If found this very interesting:
Stop conflating mass shootings with mental illness
It’s important to understand the most common underlying factors that lead to violence: untreated anger, family violence, past history of violent acts, growing up where violence is used, and being young and male. To be clear, anger is not a mental illness. Hatred of others is not a mental illness.
It strikes me as probably true and gives us insight as to why Federal law against people who have been involuntarily treated for mental illness being banned from gun ownership is mostly useless and should be repealed.
A bigger issues is, “Can this this knowledge be leveraged in some way to reduce violent crime without infringing upon the rights of individuals?”
As she says of herself. She is mentally ill. And that mental illness is not the cause of gun violence. OK…
But then she says that gun violence is a “public health crisis”. OK sweety, which is it? Is it colds and flu driving people to mass murder or VD?
Shooting total strangers for no reason what-so-ever is somehow the act of a sane person? Especially children?
We get hatred. But mass-murder with no reason to hate is mentally ill. Sorry your communist brainwashing doesn’t allow you to see that.
And why are most of these little bastards on some kind of mind altering drug? Prescribed by who????? Let me guess….a mental health expert? (So papered).
And where your mental stigma really shows is you conflate the availability of guns to violence.
Mexico has over 1200 violent deaths per 100,000 guns. (Big on gun control) Where America has less than 6. With you say, over a 120 guns per 100 people.
Guns ain’t the problem. Communist coddling morons are the problem.
It all depends on how you define “mental illness”. However, I do agree that the vast majority of crimes are not committed by people who would normally be diagnosed as mentally ill. On the flip side, criminals and mentally ill people have one thing in common… most people would have a hard time trusting them behind their backs. Why, because they have a pattern of doing stuff that could hurt us.
“Mental illness doesn’t lead to gun violence!!!”
So you’re saying that people who mass murder their neighbors’ kids are well adjusted perfectly mentally healthy jerks? Yeah, dry that one out and you can fertilize the lawn.
This is what happens when we have nitpicky professionals complaining about how ordinary people don’t speak their jargon properly. It’s word thinking. It’s complaining that the unwashed masses are using their words incorrectly an if we properly define those words then we can avoid the plain honest truth that people who commit mass murder just ain’t right in the head.
Lady, you know what we mean when we say they were crazy. We don’t honestly give two hoots in hell what you call it. Identify it, treat it, and solve the problem. We’re not trying to write laws here. We don’t need to precisely define the particular flavor of wackjob in order to make laws that outlaw him. We just want you to identify the sort of people who think mass murder is a viable life choice, isolate them from the innocent, and treat them. Doing so before they mass murder children would be a big help.
Considering that the vast majority of “gun violence” — including most “mass shootings” — is related to gangs and drugs, and committed by criminals who are violent but not described by anything in the DSM-V, no, mental illness does not automatically lead to “gun violence”.
Noe, it’s not that mental illness CANNOT lead to “gun violence”. It’s that the two are separate problems being conflated for political purposes. Of the many, many factors that contribute to criminal violence, mental illness is a tiny one.
Notice that the “profile” of a mass shooter includes “being young and male”. Well, crap, we just solved everything, didn’t we! Just imprison all males until they turn 30 and there will be no more mass shootings!
Sound ridiculous? That’s because it is. Blanket persecution of the mentally ill, whether or not they are dangerous or violent, is equally ridiculous.
Bottom line: The causal factors for violence in general, and “gun violence” in particular, are so varied and numerous that singling any one out — be it mental illness, age, gender, parents’ marital status, poverty, or anything else — as THE cause cannot and will not fix the problem.
Also, prison inmates who identify as Democrat outnumber all other political affiliations COMBINED by a factor of two: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/jail-survey-7-in-10-felons-register-as-democrats.
Just make all Democrats “prohibited persons” makes as much sense and is equally unconstitutional.
Hmm, maybe this is all hitting a little too close to home for some leftists. They don’t want their hatred, anger and homicidal tendencies (all permanent characteristics of all leftist movements and thought systems) to be considered “crazy”. Well I say that’s just nuts.
But while it is true that not all anger or rage arises from mental illness, it is one of the possible symptoms of mental illness. Likewise, slurred speech and clumsiness are not always the result of drunkenness, but they are among the common symptoms of drunkenness.
And so we’d have to talk about the difference between “righteous anger” (e.g. someone objectively and positively violated your personal rights just now, or the rights of someone else, in plain view) and “irrational anger” (e.g. you believe that white males only ever succeed because the entire Western system, being fundamentally racist, is rigged in their favor at the expense of and to the intentional detriment of brown people and women, or that the carbon dioxide your political/cultural enemies exhale, plus their farts, is killing the planet, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.), i.e. paranoia-based anger, which, last time I knew, was still regarded as a mental illness. Maybe today, for all I know, paranoia-based anger has been redefined as a requirement for “sanity”.
I suppose that, just like anything else of any value, the perceptions of sanity and insanity are being turned upside-down and inside-out by the Romish left, their counterfeits and mockeries being touted as the real things, and the real things being touted as counterfeits.
And then we can broach the subject of who, or what political mindset, is actively, even strenuously, promoting irrational (paranoia-based) anger, usually founded in envy and covetousness, via the media and education establishments, and through international government bodies, and church (so-called “faith-based”) organizations.
Only then do we begin to establish a basis for the examination of the issue. And so we might bring up the term, “induced, paranoia-based anger” which, by any other name or title, is still a thing. “Induced” meaning of course that it is being willfully and actively promoted and instilled.
Things are getting interesting. It’s when the criminally insane are arresting and openly putting to death their more rational, founded-in-bedrock-principles, opponents and calling themcriminally insane, that we’ll know we’ve arrived at the culmination of the Progressive (incremental communist) movement. I don’t think it’s far off, nor do I have any illusions of us being able to stop it.
As for the question;
“Can this this knowledge be leveraged in some way to reduce violent crime without infringing upon the rights of individuals?”
I’d say that, IF the question refers to any government action, then it clearly comes out of a “central planning mentality” and should therefore be rejected out of hand. It is not the job of the justice system to reduce crime, as we’ve recently been led to believe. It is the job of the justice system to execute justice, see? Big big big big difference. It is the job of the churches and private institutions of learning to teach right from wrong (the Decalogue), and civics, etc. Those systems are severely broken (I maintain, irreparably), and so what’s left but the chaos of push-verses-shove, and the frustration which comes from the realization that, contrary to the serpent’s claim in Eden, no one actually knows good from evil anymore, or is even interested in such fine (and arbitrary, as the old Marxists said) distinctions?
Testimony from criminal justice experts says the rate of mentally healthy individuals with a propensity for violence is about 4%.
Testimony from mental health specialists say that the rate of mentally ill individuals with a propensity for violence is … about 4%.
The overall rate of violence is the same. Singling out mental illness as a factor is a red herring.
That’s not to say that the mentally ill shouldn’t be helped. It just means that taking their guns and otherwise leaving them alone — not providing meaningful avenues for treatment — is a useless violation of individual rights with no purpose.
That is, unless violating individual rights is the purpose.
The problem is not Mental illness! In the best-case gun control is a stupid attempt to address a symptom of the breakdown of society. The ills of society that we are seeing is due to that very society and addressing the symptoms cannot fix the ills. It is society that has gone amuck. It is society that needs fixing.
Look back 50+ years. Guns could be purchase if you had the money. You could live in a shack if that is what you could afford. There were definite expected roles for men and different expected roles for women. Boys were given a gun on becoming of age usually in their early teens. There were jobs even for people on the lower half of the IQ curve. A single wage earner was sufficient to raise a family though it was preferable not to be a hired hand.
So today, it is women and POC that get the jobs and the promotions. What is a young man to think when society is saying that he has no role? That he is not wanted? Yet, he can look at what is being achieved and be alarmed.
Does recognizing reality make him mental ill?
“In the best-case gun control is a stupid attempt to address a symptom of the breakdown of society. The ills of society that we are seeing is due to that very society and addressing the symptoms cannot fix the ills. It is society that has gone amuck. It is society that needs fixing.” (from Chet, above).
America, and much of the rest of Western Civilization, granted permission to the Left to restructure society and how it operates; in doing so 10,000 to 100,000 years of how humans function has been not just ignored but discarded.
Families are critically important to the foundational issues fo societal operation; to the Left they are an inconvenience, easily replaced with bureaucratic nostrums and government money.
Personal responsibility gets taught, and learned, through the interactions that occur at the lowest level – person-to-person, in situations where the people involved share a substantial bond; the Left decided many such responsibilities could be discarded and the remainder instilled through bureaucratic processes.
The list goes on, but the bottom line is that what humans very painfully constructed over tens of thousands of years has been replaced by the Left with policies, procedures and practices that simply do not work with humans and especially in human societies where individual human interactions, of nearly infinite type and at nearly infinite levels, determine how those societies function.
What the Left has created simply does not work. At least not on this planet and with the most advanced species that occupies it. And we allowed, even encouraged, them to do it.
Does mental illness exist? Certainly, in multiple forms. Does poverty exist? Yes, because humans are individuals with particular individual characteristics; there are a great many fewer people capable of performing software engineering, or designing internal combustion engines, or performing surgical procedures than there are people capable of sweeping floors, painting houses or cooking in a restaurant kitchen.
There are perpetual complaints about the ratio of CEO pay compared to the assembly line workers. There’s a reason for that: the assembly line worker may not have sufficient mental capacity to learn the economics, personnel management skills, and rapidlty comprehend the scope of a large business operation and the person who is the CEO does. Or, the CEO was willing to sacrifice the time and money to learn those skills and to work 18 hour days, where the assemby line worker was not.
Regarding mental illness, our host has an interest in the precision required for an individual employing knowledge, learning, comprehension, developed and accumulated expertise, and effort to strike a 4 inch square object nearly a quarter mile away with a high velocity projectile.
Some, on the Left, and the Right, would consider that a mental aberration; most those same people would probably have no qualms about people with the same devotion to knowledge, learning, comprehension, developed and accumulated expertise, and effort, using a collection of expensive sticks with weighted ends to drive a 2″ dimpled sphere into a 4 inch hole about the same distance away, eighteen times. Which group is suffering from “mental illness”? And what should be the treatment for it?
Families – there’s that word again – in the past dealt with mental illnesses on the part of family members; minor to low moderate mental problems usually stayed within the family, regardless of the time, effort and expense required because families have an obligation to their members. Today, the Left prescribes chemical treatment for nearly everything; consider how many male children, who decades ago were “rambunctious” and whose behavior shortcomings received attention and correction from family members, neighbors, and often teachers, so they could develop more self control, but who now are prescribed Ritalin and other drugs as the “solution.” How has that worked out for us?
Well meaning (I will assume, lacking evidence to the contrary) white liberals spent a half century destroying the Black family structure by inflicting bureaucracy upon them. In the absence of strong family structure young males developed antisocial behavior, one result of which is the increase in violent crime. How beneficial has that been?
Or are those youths, both black, white and others, who seek some semblance of family structure in gangs “just mentally ill”? And if they are, what is the treatment? Or more important, what, if any, is the cure?
Chet points out 50 years ago guns were readily available for purchase in hardware stores, no paperwork other than greenbacks required; rural teenagers took their shotguns and rifles to school so they could do some hunting on the way home in the afternoon. “Safe storage” back then was a canvas gun case in the hall closet. If “mental illness” is the root cause of today’s gun violence where was it 50 years ago? What occurred over the past 50 years to cause the massive increase in “mental ilness”?
Certainly, there were some people then who suffered from more severe forms of mental problems, and one treatment available was a restriction of their access to the rest of society, where they could receive more concentrated treatment, both counseling and, as judged necessary, what medications were available. Today the Left insists such is “barbaric” and “unfair,” so now they’re handed a prescription and the more functional members of society become their “counselors.”
Our problems are neither just “mental illness” or other simple to define conditions; our problem is allowing a small segment of society to defy several millennia of human nature and function and inflict their wishes, beliefs and fantasies upon an entire society.
“Well meaning (I will assume, lacking evidence to the contrary) white liberals spent a half century destroying the Black family structure by inflicting bureaucracy upon them.”
No, this was deliberate. LBJ pushed for this situation back in ’65. He was told by his staff what the end result would be as far as the destruction of the Black family. He didn’t care, as his intention was to get them to vote for the Democrats “forever” by creating a system that would financially support a fatherless black “family”. He correctly reasoned that they would not realize, or care, what was going to happen, just that they wouldn’t have to work for a living anymore. Congress passed it, and the result is obvious.
As long as it is politically useful to various parts of TPTB, official or unofficial, to have mass shootings as a talking point to push their agenda, then people will be found, groomed, supplied, and turned loose to do them. So identifying mental illness may just be telling some field agent who his next wind-up toy to contact is.
The ugly reality is that humans can be and are an angry spiteful violent species.
NOTHING will change that. It’s evolutionary ( or if you’re a creationist it’s due to sin). On rare occasions you can pick out someone who is going to act out violently before they do so and intervene. That is and always will be the exception. The only realistic response to a violent action is a reciprocal act of violence in self defense. But the left doesn’t want anyone to be capable of self defense. Because that would make citizens capable of defending themselves from governmental predations. And they REALLY don’t care if anyone is a victim of violent crime. Once again the obvious must be stated.
“Gun Control” has NOTHING to do with violence, crime, guns or safety.
It is ONLY about the one thing the pathological personalities drawn to politics care about……CONTROL.
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