He should have known better than to say it the way he did, and of COURSE everyone latches onto "Stuff Happens", but he's somewhat right.

Indeed. If its an assault on blacks or Muslims or whoever else, it is reported. I think it's one of those things that should be included regardless of who is being targeted. The motivation can be important to note as maybe it may lead to some extra thought (noting that the Charleston shooting targeting blacks did a lot and perhaps some folks who are really militantly atheist may back off on their rhetoric a bit knowing that this sort of thing is what it may lead to when one peddles in hate - regardless of which direction).

Agree but one question was it determined the Charleston shutting was because he hated Christians or African Americans . I know it happened in a church but thought it was racially motivated?

Charleston was racially motivated. This shooting was anti-Christian motivated apparently.

Yup.

There were posters here who blamed the Jared Lee Loughner shootings on the conservative media. That was a fun thread. I think motive, if we know it, it always worth mentioning, but I don't think you can take it literally. These people aren't processing the world the same way normal people are. The shootings yesterday do not represent some broader theme about violent atheists rising up and attacking Christians. (I'm sure you could find that narrative being pushed somewhere on the internet).

I'm starting to think these things aren't about guns or mental illness. There's not a lot of countries which have completely banned guns or who have cured mental illness in the general population. There's many countries where you can acquire weapons if you don't have a criminal record. The reality is, if someone wants to kill you, they probably can, almost anywhere. They can't kill as many as the weirdo did at Sandy Hook if they don't have access to that kind of weapons stash, but they could certainly kill one or two people. And they don't even do that at the same rate, especially against random strangers.

Saying "not a lot of countries have cured mental illness" is obviously a strawman, but the fact is most other Western countries do have some form of nationalized healthcare and compulsory mental health care that means it's a billion times less likely that these cases fall through the cracks and people who need mental health care get it. I'd love to see figures on the % of people needing mental health care in the US who receive it vs most of western europe. I would imagine it's probably night and day.

I saw this posted on facebook and honestly, while it's a troll job I can't completely disagree with it

"It's not guns, it's mental health!"
"Great, let's get people mental healthcare!"
"No! The government shouldn't be involved in mental healthcare!"

Most of these shooters were relatively wealthy and had access to mental healthcare.

The government didn't involuntarily detain them though. I have no idea to what extent that happens in Europe. But that's always been a tough sell here. We've tried to use the criminal justice system for that purpose, but we have real reluctance to lock up law-abiding people who we deem mentally ill. I would love to see that mindset changed. I train police officers on occasion and always emphasize their statutory power to detain people who, due to their mental illness, are threats to themselves or others. Of course, police are only going to be aware of that when someone is acting out in a dangerous way, and a lot of these people are loners who spend most of their time in their homes. And even when there is a situation, people are detained briefly and stabilized and released, at least until they commit their first crime. Adam Lanza was treated and the schools and doctors knew how crazy he was, but I don't think he committed any crimes, or acted out in any way to provide evidence that he was dangerous. I think the mother knew more but was concealing info from authorities, which is easy to do in a country that has relatively strong privacy rights. If there was such evidence though, I'm still not not sure they would have locked him up, because we just don't do that as much as we should.

People struggle with mental illness (and addiction) even when they have resources to treat them. It's a real inexact science. So I don't think it tells the whole story either.

You may be right. That being said, it's just a completely different approach. Even if you are wealthy and you have access to mental health care, you are still probably paying for a large part of it out of pocket or spending time convincing the insurance company you really need it. And either of those situations you have somebody who is really motivated to keep the care as cheap and as short as possible.

I'm going to stop there and not go down that road because it ends up in the same old healthcare argument and that does this thread a disservice. But ultimately I do agree with what was posted on fb above.

You can say all citizens deserve access to guns with minimal/no background checks
You can also say the government should not be in the business of providing health care including mental health care and that should be left to private enterprise and the decisions of individuals
But if you do say both of those things, I don't think you can turn around and then be surprised when these kind of shootings keep happening. Maybe as a society we agree with 1 and 2 so much that we are willing to live with 3. But it seems dishonest to me to skirt around the edges and say "why does this keep happening here"

Do all of these shooters necessarily have a mental illness? I'm not sure that's a safe assumption. And that's kind of a scary thought

Rather than quote anyone/anything specific, I'll just say that this is in response to several posts talking about mental health issues & the handling of them in other countries.

Perhaps it's a legitimate possibility that other countries' have people doing a better job of taking care of their own family members than we do. An intentional exaggeration to clarify what I mean there, maybe other nation's aren't as reluctant to lock their own fruitcake relative in the basement as we are*

And, frankly, I'm not criticizing places where that might be the case


* (I just didn't feel like what I meant by "take care of" was clear, and wasn't up to a long-winded explanation of it, the extreme example seemed likely to suffice)

That's probably a fair question.

It's also probably equally fair to wonder aloud how small a percentage of the population isn't diagnosable as "mentally ill" in some form or fashion.

This particular fellow certainly seems easy enough to tag.

It sounds like goofy conspiracy theory, but I find myself questioning the role of not just mental illness, but mental illness medication itself in these shootings. Even the adds for lots of those psychoactive medications contain disclaimers about "may cause homicidal/suicidal urges'. Surely most of the hundreds of thousands of users of those medications get the intended benefit, but what if the cost is that they also push a few nutcases over the edge? Not only do we need to consider throwing more resources into mental health, but we need to consider our culture of treatment, beyond the modern standard of "throw some pillz at it".

An extremely quick & lazy google search reveals a semi-interesting take on the subject, from the journalistic powerhouse, the Los Alamos Daily Post:

A Brief History of Psychotropic Drugs Prescribed to Mass Murderers | Los Alamos Daily Post

To prevent mass shootings? Or to prevent any potential crime?

At least we finally have a Republican candidate come out against the Patriot Act.

Of course, he also said this You Don't Pass a Pool Fencing Law After a Child Drowns, Says Jeb, Who Did Just That

I think Jeb is just running because it was expected of him. I'm not sure his heart is really in it.

He's a politician. Of course he's a hypocrite!

Of course, on the flipside, that pool fence measure was passed 109-8 in the state house. He didn't exactly have a lot of choice.

Is the fence-free pool tied to some sort of Constitutional right that Im missing. Is this a valid comparison?

So I am curious to hear the particulars of the shooting in Oregon as to what type and number of guns this wacko had, how he got them ( were they his or a relatives) how much ammo did he have.

I don't know what types he had....doesnt really matter, but they were all legally registers and he had plenty of ammo.

Yeah it absolutely does matter at least in my mind. Did he walk into the school with two assault rifles with two thousand rounds of ammo or did he walk in with a pair of hunting rifles with two boxes of ammo? I get they were all legal. It seems just about anything is legal with our gun laws.

He actually only used a pistol. There was (what I gather was) an AR-15 he stored/hid in another room but never used it.

A semi-auto pistol can often times hold more rounds than an AR/AK. I have a Smith and Wesson 9mm that can carry 17 rounds in each magazine.

Almost everything I hear about Jeb is that he's a manager at heart. I don't think that he's a politician at heart. He's a great manager, so he sees a problem and starts to think of solutions. Deadly accidents involving pools? Let's weigh the pros and cons of new regulations of pools. Can we save lives with reasonable expense and a minimum of interference with enjoyment? Deadly accidents involving guns? Let's weigh the pros and cons of new regulations of guns. Can we save lives with reasonable expense and a minimum of interference with enjoyment? That's the first place his brain goes. Trying to solve the problem.

A natural politician would have gotten up and led with rhetoric about the Constitution and just gone from there.

I'm a Democrat, so I want the Dems to win the presidency in order to be a veto to the GOP legislature. But if I had to pick a public figure to put in charge of something large and important based solely on skill, I would probably pick Jeb. He likes solving problems, and he seems pretty good at it.

Assault rifle is a glorified name for a military looking hunting rifle. Hell, even if we banned AR-15's, that would force him to use shotguns....

In any event, it's illegal to kill people, what makes you think people will obey gun laws? And what kinds of punishment would you hand out differently if they were legal or not? The only thing that I see happening with strict gun laws is normal citizens are going to be defenseless. I hate to say it, but murder or attempted murder with guns should hold the same weight. You fire a gun at a human being and you are done playing the game of free citizen. Pinning these horrific crimes on white GOP southerners attached to the NRA is just a no-gain political stunt.

For me, it still always comes back to why do other countries not have these things on a weekly basis? They have things happen but it's not all the time, nor is it often as bad. Is it guns, mental health, income gaps, what is it? If you say that it's all of these things then you are saying, it's just American culture and the idea this is something we just have to live with is asinine.

For me it's about mental health and the way we treat it but I'm sick of watching the same discussions over and over as we as a country sit around with our thumbs up our asses hoping it's going to blow over. God forbid the day that several of these people link up. Then we might find out how bad things can really be. We have to start trying to develop ideas and working the problem and not just living with it.

It is illegal to steal things, what makes you think people will obey robbery laws?

It is illegal to drive drunk, what makes you think people will obey DUI laws?

It is illegal to use non-public information to trade stocks, what makes you think people will obey insider trading laws?

That is a horrible strawman argument that really needs to stop.

You mean like the bullshit surrender on drug laws? That certainly seems to be popular with the leftists that want to restrict gun ownership, so goose, gander, etc.

Also, none of the things you mention is a constitutionally protected right, so apples & oranges could come into play as well.

You are aware that the right to bear arms as a constitutional right is not absolute? Otherwise convicted felons and the like would legal be able to legally own weapons.

No, you just created the straw man. Read the part of my post where I start with, "I hate to say...." and it lines up nicely with all your reversed logic.

Make America great again. Repeal the 21st amendment!

It's not absolute. The VAST majority of guns are handguns, rifles and shotguns. Most other weaponry is illegal or extremely hard to get legally. While we get up in arms about this, in the end, it was 10 people. Drug dealers and thugs are still dishing out 10,000 deaths each year and its because of drugs, not mental health. And yet here we are again blaming those card-carrying NRA "gun-nuts" of the GOP flavor.

So, what kind of gun ISN'T a handgun, rifle or shotgun?

Good points that I admit are things to consider. I think we might eventually have to consider some type of deterrence to mass murder or murder with guns other than just plain old lethal injection. A life of hard labor in a coal mine or in the future life if hard labor on an asteroid in space just brain storming death by acid bath. As violent as American culture has gotten it would have to be a pretty horrific death to deter people. But then we come back to people who would never allow that and also there is no way to deter crazy.

Machine guns?

Aren't those considered short barreled rifles?

Yes, I think it's reasonable to assume every single one of them had psychological issues severe enough to have a complete breakdown, these aren't split-second loss of awareness decisions. It takes too much time between the decision to grab the gun and the actual shooting for this to be an act of temporary meltdown.

The desire to consume drugs (in my opinion) is actually a signal of mental illness.

So in about half the states in this country people can
But automatic weapons albeit they go through a lengthy FBI background check as long as they are not an ex con or have a record of domestic violence they can get one of the 300,000 automatic weapons fire up there. As for ARs, they now can empty 30 rounds in a few seconds.
CNN's Don Lemon says automatic weapons are easy to get | PunditFact

Right, by "extremely hard to get" I mean, most people don't bother with it. You can empty a 9mm pretty quick too. 30 round mags are available....ban those...okay, you'll need to bring two...neither is very accurate at that rate of fire though. The vast majority of the 10,000 annual homicides are done when the shooter fires less than 6 rounds anyway...

Agreed, but at least those are passive mental problems and not aggressive mental problems. Although, drinking or being high while driving tends to eliminate the overall benefit, I suppose.

So you are on board with limiting magazines to 5 rounds or fewer?

If anything, I was implying you want to ban everything that has 30 or less rounds! But no, I wasn't implying anything like 5 or less only.

Plus, they could be minor at first, but can rather quickly lead to bigger problems.

We have to remember that, despite attention from the media rivaling that of missing Malaysian airliners, the sum total of people killed in rampage-type shootings per decade is about equal to the number of people who die in traffic accidents in America on a single summer day.

You'd have far more impact on the lives of innocent people with a $1,000 fine for texting and driving. I also would guess that increased penalties on those who drink and drive has had an enormous impact.

I don't own a gun. I don't want a gun. I don't get warm and fuzzy thinking about my neighbors owning machine guns (and I'd bet at least one of them does).

But I view gun restrictions as somewhat similar to abortion restrictions. That most attempts to restrict gun ownership are a slippery slope toward an authoritarian control.

And I view restrictions as somewhat pointless. Many of our larger urban areas have the strictest laws against gun possession. Yet the murder rates are much higher in many of these areas.

As for restrictions on the mentally ill, I'm just not sure how that would work. But I am for restrictions on felons and my guess is that people who dangerously mentally ill - at least to a point where we would consider invoking this type of law - are already felons.

Including, or not including, alcohol?

Look, I agree with these ideas, but once again comparing guns to cars is false equivalence of the highest order.

Including.

What if you drink wine/beer/cocktails because you like the taste?

interesting map (not realted to school shootings, but gun deaths in general)

http://projects.oregonlive.com/ucc-shooting/gun-deaths