root of the evil, just a contributing factor.
In this case, and in other cases of mayhem, it bears examination.
I've stayed at this hotel - it's no dive.
Religious Science International church teaching Ernest Holmes' Science of Mind based on the teachings of Judge Thomas Troward, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Bible.
Assuming he used full factory magazines and started with an empty chamber, each magazine held 13 rounds (2*X-4=22). Since it's a 9mm, my guess is that the pistol is a Jennings/Lorcin/Bryco (same thing, related manufacturers), but it could also be a Browning HP, a Sig 228, or an H&K.
Now if we suddenly have our first mysterious shooting with a .50 caliber rifle and thousands of NRA stickers are spread around, we'll start a conspiracy thread.
Thanks for the suggestion...no really...I'll cherish it forever ...and when I mean forever I mean for 2 seconds
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