Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

831–840 of 1001 posts

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

#831

Post by slothtrop »

Leaving aside the gun logistics, there is a cultural baggage at work that seems to exacerbate cases of anti-social loner teenagers intent on punishing their world. Perhaps of grit, hostility to communal aid or social services, on the conceit that it exudes strength. Access to mental health services is nice but in and of itself may not even capture all the societal symptoms where it's needed. Ground-up grass-roots effort to change culture itself may be required. There is a generational cycle of negative experience and neglect among some youth. Existing structures are not enough. That may not be a satisfying, clear-cut avenue to explore but there is clearly room for improvement and it could garner bipartisan effort.

The alternative is to restrict access to concealable firearms, and going anywhere near this is politically unviable. Gun policy is used as a political football (so it doesn't even matter if more than 50% of Republican voters support better regulation), it leads us back here. That being said, as far as school shootings by teenagers are concerned, restriction of concealed arms probably works: it matters not that criminals don't acquire their guns legally, teenage shooters aren't career criminals, they just use their dad's gun, or in this case, buy it legally. And unless gun control translates to "asshole dad doesn't have a handgun", it won't mean anything. Gun advocates are leery that concessions would lead the conversation next to bans, probably correctly.

If you want change as soon as possible, take the first path. Otherwise, change the fabric of politics in America. Get rid of the PACs and SuperPACs.

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

#832

Post by jonathanfoster »

dsizzle wrote: post #284
jonathanfoster wrote: post #265

For those interested in learning more about this topic, I recommend checking out the Violence Project by Jillian Peterson and James Densley [1]. This book opened my eyes to how complicated and multivariate this problem really is. It's much more complicated than simply guns and mental illness. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56969516-the-violence-pr...

What are some takeaways? Normally I can get a sense from reading summaries and reviews, but finding it hard in this case.

Here’s a larger list of the key takeaways, https://www.theviolenceproject.org/mass-shooter-database-3/k....

For me, the most surprising takeaway was how many shooters exhibit signs of trouble prior to the shooting and how difficult it is for teachers and law enforcement to do something about it.

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

#833

Post by v-erne »

Zak wrote: post #92
jasonhansel wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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...

This may be a problem with our current categories of mental illness. It is my opinion that if someone murders another person for most of the common reasons (robbery, relatively minor interpersonal disputes, nonsensical rage, etc...) something is wrong with the murderer . Perhaps the wrongness is that the murderer is simply evil . I don't have a framework for helping evil people nor positively identifying them before…

>> It is my opinion that if someone murders another person for most of the common reasons (robbery, relatively minor interpersonal disputes, nonsensical rage, etc...) something is wrong with the murderer.

This seems like wishful thinking - You are making some assumptions about the nature of human kind (that murderous behaviors are not part of it) and then you work backward to classify someone who has commited murder as not healthy.

The safer assumption would be to give some credit to social norms, and be grateful that murdering each other is mostly out of fashion (when did we last witnessed real duel to death?)

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

#834

Post by Merad »

doctoroctogon wrote: post #802
Merad wrote: post #785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people bring up this I don't think they realize that there are already very few limits on what you can own in the US... if you have the money. There's nothing inherently illegal about owning fighters or tanks, for example [0] [1]. If you browse through [2] you'll find plenty of examples of fully functional civilian owned large caliber cannon and artillery. So if you want your jet or tank to be fully functional t…

This is tangentially interesting but not an answer to the question.

Please don't waste everyone's time by asking questions if you're going to summarily dismiss any response you don't like.

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

#835

Post by tablespoon »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #701

Step 1: repeal the Second Amendment. There's never going to be useful progress here until America unsticks from the idea that the right to arm yourself belongs in the same category as the right to free speech or due process.

> There's never going to be useful progress here until America unsticks from the idea that the right to arm yourself belongs in the same category as the right to free speech or due process.

America also needs a comprehensive media safety law that bans dissemination of reports of things like school attacks outside of the affected communities. All the nationwide media coverage does is inspire copycat mayhem.

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

#836

Post by [deleted] »

cout wrote: post #756
dgfitz wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was talking to my wife about this the other night and we came to the same conclusions as the points you made. What we posit at this point is: what didn’t exist in 1969? Social media. The internet. Legislation won’t change anything. Proponents of stricter gun control are being idealistic. Having kids in school right now, we are both quite concerned about the current state of affairs when it comes to school shootings…

Social media as we know it today didn't exist in 1999 when the Columbine high school shooting happened. That's the first mass school shooting in my memory, though Wikipedia lists several before that, as far back as the late 80s.

[deleted]

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

#837

Post by slothtrop »

christophilus wrote: post #777
Mordisquitos wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? What empirical evidence do we have that mandatory veganism or outright banning of cars would be a net positive, let alone feasible? To me those two ideas sound like perfect examples of the non-empirical lofty ideals that the previous comment was rejecting in the very first sentence.

Not empirical because there's no money to fund such studies, but: Mandatory veganism would almost certainly significantly reduce the healthcare (and food) costs for a society by a large fraction. Banning cars would make the air cleaner, remove a bunch of health problems, and facilitate more social forms of travel which would help form a more cohesive society and probably would reduce a lot of problems which arise fro…

Mandatory veganism isn't going to prevent kids from being murdered in their schools, which is the salient issue.

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

#839

Post by doctoroctogon »

Merad wrote: post #834
doctoroctogon wrote: post #802

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is tangentially interesting but not an answer to the question.

Please don't waste everyone's time by asking questions if you're going to summarily dismiss any response you don't like.

It’s not about liking or disliking what you said. You did not answer the question. I asked about Where limits should be and you responded with tangential facts about current lack of limits and a lynching meme.

I’d love to hear your answer if you have one to the question that was asked.

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

#840

Post by slothtrop »

axiomsEnd wrote: post #688
bspammer wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every other developed country on the planet not having this problem is a pretty big hint.

The problem is that USA is already full of unlicensed guns and very specific gun ownership culture. In countries with relatively easy access to guns and low number of similar (Czech Republic comes to mind), gun ownership and it's culture were build on diffrent foundation, so you can't just copy this solutions to USA.

Granted, but culture changes, and in fact even if you were to focus exclusively on the mental health angle, you would have to leverage changing culture to make an impact grand enough.

Qua guns, teenagers in other countries don't have easy access to concealable firearms. Dad doesn't have one, and you can't waltz into a store around the block to get one.

Post reply on HN