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Not everybody has a medical psychiatric illness. Major depression, bipolar depression and schizophrenia are classic examples of what a mental ILLNESS is.......people need to get educated.
We are going thru this with a family member. There are many things we are learning. He is 11 at the moment. He was diagnosed at the age of 6 and medicated since then. It is quite scary how deep and dark the little guy is, and sad too since he never asked to be this way. The problem many don't realize including us is our chemistry changes as we age , what works at one time may not work a year or two down the road. At this time , he's only 11 so his parents see what happens and are resposible for his medications. What happens when he's on his own and decides he doesn't like taking them anymore ? Actually this week he is being admitted because the past month he has had many violent outbreaks, and the only thing the Dr's say is they think the early onset of puberty is changing his body chemistry. He is being admitted because they fear he will either hurt himself or others.
The 800 lb gorilla is guns and our country's obsession/fetishism with them. Stop dancing around the truth.
There are millions of sane people with guns that don't go out and kill a bunch of folks. Its obvious that men who are doing mass killings have mental issues. Terrorists, maybe not, but I'll leave that to professionals to decide.
The commonality between these mass shootings are, loners, with mental problems. If we can find the folks with the mental problems and, A help them, or B, lock them up, society would be much better off. Guns don't kill folks, someone behind that gun with a finger on the trigger kills people.
There are also millions of mentally ill people both here and around the world who don't go around shooting people because they don't have access to guns. You can't have it both ways....either you have a country where a gun in every hand is the norm, or you limit access to guns and successfully regulate who can have them. Our country made its choice, now we have to live with it.
The 800 lb gorilla is guns and our country's obsession/fetishism with them. Stop dancing around the truth.
Really ? Are you really oblivious to what is going on in society ? Here in MI we have campaigns to help detour "road rage" , why because people can't deal with the fact that someone just cut them off and then they put others in danger to "get back" at that person. Do you not see a trend here ? People not being able to cope ? Firearms are not the issue here, they are just the tools that make killing someone easy (for the mentally unstable) and impersonal.
The same areas that liberals routinely disparage as "bitter clingers" are the same areas that have the least crime and mental illness. But they have the highest incidence of family values that are backward and unenlightened according to liberal rhetoric. You see the frequent derision of poor red states here on CD.
Well said. It's very apparent that many educated, urban/suburban Liberals despise rural America, because it stands for much of what they oppose. "Red states suck" threads frequently appear on CD (and plenty of other places).
The 800 lb gorilla is guns and our country's obsession/fetishism with them. Stop dancing around the truth.
Being from Oakland i can see why you think the way you do. You were surrounded by animals who couldnt control their emotions, and probably shot firearms sideways. PLease don't insinuate that something that was given to this nations citizens Constitutionally is a problem. The problem is mental disease , lack of morals, and an over dependence on government and lack of self reliance.
It didn't end because if costs in the 80's. It ended because of "rights" of the mentally ill in the late 70's. It was decided that reform was needed and that people couldn't be forced to take receive treatment. This was one of those "the best intentions" things.
It used to be that a citizen could petition a court to have someone committed to a mental institution, and the court could grant such committment if enough valid evidence was presented.
This changed in the 1960s and 70s.
Was that change, a mistake?
In 1967 two Democrats and a Republican in California's state legislature came up with the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, designed to end INVOLUNTARY commitments of mentallly ill, alcoholic, etc. people into large mental institutions. The LPS Act was hailed by liberals all over the country as putting an end to eeevil government practices of dictating to helpless victims where they would go and what treatments they would get whether they liked it or not. It was overwhelmingly passed by California's Assembly and Senate, and finally signed by Governeor Ronald Reagan in 1967. Similar laws were quickly passed all over the country, advocated mostly by liberal groups and do-gooders.
The liberal ACLU kept pushing this agenda to get these patients out of mental institutions, and finally resulted in 1975 (coincidentally Reagans' last year as Governor) in the U.S. Supreme Court handing down a decision in O'Connor vs. Donaldson (422 US 563). This Court decision announced a new Constitutional right: The mentally ill could not be forced to stay in such institutions if they were not an actual threat to others. This opened the floodgates and let huge numbers of patients, in various degrees of helplessness, out of the institutions.
When it was discovered that these laws and court decisions had the effect of putting many people who could not, in fact, take care of themselves out on the street, the liberals did a fast 180, hastily forgot about their long, enthusiastic nationwide advocacy and support of the agenda, and invented a completely new accusation: That it was Ronald Reagan alone who had "kicked all those poor people out of their nice, safe hospitals and made them homeless".
From Wikipedia:
The Lanterman–Petris–Short (LPS) Act (Cal. Welf & Inst. Code, sec. 5000 et seq.) concerns the involuntary civil commitment to a mental health institution in the State of California. The act set the precedent for modern mental health commitment procedures in the United States. It was co-authored by California State Assemblyman Frank Lanterman (R) and California State Senators Nicholas C. Petris (D) and Alan Short (D), and signed into law in 1967 by Governor Ronald Reagan. The Act went into full effect on July 1, 1972. It cited seven articles of intent:
To provide individualized treatment, supervision, and placement services by a conservatorship program for gravely disabled persons;
To encourage the full use of all existing agencies, professional personnel and public funds to accomplish these objectives and to prevent duplication of services and unnecessary expenditures;
To protect mentally disordered persons and developmentally disabled persons from criminal acts.
The Act in effect ended all hospital commitments by the judiciary system, except in the case of criminal sentencing, e.g., convicted sexual offenders, and those who were "gravely disabled", defined as unable to obtain food, clothing, or housing [Conservatorship of Susan T., 8 Cal. 4th 1005 (1994)]. It did not, however, impede the right of voluntary commitments. It expanded the evaluative power of psychiatrists and created provisions and criteria for holds.
There are also millions of mentally ill people both here and around the world who don't go around shooting people because they don't have access to guns. You can't have it both ways....either you have a country where a gun in every hand is the norm, or you limit access to guns and successfully regulate who can have them. Our country made its choice, now we have to live with it.
Unfortunately you make the case against your case.
Guns used to be much easier to get before most of these types spree shootings started to become common place in the 1980's.
I could buy handguns and "assault rifles" in the parking lot of my local grocery store before the logjam of anti-gun laws.
There are thousands of more gun regulations on the books now vs then and spree shootings continue.
To the Anti-gunners: Continue to do the same thing and get the same results. Fitting for this thread.
So just keep on passing anti gun regulations. That's the ticket.
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