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For your wisdom and perfect leadership through this discussion.
I claim 4 generations in Idaho.
Can we discuss how we respond to the president's (just ended) speech?
Can we agree, he was asked and was expected to do something by the victims and families of all the recent killings? Whether you believe it's too much or not enough, can we agree he went to those locations and grieved with all involved and saw lives destroyed and as a man with common decency, he had to do something?
I am very proud of my father for acting in his beliefs and also proud of our president for acting in his beliefs.
Thanks for the kind words...these topics are always like painting yourself in kerosene and dancing around a bonfire, from a moderator's view...
To reply to your question above...
I agree that the president felt compelled to act. A nation looks to a president to act in times like this...which is unfortunate because in so many ways people so badly misunderstand a president's inability to create legislation and a president's inability to create funding...so a lot of it comes down to "directing federal agencies to xyz" and "pushing congress to introduce a bill to fund xyz".
I believe the president had a VERY REAL opportunity to make an impact on the mental health crisis in our country and turn the country's attention to the VERY REAL problem of our youth becoming both infatuated with and inured to violence in movies, television, and video games, speaking from a wide open bully pulpit. Instead he chose to go after legal owners or potential owners of military-appearing civilian-grade semi-auto rifles (again, NOT true "selective fire assault rifles") who are statistically very unlikely to commit crime.
Grief and anger lead to misplaced action, like blaming an object (gun), organization (NRA), or segment of society (republicans, gun owners, etc) for a tragedy when in fact what killed those children in Newtown was ONE crazy person who committed a heinous murder to obtain what had previously been a lawfully acquired weapon.
I do not believe that ANY of the president's actions (EDIT: beyond more school resource officers), nor those he's pushing congress to undertake, will do anything meaningful to help prevent another Sandy Hook incident...so we'll just be back here having this sort of discussion when the next awful and senseless mass killing happens again, but at the same time we missed the opportunity, as a nation to take meaningful action at addressing the CRAP we're allowing into the minds of our children and the reprehensible way in which we deal with our mentally ill in this country.
And I recognize that some of his EOs mention mental health. I'm not ignoring those. But compared to what he had the opportunity to address this is pebbles-in-the-ocean toward the long term national mental health crisis.
Last edited by Sage of Sagle; 01-16-2013 at 11:30 PM..
As a strong supporter of gun rights, I was actually surprised to see some sensible things in Obama's EOs today. In particular:
1) Adding the mentally ill to the NICS database. Seems like a simple, common sense idea. Someone "adjudicated mentally incompetent" is already banned from purchasing a firearm.
2) Actually prosecuting those that lie "on a background check". OK, that's stupid, you don't lie on the NICS check, that's between the gun dealer and the FBI. You can lie on the form 4473, which is a federal felony, long past time it was actually enforced. So if an illegal immigrant, felon or user of illegal drugs lies on the form, they can be prosecuted. Enforcing existing gun laws...what a concept.
3) Adding more "resource officers" (aka armed police) to schools. Also hard to argue with this.
It seems like many of Obama's supporters agree with these actions as well, today.
What is a bit hard to comprehend is why, 2 weeks ago, when the NRA made exactly these same suggestions, many on the left nearly evacuated their bowels in outrage. So...why when these suggestions are made by the NRA are they in some way crazy or extreme...but when made by Obama they are reasonable and sensible?
With regard to gun bans or bans on standard capacity magazines, I do have a question for those who support those restrictions. Can you explain why a criminal, who ignores laws against murder, rape, robbery, assault, etc...would be expected to obey laws concerning firearms? Same with background checks...do you believe a gang banger with a stolen firearm is going to take his gang-banger buddy to a gun store and do a background check when he sells it? These are just concepts I'm having a little trouble wrapping my brain around.
There is a fundamental difference in the respect for gun rights in the Idaho than in New York. I grew up in rural western New York. Guns were common, particularly shotguns (no rifles were allowed for deer hunting) and rimfire rifles. Handguns were less common among the law abiding (though perhaps more common among the criminal element), mostly due to the difficulty in getting a permit to even own one. In this part of Idaho concealed carry is common. When I got mine renewed, I asked how many were in the county. My recollection is that it was upwards of 20 percent of the population. 1 in 5. Rather they know it or not, everyone in the county has shopped with, watched a movie with or had dinner with people carrying firearms. Yet gun violence, particularly against strangers, is so low that it's nearly unheard of. In Idaho, guns are seen as a tool, about as common, and threatening (in the hands of the law abiding), as a pocket knife. In New York, a civilian with a CCW permit was a relative rarity. Heck, in New York a simple jack knife was enough to cause some to cower in fear.
Last edited by Toyman at Jewel Lake; 01-16-2013 at 10:46 PM..
And I recognize that some of his EOs mention mental health. I'm not ignoring those. But compared to what he had the opportunity to address this is pebbles-in-the-ocean toward the long term national mental health crisis.[/quote]
This is really interesting Sage and it led me to wonder about mental health and violence. I clearly see the connection.
In your experience, are you able to share how many people who murdered, using a gun were organically mentally ill?
How many people were mentally ill from: war (post taumatic stress)?, childhood abuse? Drug and alcohol abuse? That is, culturally created mental illness?
And how are we going to get a handle on prevention, when there is a high risk of human rights violations?
And if a person is deemed dangerous, do we lock them away in prisons? There don't seem to be enough mental hospitals, so would we build domitories? In other words, if we can prove someone is predisposed to killing, what do we do?
How do we test? It looks like medical testing only gets done after the fact; when a person is on trial and using the insanity plea. I would like to know more about testing, i.e., brain scans, chemical imbalances, hormone imbalances, etc?
So after we establish guidelines, are we going to be able to prevent a murder? Or, we wait until someone commits a violent crime and then add them to a database that prevents them from buying a gun?
Whew!
Last edited by fishinidaho70; 01-17-2013 at 10:52 AM..
People have had the ability to shoot others for some time now. Mass shootings are a more recent phenomenon. The link between mass shootings and mental health budget cuts over the last 30 years seems a natural to me. Here is a survey showing the impact of RECENT budget cuts in Idaho: Reg II MH survey cover letter 2013 Reg II MH Survey Summary 2013
I would rather see us massively increase mental health funding than spend more on curtailing access to guns.
This is really interesting Sage and it led me to wonder about mental health and violence. I clearly see the connection.
In your experience, are you able to share how many people who murdered, using a gun were organically mentally ill?
versus:
How many people were mentally ill from: war (post taumatic stress)?, childhood abuse? Drug and alcohol abuse? That is, culturally created mental illness?
One thing to bear in mind with my personal experiences from my career is that it will reflect too small a sampling to give any broad statistical reliability.
So I'll share my recollection, but it should be viewed as representation of just one cop's career, not by any stretch a claim of anything larger.
In East LA, we saw quite a bit of homelessness of course. Much of that was from substance abuse. But the homeless became mentally less stable after just a few weeks on the streets of not getting good sleep. That group gravitated toward cutting instruments, knives, broken bottles, razor blades, etc, and they mostly acted out in a permanent stage of defensive paranoia.
But when we're talking about people who murder, I don't want to only address "completed" acts of murder. I want to talk about attempted murder and assault with deadly weapons since a good number of those could have wound up with dead bodies had we or family members not intervened.
When talking about time where we responded on people with a firearm, a good number of those were drug-induced psychotic episodes to be sure. And those were violent dangerous people. But they were either acting crazy and going to act at that moment or be stopped. There wasn't the "ticking time bomb" effect going on with them like with organically mentally ill people.
I think what's hardest for people with organically mentally ill family members is never knowing what's coming. We'd get calls to a location and one day it would be a guy locked in his room with a gun, another day he'd be chasing his parents around the house with a kitchen knife or box cutter, another time he'd be breaking everything in the house and the rest of the family would be outside on the front lawn. THEY NEVER KNEW when it was coming or what was next. And as those kids got older, stronger, taller, they just got worse, never better. NEVER did I see anyone improve.
So in any given patrol area, we all knew the crazies because we'd be out at their houses often enough. And honestly, sometimes you'd think to yourself "some day that guy's going to be up in a bell tower taking out college students"...they'd even talk about killing people, shooting people, scream about killing cops, killing their families, you name it. Again, we're talking about organically mentally ill people here. And then when they get older and their families can't take it any more, they wind up on the streets, where you add the layer of homeless instability and defensive paranoia and it's just that much worse. But often by that time they'd also be into substance abuse as well.
So in my experience, organically mentally ill people ATTEMPT to hurt people with deadly weapon on a very regular basis but are less successful because people around them are so prepared for them to try it that they're fairly prepared to respond, whereas people with drug-induced psychotic episodes are probably more successful because they're out in public with firearms and no support structure around them prepared to head them off or mitigate their violent behavior. Where I patrolled, we could get the first radio car to most locations in 1-3 minutes rolling hot, and we'd get there and there would be 1-2 family members unsuccessfully wrestling some 14 year old boy over a knife or a gun, shouting to us "please don't hurt him" (although they knew we might have to in order to disarm him quickly). When we'd roll up on someone solo with a gun waving it around or firing shots, I'd lay you 99-to-1 odds it was NOT organic mental illness, rather either drugs/alcohol or drug-induced psychotic episode.
Obviously I'm being very general here, but I think you get the picture. And to be clear, as a patrol guy, I rarely had time to delve into why someone used drugs or alcohol...PTSD, childhood abuse, etc. Unless a family member told me what was going on or a tox screen came back later for certain drugs (so that on a repeat call we knew the guy's drug of choice) we had to go with what we saw because in 95%-plus of these cases violent people aren't real chatty about their root causes. It's not like the movies where you can get them to open up to you in 30 seconds..."oh, you're a Lakers fan too?...how bout that game last night?...were you abused as a child?". Chatting them up DOES bring down the tension level...don't get me wrong...it's a tool we use to try to lessen a violent suspect's stress level...but patrol officers aren't shrinks...and we don't go deep delving into personal stuff because you could trigger an explosive outburst and violent reaction. So our talk is patter to try to defuse the situation.
Quote:
And how are we going to get a handle on prevention, when there is a high risk of human rights violations?
There is obviously a touchy civil rights issue when you're talking about someone's freedom. And to be fair to people who are keeping their dangerous tendencies in check, it's NOT fair or legal to lock up everyone who has expressed dangerous feelings to a shrink just because 5 or 10 wackos a year go shoot up a school when there are tens of thousands of mental patients who are walking the streets controlling their violent thoughts with self control and medication.
HOWEVER...what I observed in law enforcement is that in all too many cases there were people around a lot of the more severe/dangerous psychotic mentally ill who SHOULD have been granted conservatorship by the courts who were not allowed it. I believe that it's one thing if your son or daughter is worth $10 million and you go after conservatorship to get their money, a judge should take a dim view of it. But that is NEVER the case in reality. (at least I never saw it) What I saw what 16-17 year olds who were dangerously violent and the parents saw that at age 18 they would no longer be able to control the behavior or do an involuntary commitment even with a stack of 5150 holds and police reports. That's just wrong. If there's a paper trail to back it up, there needs to be more leeway for concerned family members to obtain conservatorship and do involuntary psychiatric commitments.
Look...I'm an American...and a libertarian/conservative Idahoan, you know where I stand. But if my family felt I was so mentally ill that my wife and brother felt I was dangerous enough to go to a judge and petition for conservatorship because of a stack of police calls and 5150 psychiatric holds, they should get it. I believe at that point the US Constitution's due process clause has been honored. I think right now the courts err too much on the side of personal freedom and not enough on the side of allowing conservatorships in the cases of mental illness with violent adult patients. Again, just my perception from my career.
Quote:
And if a person is deemed dangerous, do we lock them away in prisons? There don't seem to be enough mental hospitals, so would we build domitories? In other words, if we can prove someone is predisposed to killing, what do we do?
How do we test? It looks like medical testing only gets done after the fact; when a person is on trial and using the insanity plea. I would like to know more about testing, i.e., brain scans, chemical imbalances, hormone imbalances, etc?
So after we establish guidelines, are we going to be able to prevent a murder? Or, we wait until someone commits a violent crime and then add them to a database that prevents them from buying a gun?
Whew!
When I was a new deputy in LA County, the state closed down the high security mental hospital and guess where they all ended up within 8 months? Yup...in the Los Angeles County jail system...the LA County jail system became the largest mental health provider in Southern California.
But for people who actually WERE in mental hospitals and inpatient treatment facilities?
I'm not a mental health professional, nor do I have any expertise in that field, so I'm only going from what several mental patients I've arrested (shortly after being released from said facilities) have shared with me after they've assaulted and seriously harmed or killed someone. They've quite literally said to me (while handcuffed in the back of my patrol car covered in blood), "I told them I was going to hurt someone...I tried to tell them they should have kept me in there and they didn't listen". I heard that story over...and over...and over...so while I can't tell someone how to do their job or have the hubris to think I know how to do it better, I can tell you that whatever was being done when I was a cop wasn't working.
EDIT: I re-read this and realized it sounds like I was nightly dragging blood-soaked mental patients off to jail after they'd maimed the general public like Jack the Ripper. I'll clarify. What I meant to say was that it was very common to have people that cycled through the system, from jail to the streets to mental health to streets to jail and back, until they seriously harmed someone, then back in jail because the arrest for felony assault was usually only filed as misdemeanor or they even got kicked out after 30 or 60 days time served in the psych ward of the jail. They'd be stable while on their meds, but as soon as they're back on the streets they're off their meds, start hearing the voices (I think that was one of the most common things I experienced these guys telling me) and those voices were never advocating "giving peace a chance"...let's put it that way. But these guys weren't generally grabbing firearms...it was usually cutting instruments since that's what they could get their hands on. - END EDIT
I'm sure it boils down to the almighty dollar. It is very likely that mental health professionals would keep EVERY seriously deranged dangerous person locked up (legally and with good cause) who comes through their doors but the money simply isn't there so they have capitulated and at this point it's just become a shell game of keeping some of the most dangerous ones (the 5%-ers) locked up and trying to juggle the rest between the streets, the jails, the hospitals, and the actual inpatient mental health facilities.
THAT is the opportunity that I feel the president seriously missed with his response to this crisis. Because he had the full attention of every living room, every church, every senior center, every waiting room, and every bridge club in the country and I think he could have made a case for repairing an entire infrastructure that would not just help reduce the potential of future crazy killers but MORE importantly (now stay with me as I explain why this is more important) it would repair the lives of tens if not hundreds of thousands of families around the country over coming decades as they'd be able to get meaningful mental health care for their teen and even adult children.
Last edited by Sage of Sagle; 01-17-2013 at 11:03 PM..
Sage, that was an outstanding post, and the best article I've read about the issue anywhere. Thanks for taking the time and making the effort to offer that to this board. You've given me a lot to think about and digest.
Sage, that was an outstanding post, and the best article I've read about the issue anywhere. Thanks for taking the time and making the effort to offer that to this board. You've given me a lot to think about and digest.
Amen...couldn't agree more! Overall it's my hope, especially as someone who currently lives in California, that most Idahoans would take a "price of freedom is eternal vigilance" posture when it comes to the Second Amendment, and the entire Bill of Rights for that matter.
That Sage has gone to such time and length to share his past personal experiences in such an illuminating way and with such depth of thought, is wonderful. Excellent information on a topic that could so easily descend into people hurling insults, ad hominem attacks, an all-out flame war....No thanks! It really brings up the other subject of how we handle and treat people who have mental health issues.
I hope all of you enjoy a good weekend and M.L. King holiday!
Sage does do a great job of sharing a cops viewpoint.
I currently work in the field of mental health. I have done so for three years. In that time I've seen huge cuts to our state Health and Welfare programs, and the private providers it uses to reach clients. A prior post linked to a recent study showing the impact of those cuts in north central Idaho. In a word: devastating.
I do quibble with his use of the term capitulate there. We certainly have not! But (and it is a big but), it is hard to get good people interested in this field nowadays.
Why? Money.
There isn't any.
Most clientelle for the types of services that help address the issues raised by Sage are low, and possibly no, income. The gov't pays for their treatment. And, since it is a monopoly, the gov sets the rates. That's right! Here in Idaho most mental health services are contracted out by the state to private providers. The state tells them what rates they will pay. Every provider I know eeks out a living because they have a passion for it, not because they make a good living at it. One provider I know recently opened a port-a-potty business to supplement his income. Two years in and I think it has eclipsed his MH services income. The state doesn't pay enough to make it worth their while.
Gov't has a lot of competing priorities. And it does, trying to serve all the population. But, if you want to know the gov's real priorities follow the money. In Idaho the money surely isn't flowing to those providing MH services. But we are building a new multi-million dollar incarceration facility in southern Idaho.
I do quibble with his use of the term capitulate there. We certainly have not! But (and it is a big but), it is hard to get good people interested in this field nowadays.
......
We haven't capitulated. We're simply unsupported.
I didn't mean to denigrate the dedication and work ethic of the profession as a whole. But when I was a young cop, I went out trying to save the world...and it wasn't long before reality taught me the futility of that mindset and I had to just try to save the person on the next call, and then the next one, and then the next one. I had to learn that I can't save the world, but I can save the people that are placed in my path by chance or by assigned calls.
By capitulate I meant that without proper resources, support, facilities, or manpower, mental health professionals cannot lock up everyone who needs to be locked up...they are forced to lock up only the ones who present the most dire clear and present danger to society and even that's not enough. Your profession is failing society not by design but by forced default, much as my former profession had to fail society over and over due to lack of budget and manpower to thoroughly investigate serious crimes, adequately patrol high crime areas, or properly enforce traffic safety measures.
But I did not mean to imply that you (as a collective group) just gave up and stopped caring or stopped trying to make a difference.
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