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[TA]

Well, they weren't saying that the events didn't make the news at all, just nothing close to the scale of the Connecticut shooting.

Exactly.  I don't believe them for a second that the NRA wouldn't overpublicize the shit out of any such occurances.

[Brentai]

I'm not sure about the "end of the world" but I do think the people who want to watch it burn have chosen this time to start getting a lot more proactive about it.

[Mongrel]

Man opens fire in Alabama hospital. Wounds 3, security officers return fire and kill shooter.
OK Boy planned to shoot up (and blow up?) school Friday, plan thwarted entirely

The Onion comes closest to summarizing my thoughts.

[Thad]

Yeah, I figured it wouldn't be obvious at a glance.  The pertinent line is highlighted.  It's important to note that licensing individuals opens up the possibility of restricting or negating that person's license (as should have happened in this instance) which is the other point where the pro-firearm faction starts to chafe, at which point they put themselves in the tenuous position of arguing against being held responsible for what they do with their firearms.

I'll agree, but I don't see where mandatory training for everybody fits into it.

And again, while I wholeheartedly agree that people who want guns should have a license, it's not strictly relevant here as the shooter was not the gun-owner.  Shinra's right: for the law to have prevented the shooter from having access to these guns, it would have to go beyond simply evaluating the gun-owner and into evaluating the entire household.

Which I suppose would be easier to do if every single person had to be evaluated, I suppose, but then you start to veer off mandatory gun training and into mandatory psych evaluations for everybody.  And I think the potential negatives there are pretty clear.

These sorts of changes have to happen on a cultural awareness level rather than at a kneejerk reaction to the current situation level, because you honestly only really have two solutions to this situation: Add more security, which as everyone's pointed out is a terrible idea, or try to ban possession, at which point you run into the inconvenient fact that 'ban possession' has never fucking worked for anything in this country.

I'll buy that.  And doubly so for the mental health issue.

My fiancee told me she doesn't know how to talk about it with the students at the school where she works -- apparently "how to talk about school shootings in the news" is not part of teacher training.  You'd think that would be part of the curriculum at this point, sadly.

I mean, the way my high school handled it after Columbine was utterly asinine, but at least they had the excuse that something like that was totally new and unprecedented at the time.

(Brent may remember but the rest of you won't have heard the story: my high school had a bomb scare shortly after Columbine.  They herded us all out onto the football field and then up into the bleachers to deliver a dumb-ass speech about how perfectly safe we were, while they had bomb-sniffing dogs going through all the halls.  Have you ever sat in bleachers?  If somebody HAD been armed, we would have been fucking sitting ducks.  Terrible, terrible idea.  Also, they brought the kids from the on-campus daycare out too, and had them sitting upfront while the principal gave her speech about what had happened at Columbine.  Completely inappropriate.)

As I see it, the purpose of that comparison is not to equate guns to cars, because they're obviously not the same.  The purpose is to try to get gun ownership and use to be at least as tightly controlled as car ownership and use, as a stepping point to a more sane state of being more tightly controlled.

Oh, in this case sure, of course.

But it's FREQUENTLY invoked by gun rights advocates as a way of dismissing any suggestion of regulation.  "Cars kill more people than guns!  You going to ban cars?"

Of course, given that the discussion is about licensing things and preventing incompetent people from using them, obviously that's a dumb comparison.  But it's a common one.  And I still think step one is to point out that it's a flawed comparison since cars aren't actually designed with the express purpose of killing people.

It becomes Occurance at Owl's Creek Bridge

Ooh, nice reference.

(Tangentially: anybody else notice Jon Stewart busting out the Ambrose Bierce this week?  "CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be."  I mean, that's, like, a Dennis Miller level of snobby literary reference, but delivered so off-the-cuff that not only was it accessible to the audience but I'm not even entirely sure he knew what he was paraphrasing.)

OK Boy planned to shoot up (and blow up?) school Friday, plan thwarted entirely

Sammie Eaglebear Chavez, 18, told friends at Bartlesville High School that he wanted to lure their schoolmates and teachers to the gym and then open fire, according to officials.

See?  See?  Sitting ducks in those bleachers, man.

[Brentai]

I know I'm probably a little late to realize this, but the Second Amendment was drafted and signed at least 25 years prior to the invention of the first repeating handgun.  It was literally inconceivable at the time to own a firearm even capable of enabling a shooting spree.

Just something to chew on, I guess.

[Rico]

Bullshit.  The hardcore pro-gun people would be linking that shit constantly.

IIRC, the only mass shooting in recent history that hasn't taken place in a marked gun free zone was the Giffords shooting. I definitely remember the Batman movie shooting being at a theatre that wasn't the closest or most convenient theatre but the closest marked gun-free theatre. There's some evidence that a carrying citizen may have prevented further deaths in the recent Oregon mall shooting. And more relevant might be the '97 Pearl High School shooting which involved a Vice Principal running to his car to obtain his gun which he couldn't legally have with him, with which he stopped the shooter from extending a killing spree.

[A²]

Shooting at Excalibur Hotel & Casino leaves one dead, shooter suicides his way out

I...am out of reactions for this. I am literally completely stunned at the insanity humankind has devolved into. I sat in my chair for twenty minutes, staring at the screen, trying to comprehend what I was seeing before me.

You have won, world. I am no longer capable of processing your shit.

[Shinra]

I know I'm probably a little late to realize this, but the Second Amendment was drafted and signed at least 25 years prior to the invention of the first repeating handgun.  It was literally inconceivable at the time to own a firearm even capable of enabling a shooting spree.

Just something to chew on, I guess.

While the idea of this is understandable (and more thought probably would have went into the second amendment if we'd had better weapons) the underlying thought behind the 2nd amendment; formation of militias, etc - kind of necessitates access to the same quality of weapons that might be used by a tyrant or invader. To a point, under that idea, it becomes questionable if any weapon should be forbidden to the population.

The problem comes in when people add a bunch of extra shit to the second amendment - like the idea that they have the right to own automatic guns and rocket launchers, but that nobody should be allowed to know they have it. Or that they have the right to own guns but not be familiar with their use.

There is plenty of room for a liberally interpreted second amendment to exist alongside stricter gun control laws. The right needs to accept that registering, licensing, wait periods, and thorough background checks aren't the end of liberty in America, because at this point we are on a fucking fast track to seeing comprehensive gun bans that could actually have a shot (ha) at passing if this trend keeps up. They can be adults about it and come to the table with an offer to the left, but I have a feeling they wont' and this will just continue to be a series of rising body counts while two ducks quack at each other over who has the grosser coat.

[Mongrel]

Also, to be fair, the idea of random massacres - even with a knife or whatever - was also something pretty damned alien to the founding fathers.

Not that mental health was by any means better handled - obviously that's not the case. But society was simply more intimate. If there was a boy who "Ain't right" he'd be a well known quantity to his friends & neighbours, if not outright ostracized or terrorized by them.

Even if somebody did go apeshit (I'm sure there were some sort of pre-20th century lunatic attacks, albeit on a much smaller scale), he couldn't just hop into a car and drive to the nearest convenient collection of innocents.

The overriding concern of the founding fathers was just what Shinra describes: A fear of tyrannies, in a world barely a decade removed from monarchies as the only practiced form of government. God knows what they'd think of the current state of affairs.

[Royal☭]

You know, if there's one thing I want to see people stop talking about so much, it's mental health. The simple fact is, we don't know what was going on in Adam Lanza's head, and we have absolutely no real diagnosis to tell us he had any kind of mental disease. Over in Norway, Anders Breivik shot over 70 people to death, including kids, and was found mentally fit. Totally sane people who don't have mental health issues are capable of picking up a gun and killing. The problem, though, is that when people keep saying "This killer must have had a mental illness", they end up stigmatizing everyone who has a mental health problem. And despite no kind of diagnosis, I keep seeing the same stuff about mental illness come up. The truth is, you can't divide the world into the sick and the not-sick, the good and the bad. People we would consider "sane and healthy" could commit something like this. That's why nobody can ever predict them.

[Mongrel]

Maybe someone with better knowledge of critical mental illness can explain this, but isn't the willingness to kill masses of people at random irreconcilable with being "mentally fit"?

I mean, "mental illness" is a construct that allows us to frame discussion of deviation from some notion of the mean average of human thought process, with the implication that this is usually harmful or detrimental (illness). Maybe in some cases it's a temporary event, but even so, mass murder without rational provocation seems about as far from any sort of acceptable standard of behaviour as you can possibly get.

[Royal☭]

That's the Victorian era definition of mental illness, where someone who Does Something You Don't Like is mentally ill. But that doesn't mean he had an actual, diagnosed mental illness. Remember, as of right now, there are millions of people across this earth killing each other. And the only reason we say that they're "mentally fit" is because they kill the people that society agrees should die. Hell, Barack Obama has been killing women and children at random since he took office, yet nobody says he has a mental illness. The reason I make an issue out of it is because lumping Adam Lanza on the "mental illness" bandwagon is that it stigmatizes actual mental illnesses, making it harder for people who have schizophrenia, or depression, or bipolar disorder to come forward. It's really hard to seek help when everyone thinks you're one bad day away from shooting up a school full of children.

[Mongrel]

It seems that you're saying that declaring these people mentally ill harms people with less severe (or perhaps less acute, but more chronic) mental issues. That's a reasonable point to make, but it doesn't make these most extreme cases "sane". It's as if mild forms of cancer were an illness, but the worst kinds that kill in mere weeks was perfectly normal and ordinary.

Also, conflating that with military or polictical killings, is an error I think. Those may be immoral or just wrong-headed, but they're grounded in a "conventional" logic that most people can at least understand, even if they disagree with it.

[Royal☭]

Actually, my point is that in order to declare Adam "mentally ill" you have to assume things about him which you do not know. If our basis for calling him insane is that he killed a bunch of people randomly, then we have an entire military to call insane. Not that that probably isn't the case.

But really, we're passed the point in society where "mental illness" is a subjective judgment call. They are now the results of psychiatric evaluations which have specific legal ramification. And no matter how uncomfortable it might make us feel about our own sanity, logic or humanity, this guy may have passed those evaluations with flying colors. I mean, he already passed them with every person he ever met who expressed shock that he did this.

[Doom]

I don't see a problem with the association of mental illness under the intention that "people should feel they can have access to help and support, particularly before they feel that a suicide rampage is the best way out." Do I think Adam is merely an undesirable state of mentally fit that inconveniences me? No, I think he should have felt that in American society, he could get access to help without any stigma associated to it.

Unfortunately reforming access to healthcare, cultural stigmas and maybe our system of mental health support isn't any smaller of an order than convincing contemporary politicians to make gun access stricter.

I think your point would be made more succinctly if you argued that we should be more understanding to the common elements in these massacre killings. The killer is often a relatable Human who was crushed by factors outside of his control into feeling profoundly helpless(this case excluded for now, as we have very little info and it may be an outlier.) The line between the everyday misery many Americans feel as quality of life worsens is blurring with legitimate mental illness, which may be the foundation of your argument here. I still think anyone in either of these two camps or mixed between them should have better access to help and support.

[Royal☭]

Is it not conceivable that the guy didn't even think he needed help? Stigma or no, to most people he seemed healthy, and to him this may have seemed like perfectly healthy thing to do. I mean, he was an honors student, didn't know own his guns and apparently got along well with others. This is what I'm trying to get at. We're all assuming that this is the result of something that we could all, even the shooter, identify as a mental illness. But he may have just been responding to things that we, as society, consider normal.

[Doom]

It's as conceivable as him being intelligent enough to feel that something is a bit off, but to carefully guard against letting anyone else know lest he be deemed a "loser" in the social and cultural structure of society. I can see where you're coming from and it's why I'd suggest mental health reform at all. We're both speaking to something as unknowable as Adam's personal day-to-day thoughts, I don't think either one of us is wrong or can really convince the other of his true mental state.

Furthermore, we'll be receiving a great deal of information in the days to come with no idea what of it's concrete. So all I can really suggest here are tangible ideas for the future, like eroding the social stigma and making simple and wide-spread help available. If even half this article is true, I'd say we're both right. Not directly mentally ill or insane, but suffering from very common lifestyle elements beyond his control that weaken mental strength all the same.

Depression, divorce... a lot of US citizens deal with this and many of them feel it's not culturally acceptable to even complain about it.

[TA]

[Shinra]

Wish somebody would go on a shooting rampage at one of their rallies. That's fucking disgusting.

Actually, my point is that in order to declare Adam "mentally ill" you have to assume things about him which you do not know. If our basis for calling him insane is that he killed a bunch of people randomly, then we have an entire military to call insane. Not that that probably isn't the case.

Yes, compare our military to the guy who just gunned down 20 children at close range with handguns. What are you even thinking when you make a comparison like that?

e: not going to get into the mental health thing after all, but I think you are way off base in assuming that this guy wasn't insane because the Norway spree shooter was deemed 'mentally fit'. 'mentally fit' does not mean you are, in fact, mentally fit - it means that the government wanted to throw the fucking book at you and you didn't try hard enough to be declared insane.

[Royal☭]

No, I'm trying to remove the stigma of "mental illness = psychotic." By comparing it to the military - which has a history of killing random children, women, families, etc - I'm trying to separate the impulse to lump random killing in with a rather nebulous term as "mentally ill." And Breivik wasn't declard "mentally fit" because the government wanted it, he was declared thus because psychological evaluations by trained professionals determined it.

As uncomfortable as, we cannot just go around assuming anyone who kills is in the same category as schizophrenics, bipolar disorder, manic depressives and any other real, evaluative mental illness. Every discussion I see about this discusses how "We need access to help the mentally ill, we need better services, why can't the mentally ill get help" without any kind of evidence that he had a provable mental disorder that could have been acted on. The simple truth is we do not know, and we stigmatize people who need REAL help, who have REAL problems when we equate shooting spree with mental illness.