Posted on 12/16/2012 10:32:32 AM PST by jimbo123
Edited on 12/16/2012 11:24:04 AM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Imagine that, we still live in a Country where you are innocent until proven guilty, you actually have to commit a crime before you can be incarcerated.
I can't believe what I am reading on this forum and what some are calling for.
And we accuse the left of knee jerk reactions?
Yeesh.
I hate what has happened to our culture. Schools becoming prison camps. Zero-tolerance zones. Drugs being administered to kids to make them zombies in school. The push to take away our guns. None of this addresses the causes of mayhem.
I remember reading a Readers Digest article a couple decades ago. A couple was afraid of their violent son. The father ended up shooting him dead in the house when the kid attacked them, with a single shot through the heart. Father wasn't charged, was justified. Guns weren't blamed, as a matter of fact stated that it was good he had the gun to defend themselves, even against their son. You won't see an article like that now.
No one will take my guns. And my grown-up married kids will not allow their guns to be taken. I hate what has happened to our culture.
“This story is about a mother, who is not Adam Lanza’s mother, who has a hard time with her defiant kid.”
Yeah, I thought this headline was very misleading.
You make a valid point. Who gets to decide?
Is Alex Jones crazy? Pam Geller? Jeff Rense? Rush Limbaugh?
Who makes that call? We’ve all seen here, and other places, conspiracy theories. Sure, we chuckle about it, but there are people who seriously believe these conspiracy theories. Things like HAARP, the whole “truther” movement.
I’m sure that many on the left of the political spectrum would say that a fairly high percentage of Freepers exhibit paranoid tendencies and delusions of persecution. And many Freepers would argue that DUers are as loony as bedbugs.
In regard to the idea of involuntary commitment, it should only be a family member who makes the final call.
The same as it is right now, and has been for years -- the likelihood that people are a danger to themselves or others. The problem at present is that even if mentally ill individuals fit the criteria, there really isn't any place to put them, since the states closed down most of the mental hospitals. So it's not likely that they'll be declared a danger, even if they obviously are because of the potential for lawsuits. And they can't be forced to be treated, so it's a futile effort in any case. Classic "Catch 22". No matter what, everyone loses.
Personally, I believe life has inherent risks and you cannot create laws or a systems to prevent them all.
If you did, there could be no freedom what so ever.
The solution in my view, is the absolute individual right to bear the tools that will give you the ability to protect your self and others.
IMO, we have that enshrined in the 2nd A, the God Given Right the Government wants to limit or take away.
It wasn’t the headline the blogger used, just the quote from her post that the Post used as a headline.
They're FOS, the ACLU sued and the State could no longer incarcerate them
They were released and subsequently became home less.....which was then blame on Reagan and his econmic polices and love for the rich.
Great, great description of what life is like in the desinstituionalized US. This is tanks to radical leftist Langian shrinks and Ronald Reagan, who actually thought that releasing California mental patients onto the general population would save money for CA - because these people could actually work as playground monitors???.
This was a bizarre concordance of lefty lunacy which said that the only truly sane are the mentally ill, because they’re reacting against capitalism, and the right wing short-sighted tightwad mentality, which was to destroy mental hospitals because they’re costing money and anyway, the left has already told us that the loonies are just expressing their hatred of capitalism.
This is a wonderful opportunity to begin a new conversation about how both the mentally ill and the society around them can be helped by involuntary committal no matter what mother says (because clearly this kid’s mother was a major enabler). We need to install review policies and a mandatory outpatient plan, but we need to get these lunatics off the street. I can’t even hate this kid, because he was crazy. But he was enabled.
CT didn’t have such a law because the ACLU had objected to it literally a couple of months ago. CT is one of only 6 states in the nation that did not have a mandatory outpatient plan, and that was thanks to the ACLU.
I was brought up by a mentally ill mother who was always threatening to kill me (I kept a knife under my pillow) and I didn’t run away because NYC foster care was horrible and my more vulnerable younger brother would also have been sent into it. I always thought that when I became of legal age, I could have her committed...by NY law changed that year, and I couldn’t have her committed.
So she ended up on the streets for a number of years, and then finally she became so frail that the police picked her up after one of her attacks on her phantom enemies and sent her to Bellevue and the social worker (who should be canonized) contacted me. We got her into a very nice facility in the Bronx and she lived out her last years with dignity.
But she should never have had to go through this. Even back in the late 60s, early 70s, there were drugs that could control the hallucinations. But they required supervision in residential facilities, and that was where the whole thing broke down (even though there were both public and private funds to pay for this).
I read something a few years ago, and I wish I could remember where, about the costs to society of deinstitutionalization: it took into account emergency room, police and sanitation costs - and also lost wages for the injuries, deaths and funeral expenses caused by the free-roaming mentally ill. It was staggering.
I know several States have that standard, and there are stringent avenues that must be followed after the original assessment is made.
For example, in California the PC is 5150 and is severely limited as to the amount of time an individual can be held pending outcomes of further reviews.
On that level, I can be persuaded but I was actually coming from the Fed level not the State in my concerns.
You make valid points.
Well they are lunatics and what's more, they're destroying this Country.
Lock them up!!
/sarc
I agree. I never thought it was about spanking anyway. It's about the fear. I could count on one hand the number of times I spanked either one of my kids. However, they had a healthy amount of fear that I would not hesitate to do it.
My kids would be terrified to talk to me like this kid talks to his mother.
I don't think anyone can really be sure the cause unless you lived with it. It could have been how this boy has been raised, or it could be a completely mental illness issue.
If this boy needed a come to Jesus moment, the time for that has long passed. He doesn't seem to fear anything or anyone now. The reason for that may never be answered.
Family members are way too invested. Adam Lanza’s mother, who obviously had decided that her whole life was about “protecting” him, would never have made that call.’
There should be a panel and regular reviews. But I can tell you, having lived under the old involuntary committal system in NYC up to the years after Geraldo Rivera’s report on Willowbrook (which was extremely distorted), that things were much better under the involuntary commital plan, and it had nothing to do with your political opinions.
Are you living in the subway on on a heating grate in a cardboard box, going out only to menace people, even though you’re collecting good money in SSI? You need to be institutionalized.
Are you a teenager writing screeds about killing your classmates, random people who have offended you, or your mother and father? You need to be institutionalized.
This kid’s mother protected him, and of course she was the first one killed. But the only positive thing I can possibly say about her (although his school had apparently wanted to get him either examined or referred before she took hi out of it) is that probably treatment would have been virtually impossible to get, especially in CT after the ACLU fought and defeated the law requiring people like him to get at least outpatient care.
One of the Columbine killer’s father (I think Harris),still doesn’t admit his son had a problem!!
For people interested in teenage psychos, the book “Columbine” is brilliant.
Interesting. I guess there’s probably a better than average chance that such a parent’s a bit off, as well as a likely tendency toward denial.
Yeah, I lived through the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill in NYC throughout the late 60s and all through the 70s.
I do know that there were some state mental hospitals that were very poorly run. And, of course, we had people like R.D. Laing who was going around saying that mental cases were far more sane than the average middle-class person. Remember that?! Oh, those 60s - what have they wrought?
The level of aid that is given to the families of children with behavioral disorders or Asperger’s varies from state to state. Many of the parents of teenage children who are Aspys were told as recently as ten years ago that their children were either schizophrenic or psychotic or suffered from any other number of incorrect psychiatric disorders so the treatment that they received probably did more harm to them physically and psychologically than no treatment at all.
The high functioning capacity of a lot of these children and young adults is actually a barrier to receiving mental health treatment because they can pass cognitive tests that a lower functioning child with Autism probably would have difficulty performing.
An individual on the Autism spectrum often has difficulty understanding a lot of complex human communications and interpreting them to understand what anyone else is feeling, doing, or thinking. They live in a world without a lot of context and often misinterpret very key things that we take for granted. Not being able to understand what a smile or crying or what fear looks like are pretty common aspects of the life of a person on the spectrum.
I still can not for the life of me figure out how the parent of a child with such limitations was thinking about when she trained him how to operate and use a firearm. I worry about my son and matches because of his inability to understand that he could burn down our house. I would never give him the ability to have access to such a dangerous weapon. He would pull the trigger and not even understand what he had done, besides make a loud noise.
I remember that movie. I was pretty sick one week and stayed home from school and watch it. It was pretty messed up movie. In this day and age, we refuse to deal with evil and what does it get us ? More of it. And political correctness demands we accept it and tolerate it.
> One of the scariest movies I ever saw was the 1956 movie, The Bad Seed.
“...How many times have you heard of murderers killing because they were off their meds. You can not force them to take meds. You can’t save your family from the mental health bureaucrats or activists who think it all looks great on paper but ignore the families who know the terror of living with the mentally ill on a daily basis....”
We know from first hand experience. We live way out in the country and used to have a neighbor that lived right close to us. He was almost 400lbs and well over 6’ tall. He was a big man and strong as a bull. He was bi-polar, a pain med addict along with other mental issues. He was very difficult to deal with and pretty violent at times, especially when he wouldn’t take his meds. We had the sheriff out to our place so many times, we lost count. He’ verbal abuse us to the point of threatening to kill us. Finally, the sheriff, himself, told us there was nothing he could really do until he committed a crime and we were willing to press charges. He told us to do whatever we had to do to protect & defend ourselves should the need arise, but to make damn sure it was life-threatening and self-defense. It wasn’t long after, I got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, no lights other than the night light, walked by a window and saw the glow of a cigarette in our backyard. He was in our backyard sitting in the grand-kids’ tree swing at 2am in the morning with nothing on, totally naked, but for his slippers. Just sitting there staring at our house smoking cigarettes. I got dressed, went out the front door and quietly came around behind him armed with a Remington 870 12-gauge loaded with 00 buckshot. Meanwhile, my wife was calling the sheriff and it took them over 15 minutes to get out there because of where we live. I held him at gunpoint until the deputies showed up, filed trespassing, stalking and peeping-tom charges against him and had him locked up. He finally died from a drug overdose and we ended up buying the property from his family. His family had tried for years to have him committed but couldn’t do it. He molested his own two teenage daughters to the point where they finally ran away from home to keep from getting pregnant. He almost beat his 9-year-old son to death in our backyard one day. If I hadn’t intervened by putting a .45 to his head and threatening to shoot him if he punched that kid one more time, he would have killed that kid. The whole time the kid is crying and screaming at me to shoot him.....sad. My wife lived in stark fear of him because sometimes I would work away from home. She got her CCL and armed herself with an M&P .45 with a laser on it. We lived in hell and fear in our own home for over two years until he finally died from that drug overdose. Some people just need to be put away.
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