Posted on 02/22/2008 10:19:10 PM PST by neverdem
Following a spate of campus attacks and threats, including the fatal shootings at Northern Illinois University and a chilling message scrawled in a boys' bathroom at a Levittown high school, federal lawmakers are renewing a push to beef up gun-control laws, fund safety procedures and study the link between college shootings and mental illness.
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), at a news conference yesterday in Manhattan, said he and congressional colleagues plan to step up efforts to close loopholes in gun-control measures and create a federal task force to come up with national school safety guidelines. They also plan to push for congressional hearings on links between mental illness and school violence.
The effort comes a little more than a month after President George W. Bush signed a gun-control bill in response to a horrific shooting at Virginia Tech University, where a student with a history of mental troubles killed 32 people in April. The law seeks to expand the federal database used to screen gun buyers to include more than 2 million people who are not eligible to buy firearms, including those with mental problems.
That measure includes only "adjudicated" mentally ill patients, Schumer said. While it would have applied to Seung-Hui Cho, the gunman at Virginia Tech, it would not have revealed Illinois campus shooter Steven Kazmierczak, because he never was ruled mentally ill.
Among the efforts Schumer outlined are a bill introduced by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) last February, which is stalled in Congress, to provide funding for security at colleges and high schools.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsday.com ...
Schumer might broaden college shootings to include all school shootings. Schumer's reaction to the information on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors should be interesting, to say the least.
I’d love to kick this guy out of my state.
I’d rather you would get the voters of your state to kick him out of the Senate.
I shudder to think what Jan 20th, 2009 will bring.
Thanks so much Dubya, you stinking CINO/RINO, for making all this possible.
This gets real problematic for those who would prohibit guns to the mentally ill.
Most people who are treated for mentally illness do not have the kind of mental illness that would prohibit gun ownership under current laws. Furthermore, most people who do have "that kind of mental illness" (don't ask me, I'm not a lawyer) are not reported to anyone, for any reason. Thirdly, mental hospitals are fast disappearing altogether, so that confining people who are mentally ill and dangerous is limited to only those who have gotten themselves arrested and are currently incarcerated. Those people who are dangerous and mentally ill and not incarcerated have the choice of seeing their doctors and taking their medicine, or not. There is no law that requires MH professionals to report someone who is deemed potentially dangerous. There is a law (Tarsoff vs California, ?'72) concerning a "duty to warn" that prohibits MH professionals from reporting such patients unless that patient has made a specific threat of harm to a specific, named, individual.
All of this mess will be opened further as lawmakers work to "solve" the public shootings problem.
I question Chuck’s mental health!
I'd fund a study. Just to prove what we already know.
We have several regions within this nation who should just go away, and do their own thing.
Not true. IIRC, a provision of NCLB (Illinois Children’s Mental Health Act of 2003) allows schools to asses the mental health of studenrs...and that of course would carry over into adulthood. IIRC, a BUSH mental health intiative was to get shrinks to asses kids into preschool (Head Start)...
http://www.mentalhealthcommission.gov/
http://www.edaction.org/2004/080204.htm
New Yorkers are stubborn, and kinda stupid. If the reasons were put in their face, they still wouldn’t vote him out of office.
That's what will save the GOP in 2008. In 2006, they didn't make a peep about gun grabbing. Heck, most of the newbies that they ran in 2006 boasted of their RKBA credentials.
I sincerely hope you're right about that.
I'm racking my brain to try to concieve of any national school safety guidelines that could have stopped the NIU shooting and others. Just can't come up with one. Maybe it's time to try something else....... like allowing people to carry on campus.
I read on one of my threads that the NIU shooter was taking Prozac. The story from Chicago said he stopped taking his meds for anxiety about two weeks before he killed. Cho at VA Tech had a clean toxicology report. Maybe both of these killers were experiencing SSRI discontinuation syndrome?
I don’t like thinking about it either, FRiend.
Yeah, true and not true, depends on the actual, on-the-street use of the law and other things.
I've retired and not keeping up all the new laws, and some you mentioned did not become law. And, there is new front in the MH-legal area where the state wants to raise children while they remain in the physical custody of their parents.
So far, there is nothing in any of these laws regarding the reporting to law enforcement of an adult who may or may not shoot nameless people. And the Tarasoff law prevails upon the practioner---who is required as part of licensure to read, know, pass a test on and honor the laws governing conduct of a practioner---to do the utmost to NOT reveal unless there was a specific threat of harm to a specific, named individual.
Who’s surprised? Spitzer wants to ban .50 muzzle loaders because they are anti-aircraft guns.
I thought they could shoot down the moon.
At least that’s what Sen. Boxer told me...
You know I am loathe to use that argument re: SSRI--just sticking it to me, huh? (LOL!)
Abrupt termination of anti-depressant meds is so ill-advised that shrinks avoid it without a second thought. Sort of like, 'don't drive off the roadway.' So, I admit there is a discontinuation syndrome. But, from time well before SSRI, it was has been an enduring syndrome. In my own experience, in those instances where the patient has DCd their owns meds, I truly fear discontinuance of a non SSRI more than I do SSRI. (disclaimer: I don't prefer SSRI, and generally steer away from them)
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