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Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)

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231–240 of 1001 posts

Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a country of 330,000,000, people who have shot up schools may be around 330 or 0.0001%. It is impossible to assign any single causality to events that have such low occurrences unless you have billions of examples. (Yes, the rest of the world data can provide counterfactual data, but it is still mathematically impossible because there are 100s of variables at play)

It is possible and airliner crashes show that. They happen even less often and almost every single one had a precisely defined cause that was discovered after rigourus investigation. The reason why we do this despite the events having small chance of occurance, is because the impact is enormous and we give it as much scrutiny as we possibly can to prevent it from happening again. The same level of scrutiny is not hap…

I've yet to meet a human being that came with an operator's manual, a maintenance manual, schematics, engineering diagrams, a diagnostic and logging system designed to survive catastrophic system failure, or a multi-billion dollar megacorp full of thousands of people whose jobs depend on being able to perform root cause analysis after catastrophe. There's a whole dimension of failure analysis that is uniquely permitted by human-designed engineering systems, thanks to our comprehensive understanding of their construction and capabilities, which allows us to narrow down root causes for failures with great precision. We can do that to some extent with people, for their less complex and more common failure mechanisms (medicine)... but I don't think "deciding to go on a shooting spree at a school" is the kind of failure mode you can pinpoint to some specific hardware or software phenomenon (at least not today), let alone how to fix it. The level of scrutiny applied to human-designed engineering systems, when instead applied to interpreting tail-end-of-distribution human behavior, does not yield an improvement in root cause specificity, and likely wouldn't yield any actionable design improvements. Instead we can really only suggest process controls, based on inferences about which particular parts of the process have the most influence on the outcomes. There are so many inputs into the black box of human behavior, and so many functionally unverifiable assumptions about the mentality of the tail-end-of-distribution people who become mass shooters, that it's extremely challenging to identify process controls that would be both effective and feasible to implement. Harder still when many suggested process controls also contain embedded political goals that have little to do with controlling the process, but which can be speciously furthered under the guise of preventing high-impact system failures.

All this to say, this is a hard problem, composed of thousands of overlapping adjacent elements, we have very little insight (or reliable insight-gathering mechanisms) applicable to the system under investigation, and so throwing money or effort at the investigation is a gamble that a feasible solution exists at all, rather than a process of concrete deduction with a deterministic endpoint. Maybe the optimal amount of scrutiny should be different.

Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)

#232

India has 4 times the population of US and I've never heard or read about a school shooting or a mass shooting. There is way worse poverty, mental illness, lawlessness, corruption at every level in India. The only difference is easy access to guns. Not sure why it's so difficult for gun worshippers in US to understand this.

"There is way worse poverty, mental illness, lawlessness, corruption at every level in India. The only difference is easy access to guns." Sounds like we should keep the guns ??

Your comprehension skills are extra ordinary, keep the guns.

Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)

#233

I sincerely hope this does not descend into a flamewar. We can't have discussion about this in an intellectually stimulating way in congress, we can't have this discussion in the media, we obviously can't have this discussion on social media so HN is the last bastion of hope. It is a multi-faceted problem with a lot of complexity. The fact stands that USA has a school shooting problem [1] unlike any other country in…

There's a psychological link between "freedom" and "guns" going back to US independence. Guns = independence from the yoke of UK rule, therefore guns = freedom from tyranny, therefore guns = good. It's ingrained.

A threat to gun ownership is equated to a threat to the freedoms fundamental to what makes the US 'the best country in the world'.

Any argument restricting gun ownership, no matter how logical or however great the weight of evidence, is up against this "the very DNA of the country" emotional position.

Gun availability has been said to be similar in the US to some other countries. Mental illness isn't limited to the US. The US' foundation is based on a war fought for freedom, using guns. That's the differentiator. (this, my apologies, papers over the requested nuances of mental illness drugs, the cost and availability of medical care, the individual and societal effects of uber-capitalism at all costs, the equating of any level of socialism to be full-on communism, the widening ideological divide and/or the decreasing tolerance for the existence of differing ideologies to one's own).

My cynical take is: Why would this incident make any difference if none of the previous incidents have? It's a harsh observation, but this is "US normal", and has been for a long time.

Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)

#234
post #141
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider myself the middle. My mother is right-leaning American and my father is left-leaning European. Long story, to say the least. I maintain the US has a bruce willis problem. An ethos that a good guy with a gun is the solution to all problems. It may even be, the issue is when someone thinks they're the good guy with a gun, and they're not. They think they're bruce willis, and they're not. They think they're r…

> I maintain the US has a bruce willis problem. An ethos that a good guy with a gun is the solution to all problems. I think this is a commonly held belief, and that it is also false. Why does Japan have a swat team? Why is the US sending antitank weapons to Ukraine?

How does Japan use their SWAT teams?

Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

India: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_India China, with knives: https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/06/09/china/china-knife-attacks... These things happen everywhere, aren’t necessarily reported in the same way. One part of why they are so prevalent in America is how each event becomes such a cultural focus, half of what I’ve seen on social media has been people posting about this event. Perpetuating t…

What about first world nations like Australia, New Zealand? They too are not reported in the same way?

Australia:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_crimes_in_...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10629425/amp/Everyo...

> Stabbings have never been worse or more brutal, police say, as Australian hospitals struggle to cope with an emerging 'knife culture' amongst young men.

There are certainly differences in rates, but these things happen everywhere.

Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)

#236

I sincerely hope this does not descend into a flamewar. We can't have discussion about this in an intellectually stimulating way in congress, we can't have this discussion in the media, we obviously can't have this discussion on social media so HN is the last bastion of hope. It is a multi-faceted problem with a lot of complexity. The fact stands that USA has a school shooting problem [1] unlike any other country in…

The root cause may be bullying and ostracization combined with the media contagion effect. This is a repeating pattern. Bullying: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/25/uvalde-texa... The gunman in Tuesday’s elementary school massacre was a lonely 18-year-old who was bullied over a childhood speech impediment, suffered from a fraught home life and lashed out violently against peers and strangers recently an…

Family members are rationalizing why he might have done this after the fact. Inferring a causal effect from bullying to murdering children from family member testimony seems very biased.

Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well no one has said it yet and I don’t have a precious study to trot out, but: My >80 year old friend has suggested to me that this kind of problem didn’t exist before we started handing out pharmaceutical drugs of the variety that ‘handle’ mental illness. Sidebar semi-related story time: my wife got her Masters in childhood education and went directly to work for a public high school after. She was a.. I forget, co…

Mental illness, mental healthcare and pharmaceutical treatments are a thing in Europe too. The US is not a special outlier when it comes to bullying and mental health. But you don't see children being gunned down every other week in Europe. The problem is guns.

No post body was provided.

Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)

#238
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes he is. Cops sometimes have to shoot people. Gun owners occasionally shoot in self defense. They are not mentally ill.

> Gun owners occasionally shoot in self defense. They are not mentally ill. Then that's not a gun crime and definitely outside the realm of the 1 sentence context. This is why these discussions seem to go back and forth. Wild swings of intentional ignorance, as to what the discussion is about, after having already made up their minds.

It certainly can be a gun crime depending on their locale and circumstances.

Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)

#239
post #9
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not wrong.

https://www.salon.com/2022/05/25/you-are-doing-nothing-erupt... "These massacres are not natural disasters, acts of God, or random. They are totally predictable, direct consequences of the choices made by Greg Abbott and the majority of those in the Texas legislature," O'Rourke wrote to supporters in a Wednesday email.

> They are totally predictable, direct consequences of the choices made by Greg Abbott and the majority of those in the Texas legislature

I don't understand blaming Texas laws, California has much stricter laws and has technically more mass shootings per capita than Texas[0]. To me these are all such low numbers that it is hard to draw any conclusions based on policy, let alone specific legislation from a specific Governor. I'm all for practical solutions (hell I'd have them throw the second amendment out if it were even possible) but I don't know that there are many easy answers to the problem.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/811541/mass-shootings-in...

Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The root cause may be bullying and ostracization combined with the media contagion effect. This is a repeating pattern. Bullying: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/25/uvalde-texa... The gunman in Tuesday’s elementary school massacre was a lonely 18-year-old who was bullied over a childhood speech impediment, suffered from a fraught home life and lashed out violently against peers and strangers recently an…

It almost sounds like he's the victim in your mind...just consider that there are millions of people that are bullied, and people with mental illness that do not do anything close to this. He targeted little kids. An obivious ego driven attempt at grandizing the scale of his revenge. This was all about him. A purely selfish act. Exaggerated to a scale to mock life itself.

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