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Virginia Tech Report Cites Privacy Law Problems
RickRussellTX writes "A panel of Bush administration officials, including several bureau chiefs, concludes that confusing privacy laws contributed to the Virgina Tech shootings. The report claims that confusion over student privacy and medical privacy laws "has limited the ability of these officials to prevent the kind of violence that occurred at Virginia Tech.""
"has limited the ability of these officials to prevent the kind of violence that occurred at Virginia Tech.""
You can't prevent this sort of thing. It really is impossible. Unless, that is, you want to start treating people who haven't committed a crime but seem a bit "different" as criminally insane. But you'd have to lock them up forever, because if you steal someones life and then let them go... well, he'd be more pissed off than ever before - if he even could do something like these shootings you should bet your arse this would trigger it off.
I suspect that the response will be what we can usually expect from pretty much any government though, "this generates bad headlines, "THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" generates good headlines regardless of the consequences, therefore we should do the whole think of the children thing to an even greater degree". And if they do remove a large section of privacy from people - especially if they go as far as to interfere with doctor/patient privacy - then you can expect more shootings as people who could have been stopped with help and support are forced back upon themselves.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
The issue of prohibiting access to firearms is moot - if he hadn't had access to a gun he probably would have used a sword, or a knife, or burned a few buildings down, etc.. The point is, he was dangerous and the only reasonable form of prevention would have been to remove him from society - but the risk of false positives probably means all the hand wringing in the world will not stop another Cho.
Agreed. Blaming, even partially, "privacy laws" for this massacre is just plain dishonest.
n g/ )
(if anything, the problem with privacy laws is that they're facing extinction)
Snippets from a news report written shortly after the tragedy:
"A medical examination found that (...) [Cho's] insight and judgment are normal"
"Although Cho's writings were disturbing, mental health professionals say the student's behavior didn't reach the threshold that would have demanded more aggressive intervention."
"You can't do anything unless there's imminent risk that's somewhat foreseeable to take away someone's civil rights"
(source: http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/19/student.counseli
Seems clear to me that no sharing of medical information with law enforcement would have helped here.
it does show clearly how the governments around the world manipulate public opinion in an alarming way to get to an endpoint they desire.
But what I can't understand is why they want to get this endpoint in the first place. Why does the state need so much control when it can so easily be voted out within 4 years? It just doesn't make any sense.
The idea of an 'unreloadable by the owner' gun is ludicrous. For one thing, how on earth are you going to expect the owner of this 'wonderful' piece of technology to be able to get enough practice to be able to reasonably hit what he needs to? After all, he's only got ten shots before he has to go back to town!
That and, if it's only reloadable by a factory/technician/expensive-and-heavy machine... how do you unload it to render it safe, perhaps for storage? If you're going in to town because you used it to shoot a fox that went into your hen-house, and you fired two rounds, do you just blow off the other 8 (yay, practice!) before driving to town with it?
While guns can indisputably make killing people easier, they are, in the end, merely tools. It's much easier to kill someone with an AMC Gremlin than it is with your bare hands. Sort of. Crazy people are the problem, and a lack of education and control. Many violent firearms-related crimes are committed with weapons that are obtained illegally - you don't think that the gang-bangers pick up their AKs at Wal-Mart after a 10-day waiting period, do you?
Everyone and their brother having access to guns isn't the problem as much as everyone and their brother having access to guns without any education about or respect for them. Belt-fed, 40mm grenade launchers? No, I can't really see any logical reason to have one of these unless you're, you know - the military. Nevermind the fact that I can only imagine the cost of shooting the thing. But it seems to me that there are as many arguments against 'gun control' (say more clearly, gun restriction - because illegal weapons are still every bit as available and out of control) legislation as there are for it. Statistics from both sides can be brought to bear with alarming facility.
But there's one thing we all ought to be able to agree upon: crazy, disturbed individuals are more dangerous than any 'assault weapon'. I can't find a citation at the moment, but a guy in the UK went into a church and killed a bunch of people with a SWORD. Guess he really meant to get all 'old school', but it certainly proves that if you're disturbed, you don't need a gun to commit multiple murder.
Let's ban crazy people! Just don't worry too much about who gets to define what 'crazy' is. Is disagreeing with the current administration's position on the 'war on terror' crazy?
Evolution ceases when stupidity can no longer be fatal.
I'm not a gun person, but if the founding fathers had only had the guns the government deemed that they needed then we wouldn't have one our independence. In this country people have a right to bear arms, and it's not to hunt, it's to form militias if so desired. If we want to change this sort of thing, step 1, is to change or remove the 2nd amendment. Which makes sense because militias are no longer used in law enforcement and there has become such a huge disparity between the stuff the military has and the stuff the populace has that we could never succeed in a revolt against an illegal tyrannical government anyway.
as well as strength of character necessary for a responsible owner.
Wow. You really want to go there? Because I'm pretty sure that having not accepted the flying spaghetti monster as your own personal savior, you don't have the strength of character needed to responsibly do anything important, like vote, or speak freely.
Farmers can kill, repel or immobilize wild animals by weapons that are not likely to kill humans.
a lot of the dangerous wildlife out there is dangerous because it is big enough to be, which often means harder to kill then a human.
Yes, the fine article talks about privacy laws. It also states that because of "budget constraints" the state mental health system can't handle the number of patients it needs to handle, with month-long waiting lists for counselling and "local health agencies" that don't follow up on patients. So Cho was a mentally ill man, far away from home, with a possibly history of untreated mental illness for several years.
/. summary is basically the first paragraph about privacy laws? Congratulations in promoting the culture of knee-jerk response!
Also from the article, the state of Virginia never passed on the information that Cho had been "adjudicated as a mental defective" to the "National Instant Check System", but it seems the state was not funded for its part in keeping this system up to date - the proposal is now to fund this activity.
So... all of this in the article, and the resultant
It depends how paranoid you like to be. If you take the long term view there is an argument that people in power want to keep that power and if it needs to be done in stages ie. voted out this time, back in next time, so be it. A scared population is a compliant one and if there's no bogyman, it's a good idea to invent one. You'd really need to see the program as it's quite a complex series of steps to get to where we are now.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
As you slide the Overton window, people become acclimated to whatever arguably wrongheaded idea you want to implement.
Just to drop an example, it is practically impossible to float a serious policy question along the lines of "should the federal government tax the income of individual citizens?".
Regardless of your opinion of whether a more states-rights approach would make sense the IRS is here to stay. "The savage civil servant's beady eyes"[1] glow with pleasure at the thought of shaping public behavior through tax policy. The change of administration, like a shift of wind at sea, has no effect on the current below the whitecaps.
However, Al Gore's little internet invention may become a feedback loop to restore some liberty, if http://porkbusters.org/ has any impact.
[1]http://www.google.com/musics?lid=8yCLpO47IjD&a
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I find it amusing that you think the point of having access to fire-arms is moot. How many people do you think he could have killed with a sword? Let me tell you: One, and he could have injured a couple more. Consider the time and effort it takes to actually kill someone with a sword. It is damned hard.
We had a madman going into a RFSL-clinic (an organisation for the equal treatment of gays and lesbians) and attacking a woman with an axe (she got hit in the head). The woman survived. Do you honestly think she would have been the only victim if he had had access to a handgun of any sort? Do you think she would have survived?
Having access to guns doesn't make a person a murderer. But a murderer with access to firearms (or other kinds of similar weapons, grenades, explosives, poison gas) will be way more effective than one without them.
Also, the old "If everyone had guns they could have defended themselves" NRA-rhetoric is also stupid. Would you have wanted to be in a classroom full of scared kids with handguns when the rumors of a madman going from room to room killing kids gets going? It would be a massacre of biblical proportions of people shooting each other by mistake.
Badgers, we don't need no stinking badgers! - UHF
It is a social problem.
Yes, people will always try to kill each other.
However your chances of surviving a hit with a blunt object, or a stab with a knife, are FAR greater than surviving a gunshot.
In countries with tight gun control, overall violence is pretty much the same. Mortality, however, is FAR lower.
Yes criminals will have the guns. Even if you take the guns away, they'll have knives, or SOME sort of weapon. After all, that's the whole point of being a criminal. However a mugger is not likely to shoot up a school or a McDonalds. The most he'll do is kill his victim.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
New York City: 6.9 murders per 100,000 people (2004)
London: 1.7 murders per 100,000 people (2005)
The cities are comparable in size, population and prosperity.
What protects freedom of speech (and all the other rights)?
t m
In Mao's words, power comes from the barrel of a gun. The Second Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees an INDIVIDUAL right to "keep and bear arms" basically to prevent the government from having too much power over individuals.
Oh, as for gun control lowering crime? One is a helluva lot more likely to be robbed or assaulted in London than one is even in the worst parts of DC or Detroit. And never mind the number of home break-ins documented to happen in the UK. That doesn't happen in the US that often - because the crooks know there's a really good chance they'll get their ass shot. And last I looked, the murder rate in Ireland (no guns) was higher than the murder rate in the US.
Oops. Sorry to deflate your vision with facts.
There's no cross-societial evidence that correlates levels of gun ownership with crime rates, or even shootings. Guns are quite prevalent in Switzerland, for example. How about Finland?
Here's some real numbers for you to chew on:
http://www.uncjin.org/Statistics/firearms/index.h
One does wonder what ever happened the that "final study" that commission was supposed to produce, oh, about 8 years ago.
Do you think maybe it got swept under the rug because it didn't support the "guns cause crime" knee-jerk reactionaries?
And as far as swords go, how much cooler would it be if we had sword toting bad guys instead of gun toting ones? If our nightly cop dramas (or mob dramas) had lots of guys pulling katanas or rapiers at each other?
But on a more practical level, let's just get the automatics & semi-automatics out of circulation, and shit like at VA Tech won't happen.
Who says that Bush's administration will be voted out in four years? If I were Richard Cheney, I would remove the president from office in order to hold office for 3 years, with the possibility of reelection as an incumbent.
It reminds me of the oft-quoted Claire Wolfe from the book 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution:
"It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."