no mention of fatherhood or role models.
Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
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Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
#12No post body was provided.
Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
#13For context: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott recently attributed all gun crime to mental illness, saying at a press conference that "anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health problem, period."
He's not wrong.
He is absolutely, 100% wrong. It may be true for mass shootings, but not for overall gun violence.
A lot of gun deaths are suicides. Those are mental illness.
But there are categories that are just idiots with guns, like people who get into fights outside bars.
There are also a surprising number of men who murder a woman who is pregnant with their child because they don't want the baby to be born.
Sometimes murder is just murder and there is no diagnosis. Not all aberrations in society are mental illness.
Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
#14Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
#15Earlier 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.
Something can be random and also preventable.
Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
#16Earlier 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.
Beto is right and wrong at the same time.
This psycho kid had red flags everywhere and there was no real mechanism in place to close the loop.
Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
#17For context: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott recently attributed all gun crime to mental illness, saying at a press conference that "anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health problem, period."
He's not wrong.
"Being a violent criminal" is not a mental disorder; most people who commit acts of violence do not have any diagnosable mental health issues.
Only a small minority (3-5%) of acts of violence are attributable to mental illness: https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2015/10/1/18000532/gun-viol...
edit: Even most mass shooters are not mentally ill: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/most-mass-shooters-aren...
Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
#18I 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…
It likely will for a variety of reasons. People will make up all kinds of reasons why "this doesn't happen anywhere else", they'll completely ignore the actual cause of the violence (a person), they'll make excuses, bring up solutions that are illegal, entirely ignore cultural issues, ignore that psychopaths are looking to be famous, point at more laws which won't do anything because the existing ones didn't work/etc…
I mean, I overheard my coworkers discussing pretty awful talking points. Ex: saying that gun control won't work because we'll just be killing each other with swords.
Which ignores the fact that its a lot harder to kill 18-children + 1 teacher with a sword, than it is to kill the same number with a gun.
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There's also the discussion point where "background checks won't have any effect", except we know that this person legally purchased a gun just days before deciding to shoot his grandma (and continued the shooting-spree into this school).
Just giving that person maybe 2-weeks of break between buying the gun, and having the gun, could have been the time needed for that person to calm down internally and find himself. As long as people can walk into a gunstore, pickup a gun the same day, they can execute these power-fantasy moves.
I'm not sure if a background check would work in this case. But any kind of "innate delay" to the gun buying process, to give any would-be mass shooter some time to think it over, would almost certainly reduce the amount of gun violence. Almost all major mass shootings in the USA for the past decade seemed to be with a very, very, very recently bought gun (within a week or two).
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The "background-check" argument seems to point out the issues of spouse-abuse as a high correlation to mass gun shootings. It'd probably work in other cases, but not this most recent shooting.
The "background check" against racism might work, since just a few days ago there was a racially motivated mass shooting.
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In any case, there's a lot of bad talking points on this subject, pretty much espoused by everybody? I'm not entirely sure how to move forward with discussion.
Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
#19Quoted post unavailable.
Are you saying this is nature/genetic or nurture/environment?
Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's not wrong.
The kids that find a gun and shoot their siblings, parents or themselves are mentally ill?
That's not a gun crime (at least on the part of the kid) it's an accident. Kids die in accidents, it's a very sad reality. It might well be negligence on the part of the parents or whomever let the kid gain access to the gun though.