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Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
561–570 of 1001 posts
Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
#562the problem is easy access to guns. sure you can dance around the issue with mental health and gun ownership, but simply the high volume of guns means getting one is pretty damn easy for most people even without a license
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Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you are suggesting is illegal. Its illegal to license a right. We shouldn't penalize the hundreds of millions of legal gun owners in the US because we're unable to catch psychopaths before they kill people.
This is part of why a sensible discussion cannot be had. "Shall not be infringed" has become axiomatic to many gun owners. Disclaimer: I am a gun owner. I like guns very much. Here's the 2A in full: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." I am not a historian but I believe that this quote from James Madison in…
The Natty Guard = "well regulated malitia" argument is not compelling at all to me. If it was, the fact the guard can be nationalized and that states don't appoint officers unilaterally would be in strict contravention of how the constitution says the militias should be run.
On top of that, the Bill of Rights is focused on rights of the people and states. IIRC there's nothing in it about protecting the "rights" of the federal government. Why would it need to explicitly give itself the right to arm its own standing army?
Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
#564Quoted post unavailable.
A problem with that logic is that it doesn't do anything to change the economics of gun sales.
If you kick them off the stock market, gun manufacturers can go private, or they move their headquarters and incorporation abroad.
If you prevent banks from making loans, they'll take their billions to Deutsch Bank, or HSBC, or some crypto bank that is happy to hide their money. Plus, if they're now private, there's likely no requirement to report their loans.
If we tax gun sales at 100%, you'll start to see more people renting out their guns or "gifting" them.
Are you buying a new mattress? We'll toss in his and hers handguns to keep under your pillow.
There are hundreds of millions of privately-held guns in this country. Without a cultural shift, and an active campaign to decommission those firearms, there's more than enough supply to fuel a black market for a long time.
It'd be like the war on drugs, you'd push everything underground, manufacturing would move abroad, and the lack of visibility would potentially make things worse.
Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
#565Canada is the U.S.'s neighbour and is probably closer, culturally, than any other nation. Gun ownership is also high in Canada. In terms of guns per capita, the U.S. is #1 by a long shot, but Canada is #7 [1]. In Canada, guns owned per capita is one third of what it is in the U.S.. Canada also has mass shootings. The annual deaths from mass shootings per capita in Canada is 0.032, which is about one third that of the…
Right now it is hard to look at our kids faces and not feel the impact of this tragedy. I don’t know about everyone but for most people their kids lives are way more important than their right to bear military grade guns. If there is no perfect solution we have to live with a less than perfect solution. If the solution is to legally make it harder for people to access such guns then so be it.
There are (conservatively) hundreds of thousands of defensive gun uses per year. Many just involve presenting or brandishing the gun without having to use it.
Could you look someone in the face who has used a gun to protect themselves or their family and tell them they will need to give up that gun for "public safety"?
Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
#566Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
The context here: the media claimed the shooter has "no history of mental illness"; Abbott said anyone like that must inherently be mentally ill.
The media's position is untenable. If your definition of mental illness doesn't include adolescents who want to murder their peers, then it's defective by design.
Your first link doesn't address mass shooters.
The second one (written by an "enterprise reporter" and quoting from forensic psychiatrists) draws an astonishing distinction between "mental illness" and "sociopathy or antisocial disorders" (!), and defines most mass shooters as sociopathic and therefore not mentally ill. I don't know how anyone could read that article and be convinced by it. I should note that forensic psychiatrists are by far the most conservative (not in the political sense) practiciners in their field, a shocking number of them are quacks, they often have little experience treating patients, and they tend to believe in more black-and-white/"predictive" (and excessively confident) theories, suitable to their role in courtrooms.
Under the old-school DSM mindset, if you're not diagnosed with anything, you are defined as healthy. That type of thinking will never allow us to truly address society's emotional health. Emotional health is a spectrum; we're all at varying degrees of emotional health, and the average (i.e. "normal") person is significantly emotionally unhealthy.
Any reform that aims to genuinely improve society's emotional health has to move beyond the old model; and in any model of emotional health (where low self-esteem, social anxiety, low emotional self-awareness, attachment disorders become part of the picture), any shooter would be defined as severely emotionally ill; moreover, any reform that aims to detect attachment issues, low self-esteem and more, early on in life, in a systematic way, would prevent most (if not all) of these shootings from happening.
Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
#567Earlier quoted context omitted.
We only have more anti-gun-violence activists because we have more gun violence. I forget where we are on the murders per capita scene, but I think we rank somewhere around Uruguay and Cameroon. Great company while pretending to be "the leader of the free world."
I never claimed we are the leader of anything, and in fact I explicitly said that the US is not a democracy by many meaningful definitions of that word. I am the furthest thing from a US ultra-patriot who thinks we’re the greatest country in the world, so please don’t ascribe other people’s opinions to me. Tangent: other than their moderately elevated murder rate, what’s wrong with Uruguay? Is that supposed to be an…
I never specifically mentioned you, and I was referencing the rhetoric from our hyper-partisan anti-American "patriots" who fervently believe that the US is #1 in virtually everything.
Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. When compared to places like Australia, where guns are highly regulated and barely anyone owns a gun, such that there have been no mass shootings for 35 years, the solution really is obvious.
> Interesting. When compared to places like Australia, where guns are highly regulated and barely anyone owns a gun, such that there have been no mass shootings for 35 years, the solution really is obvious. Is it that simple? The is little correlation between stricter gun laws and fewer number of dead people: https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/27-years-recorded-crime-vict... That same link shows a slight negative correl…
Yes it is that simple. Denying there is a link between shooting and gun laws is he problem. It's that simple.
Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Where many U.S. states permit concealed carry of handguns, handguns are virtually illegal to carry in Canada. Transporting them from your home to the range is legal, but they must be unloaded, locked, and permits are required for the transport." I see no mechanism by which those laws would reduce mass shootings. A mass shooter would simply ignore them. The other policies you mention may be more relevant, but it goes…
>I see no mechanism by which those laws would reduce mass shootings. A mass shooter would simply ignore them. On virtue of how many shootings have begun "without warning", the cultural context in canada versus the us is quite different. The expectation of actions when you see a firearm is very different in these two countries! - in the US, someone with an openly carried firearm may be transporting it or any number of…
> Gun owners consistently misrepresent and come up with inconsistent interpretations of any gun control. The bar is never high enough, the logic never sound enough. The "broad infringements" proposed are never, and will never be, good enough. I find your statement to be a bit disingenuous in that regard.
Gun control advocates consistently fail to understand the things they are attempting to regulate, and fail to provide rational justifications for how their restrictions would actually promote public safety.
Re: Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
> “I see no mechanism by which those laws would reduce mass shootings. A mass shooter would simply ignore them.” And yet, there does seem to be a strong correlation between “countries with stricter gun control laws” and “countries that have low rates of gun-related deaths and homicides”. Canada has between 6-8X fewer gun fatalities per capita compared to the United States - both homicides and unintentional/accidental…
Surely there are some laws that have greater effectiveness relative to the interference with peaceful gun owners. If you care about working together with your fellow citizens who think differently than you do, you'll pursue such laws and push back on laws that have a bad relative effectiveness. For instance, did you know that, in California, you cannot buy a new model of a pistol? The most recent model you can get, f…
>Surely there are some laws that have greater effectiveness relative to the interference with peaceful gun owners.
I'd like to point out that any Peaceful Gun Owner is capable of becoming violent in the future, for a multitude of reasons that can be undetectable at the time of purchase. This is why I find any policy that attempts to "weed out" certain people to be inherently pointless. The only thing that would work is to repeal the 2nd amendment, but that's never going to happen.