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Thinking the unthinkable

anarchistsoccermom.blogspot.com

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Re: Thinking the unthinkable

#81

Post by ArnoVanLumig »

Daniel_Newby wrote: post #63
mpweiher wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulating guns ("outlawing" is a straw man) ameliorates the problem of how much damage a mentally disturbed person can do. A knife in the same situation is much less dangerous, as evidenced by the incident in China at the same time where people were hurt, but none so far killed. Degrees matter.

> Regulating guns ... ameliorates the problem of how much damage a mentally disturbed person can do. No, it makes it much worse. We want the violent lunatics to have guns, because guns are not particularly fast or efficient at killing people. A lone gunman can kill at most a few hundred people before he is stopped. You know those nightclub fires that kill hundreds of people in ten minutes? We want our nutjobs to have…

These "more efficient" methods are also available without gun regulation, so why doesn't this happen already? Apparently there's something about guns that makes them an attractive weapon for these people.

Another thing here is that gun regulation alone is not sufficient. In the Netherlands guns are heavily regulated, but we still had the incident in Alphen a/d Rijn [1] last year. The shooter was a member of a shooting association and was known to have mental problems. That's just not a good combination.

If guns could be regulated in such a way that they never end up in the hands of violent lunatics that would probably be okay, but I just don't see how you could do that without banning them altogether.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphen_aan_den_Rijn_shopping_ma...

Re: Thinking the unthinkable

#82

Post by Fumanchu »

dr_ wrote: post #79

I feel for the parent who has written the article, and whereas I agree we must do more to address the needs of kids with mental illness, I disagree with the stated premise of the article, that it's easy to talk about guns. It's actually not easy to talk about guns in this country, which has led to a lack of any serious gun control regulation. It borders on insanity when we look at the type of weaponry we allow our ci…

I don't live in the States, I live in Europe. The blog post touched me deeply. However I grew up in a society where owning a gun is the exception. Almost nobody does. Reading the comments to the post, from people who have family experiencing same mental health problems, my heart goes out to them. But stating that guns isn't the problem, only the mental health system needs fixing, to me, sounds absurd. It reminds me of this comedy sketch by Eddie Izzard: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsN0FCXw914

Re: Thinking the unthinkable

#83

Post by zybler »

Right now I can understand why it's a gun control problem rather than a health care problem. But what about when one day 3D printer is everywhere? Printing of firearms would be made possible by high-quality 3D printer and it would be next to impossible to control. Just as it is impossible to control piracy. We have to deal with this problem, before it is deemed too late.

Re: Thinking the unthinkable

#84

Post by ht_th »

thinkling wrote: post #73
pm90 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that this might be a purely statistical phenomena? What I mean is, isn't it possible that such things occur in the US only because there are so many people in the US, and once the population gets large enough, the number of outliers get large enough, in absolute terms, to become noticeable? It's often forgotten that US has the 3rd largest population, after China and India (although admittedly far…

I'd certainly be curious to see statistics that adjust for population. The stat quoted by 'slyn above is that the next country for gun violence over the last 25 years would be Finland with 2 incidents, but Finland has 1/30th the population of the U.S. It would be more appropriate to look at the EU overall for comparison. Last year there was a shooting in Norway with 70+ dead and I believe one in southern France in a…

It is interesting to see of the Norway shooting falls in the same statistical category of "mad shooter" or in something like "homeland terrorism". But yes. There seems to be a rise of similar incidents all over the developed world, although access to guns is in the USA a lot easier than elsewhere and that reflects on these excesses. For example, knivings (is that a word?) seem to be more common than shootings around here.

Re: Thinking the unthinkable

#85

Post by icebraining »

justincormack wrote: post #74
pjscott wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The United States also has more than 50 times the population of Finland. Normalize!

Here is the list http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/07/20/the-worst-mass-shootings... It certainly looks like Scandinavia and the UK might have a problem. Europe as a whole still has fewer than the US for a similar population but it is high. None for China, India or Brazil. So it is not just about normalisation...

Apparently, Brazil had its first just last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_de_Janeiro_school_shooting

Re: Thinking the unthinkable

#86

Post by ht_th »

rdl wrote: post #77

This woman is saying she both doesn't have the ability to handle her son, and is afraid of him. He's repeatedly threatened to kill her, and is old enough to be a credible threat. I'm all for individual rights, families taking care of their own members, etc., but it sounds like society would be better if there were a way for her to give him to the state or some specialized institution, rather than just waiting for him…

Her kid is also extremely intelligent and seems to have mastered sweetness as a way to get his way still. I wouldn't be surprised if he could behave "normally" for a long stretch of time to get out of whatever institution they put him in. Unless these diagnoses are for life and these institutions are basically a hotel Calofornia.

Re: Thinking the unthinkable

#88

Post by benjoffe »

justindocanto wrote: post #70
richcollins wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any evidence that healthcare would help with this situation?

As somebody who has dealt with the mental health care system without and with mental health care... absolutely yes.

While I don't doubt your assertion, I think the parent was looking for more evidence than a simple "yes".

Re: Thinking the unthinkable

#89

Post by michaelt »

omGac0W wrote: post #67
joonix wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be politically incorrect to say right now, but I think the genes associated with mental illnesses that have a tendency to lead to violence will be phased out by a future generation sometime within this century and the next. We'll soon enough try gun control. That won't stop mass killings. Then we'll try increased mental healthcare access. That won't do much because we'll struggle with the Constitutionality o…

Is "wanting to kill people" really so far from the norm as to have a gene associated with it? What would the gene be responsible for, "Propensity to give a fuck about other living beings"? Because in my mind, the line between being "sane" and killing everyone in sight is pretty fine. One's logic could go like this, "Man, everything sucks, and those kids down at the preschool are always so damn happy. Fuck Them. If I'…

Having occasional thought about killing isn't unusual - but the article describes having these thoughts far more often than is normal, and acting on them with much less provocation.

An analogy: Any computer will crash when running buggy software - but a computer with a bad stick of RAM will crash much more often. The symptoms of both those problems will be fairly similar.

Likewise, most humans think about killing from time to time - but some mentally ill people think about it much more often. Unfortunately with humans one can't run memtest86+ or swap the ram out and see if the problem goes away.

Re: Thinking the unthinkable

#90

Post by RettalnhoJ »

potatolicious wrote: post #49
JohnLatter wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"When a child has demonstrable, repeated, unpredictable..." If its repeatable, its definitely predictable now. Thank you for the person who posted this method( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivotal_response_therapy ), it was unknown to me before, but it seems to be what could be attempted in a majority of these situations. As far as anyone becoming more isolated...Why does a person have to be social in the first place…

> "He's SO SMART his brain is brute-forcing social methods of manipulation in order to obtain/achieve a goal/objective." This seems like wild supposition to me. We know that the child has wild mood swings and alternates between "normal" and "manipulative and violent". I don't think it's clear at all that his behavior is due to raw intelligence. To be more blunt, this seems like armchair psychology with nothing in the…

Just as I was/am, and probably just as he is.

We are cunningly manipulative from the get-go, any emotional response from that point is just part of the game, even the fits of rage are a last-ditch effort to assert some form of dominance over the situation after we have expelled every last conceivable option/variable to achieve a set/dynamic goal or objective.

It starts with the parent not parenting an autistic child as an autistic child. The article has a few points that threw red flags immediately, that would be regular triggers for me(such as her punishment strategies for just one) also, the way she attempts to have him CONFORM to school rules though, there had clearly been an exemption made for his clothing(he wants to be free to be free, and in this conformal society, that's ludicrous)...

I hope they make it.

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