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NYPD To Identify 'Deranged' Gunmen Through Internet Chatter
Hugh Pickens writes "Michael Wilson writes in the NY Times that top intelligence officials in the New York Police Department are looking for ways to target 'apolitical or deranged killers before they become active shooters' using techniques similar to those being used to spot terrorists' chatter online. The techniques would include 'cyber-searches of language that mass-casualty shooters have used in e-mails and Internet postings,' says Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. 'The goal would be to identify the shooter in cyberspace, engage him there and intervene, possibly using an undercover to get close, and take him into custody or otherwise disrupt his plans.' There are also plans to send officers to Newtown and to scenes of other mass shootings to collect information says the department's chief spokesman Paul. J. Browne adding that potential tactics include creating an algorithm that would search online 'for terms used by active shooters in the past that may be an indicator of future intentions.' The NYPD's counter-terrorism division released a report last year, 'Active Shooter (PDF),' after studying 202 mass shooting incidents. 'So, we think this is another logical step,' says Kelly."
Beat that.
Seastead this.
I am mad and I have a gun and I will be shooting everyone. I am announcing this beforehand so that the police can stop me. There is no sarcasm in this text whatsoever.
lol i no rite
Seriously, it's not going to work with the presence of popular internet shorthand.
what they should be doing is improving mental health services. Both the Colorado movie killer and Virginia Tech Killer had been identified with mental illness with red flags. A good system would have gotten them help. And for people that refuse mental health help there are only two options, institutionalization or they do what they want. There should be something like child protective services for people that refuse mental health help with red flags to keep track of them and make sure they get help.
Doubleplus ungood.
Now we're accepting mass surveillance for the sake of stopping rare crazed killers?
How about we provide a proper mental health system instead, so that when people go seeking help early in the process, they actually get it? They're willing to spend billions of dollars on a surveillance state, but heaven forbid parents be able to get the help they need at a reasonable price or for free when their kids have problems.
There's nothing "logical" about the approach they're talking about. It's completely irrational and emotional.
How does a city (albeit large) have the budget to do these kinds of things? Isn't traveling around the country to collect information from crime scenes the responsibility of the FBI?
The NYPD is a terrorist organization!
It will be impossible to ignore Bloomberg and his fiefdom.
Doesn't New York have term limits or something?
We all know how well this worked out in Minority Report?
through absurd policies.
Seems like a better idea, and only the tyrants rights will get trampled on should the system be abused.
Who gives a shit if we shit on the rights of the tyrants? AMIRIGHT?
It wasn't so hard to ban free speech. Now even talking about an FPS match will land you in jail.
So they are going to start arresting people for not having an interest in politics?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
In the UK you can be "Sectioned" If you appear to be a danger to yourself or others but these days policy seems to be "Care in the community" or shut as many mental facilities as possible and let fate take care of the problem.
Trouble is it is cheaper to ignore the problem, than do anything about it.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
The Newton shooter had almost no online presence at all. So how would this have prevented it? Just sounds like an excuse to spy on us.
So now we have states doing whatever the fuck they wanna do without regards to the constitution. Talking smack online is a crime now. That's what New Yorkers need, NYPD swat breaking into your home and threatening to blow your head off if you move and scare the living shit out of your family, oh yeah and the shooting of pets. Came from a communist country but it was never so bad(nanny state) like here in the U.S. I think these Oligarchies really need to go, they are just using any excuse to take away more rights. But who cares anyway, a country is just an ideology with virtual borders. Why the fuck should anybody listen to a bunch of guys dressed in clown suits wearing those mentally retarded badges calling themselves law enforcement. I think we need a new form of government because this one is just out of control.
They don't need to be institutionalized, they just need to be stopped from buying guns. Is that really too much to ask?
Didn't the latest crazed gunman have almost no Internet presence at all? If this is just an excuse to more closely monitor people online, it's a pretty transparent one.
Any excuse to monitor everyone.
REDRUM..... REDRUM
To try and figure out which cops are going to be rapists, since NYPD seems to have a little rape problem.
It helps me identify how effective a proposed plan might be. Without even RTFA I see that Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly uses it twice in the space of 2 sentences. On the Super Duper Gratuitous yet Uninformed Use of the Word Cyber Scale, that identifies his plan as absolutely fucking useless (out of ten).
do{
message=getmessage();
if(message.contains("Mass Effect"))
email("Alert@fbi.gov", "TERRORIST DETECTED", message);
while(1);
?! - Even Watson knew that...
So?! Even IBM Watson knew the answer to those and any else questions. This news is not part of the really big news about this fear.
Or? http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/21/nyregion/police-dept-to-use-internet-to-try-to-stop-shootings.html?_r=0
Because, when you screw someone, you do. Dangerous examples are recent, Norway, and now the recent school massacre,,, Fuck it. Please.
A fuck should be the intercourse between two humans!!! Not a killing...
Fuck me, the right way.
Trouble is it is cheaper to ignore the problem, than do anything about it.
No, it's not.
The problem is that there's no legal mechanism to send the bill to the society.
To every kid being killed, there're expenses on funeral and emotional support for his/her relatives, but there're also all the practical expenses of the day-to-day life, as medical/dental bills, educational expenses, toys and little amusements, vacations, necessities (clothes, etc) that go to the trash bin.
To every adult being killed, we have all that expenses since his/her childhood, more the LACK of the future (and present) funds to do the same with his/her kids. With luck, another adult will take for him/herself this expenses - at the cost of the expenses of his/her own kids (present of future).
So, YES, there're a lot of waste of money on every people being killed by a nutcrack. People are used to avoid talking about this, because we're used to think that a "human life is invaluable and, so, can not be monetized". What I, also, agree - there're no money on the world that can pay my life.
However, the COST of being alive is measurable. If a life can't be brought back, the costs incurred on being alive can be.
So, NO. IT'S A HELL OF SHIT EXPENSIVE ignoring the problem. Thing is that the bill does not goes over the shoulder of the bastards that make that decisions.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
and when were all sitting in prison cause we're not allowed any more what the fuck
NYPD you suck donkey cock
They don't need to be institutionalized, they just need to be stopped from buying guns. Is that really too much to ask?
Adam Lanza didn't buy any guns...
Granted, the vast majority of these shooters do buy their own guns through legal channels, so trying to stop the purchase of guns by the deranged is a valid option to explore. But identifying the tiny fraction of strange antisocial people who will commit violent crimes is not as easy as it sounds...
"Trouble is it is cheaper to ignore the problem, than do anything about it."
Sure it is. There are almost a hundred thousand public schools, not even counting the private ones.
Instead of hiring gunmen, just make 20 new kids and your economy just lost a hundred kid-years or so.
Not every problem needs to be solved.
First they came for the deranged shoe bomber,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a deranged shoe bomber.
Then they came for the deranged underwear bomber,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a deranged underwear bomber.
Then they came for the deranged gunmen,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a deranged gunmen.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.
"They don't need to be institutionalized, they just need to be stopped from buying guns. Is that really too much to ask?"
How about preventing them from buying fertilizer and Diesel? Or chemicals to make Chlorine gas? Or sprinkling the salad bar with Ricin? ...
Some years back there was a lawsuit in Kentucky,,,against a drug company,,,their psychotropic drugs were shown to enhance the possibility of violence against oneself and others,,,the drug company lost but managed to get the records and results sealed anyway... ,,,has been under psychiatric care,,, is a common phrase used to describe rampaging shooters for quite some time now,,,of course with their medical records being sealed who knows how many, if not all of them are on "professionally" prescribed mind altering drugs,,,,
If the government wants to reduce violence they should ban the prescription of such drugs,,,,,being under "psychiatric care" is perhaps one of the true sources of the problem.
How many people are put on that stuff these days, or in recent teacher suggested past,,,,have been put on such things before they get to make a real choice of their own? A lesser subset of those being a long list of kids taking guns to school etc...
One reason that we can not track mental patients is that most people spend a portion of their lives with some form of mental illness. In essence it is normal to be a bit cracked at times. Secondly the public has refused to fund reasonable mental health care forever. For many individuals treatment is slow, the ability to work is often missing and the cost of effective therapy can be staggering. We also lack a legal system that has any ability to deal with crimes before they happen. In essence we would have to toss the bill of rights down the sewer.
Another really thorny problem is that substance abuse is behind much of the violence that we see. And it is not that the person is high at the moment of the crime. But the use of substances that make people feel good often depletes substances and functions in the brain that lead to radical depression and an inability to handle normal loads of stress. Many people confronted with the on set of depression or mental illness turn to substances to feel better and the issues are inevitably amplified. This is exactly what you see in the crazed teens trying to gun down their classmates. They may not have gotten high in days but the overwhelming depression just sweeps their minds away and rage is released. But if you try and tell people that substance abuse is behind almost all crime they will go into denial so fast that you won't believe it. I met one creep who could not be convinced that he did not drive better while taking LSD. He wiped out seven lives on a Florida highway. In addition to the seven dead, he lost his entire lower jaw, can only stand with two crutches and received a 115 year prison sentence. So he will lay in a prison hospital and be thread liquids through a tube until he leaves the planet. No amount of reasoning could control this guy and I have seen it in other addicts as well. For example a declaration that drugs were the center point of their life and they were dedicating their lives to getting high and they would not change that even if they knew they would accidentally kill a few people with their cars along the way. It really is a deep problem.
New York City has become a model for the new authoritarian state. They have a police force that selective uses the law to harass "undesirables". They have an intelligence operation that extends across most of the country collecting information on people without warrants or even any real suspicion. The story of 911 has taken the already slightly emotionally unstable self-involved personality of New Yorkers and notched it up several degrees. And their fears and phobias have infected most of the country as these folks spread their distorted interpretations of events to the rest of the country through the media they control. Bin Laden won. Musolini made the trains run on time, and Bloomberg is making New York City safe for investment bankers and their servants. And he isn't going to let the borders of his city prevent him from extending the reach of that effort across the country and world.
Of course for the typical person, most of us, this won't matter. We never really test the limits of behavior where we would be noticed by their surveillance. Its the "you don't know you are in jail until you want to get out" syndrome. But its apparent that the idea that everyone has civil rights is passe. Instead, those rights are something to be managed by a ruling elite that has the intelligence and wisdom to properly organize society. It may look like they are a bunch of incompetent failures, but that's because the rest of us aren't smart enough to have the understanding of the world they got while networking at Yale and Harvard.
Both the Colorado movie killer and Virginia Tech Killer had been identified with mental illness with red flags.
A constant theme around these is that plenty of people noticed "red flags" in the person, and yet none of them did anything about it to get them help. I think this is probably more 20/20 hindsight than useful observation. And then everyone gets the idea that if only the system worked better, they'd have got help.
How do we improve the system? Who's responsible for getting people help? One person might know someone with social anxiety disorder, while another person might only see a "red flag" in a gun-collecting guy with scruffy hair who never looks anyone in the eye. Is every person who doesn't intimately know you but sees some odd behavior supposed to harass you about getting help?
I think this is a more complicated thing than many will let on, and it's a slippery slope to TSA levels of worthless profiling.
They just announced to all potential "deranged gunmen" that they shouldn't use the "active shooter" phrases on the internet, or cover their tracks if they do so. Good job.
If there's anything more important than my ego around here, I want it caught and shot immediately.
.. without addressing ANY of the root causes.
Yet another waste of taxpayer money and curtailing of our rights.
And who the hell do we trust with the power to remove the freedom of others?
I would insist on a jury of shrinks from no less than four different mental health agencies.
I think we should treat it the same way we do criminal justice.
I just want to make sure I understand.
The corrupt NYPD is a government entity that has a budget and a program to spend it.
But NOW all of a sudden they're going to NOT do police work and instead patrol the
Internet (somewhere they have no jurisdiction)???
AND they are brave enough to put out a press release saying in essence "We won't be
doing our damn jobs. Instead we'll be surfing the net. We'll find criminals. Even if they
have nothing to do with New York" and this is GOOD news???
Fire the corrupt police commissioners. Fire the corrupt officers who came up with this
"we surf the web instead of patrolling our streets" campaign.
E
Your 4Chan Ion Cannon buddies also thought the Secret Service would NEVER be able to figure out their IP addresses.
Like A prOM DaTE, MaybE?
enjoY the SilenCE! are you for supper?
TURTLES! now LETs go dream about liTTle breaded CHICKEN FINGERS!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
We have to sacrifice our rights and live in a police state, because that is the "price to protect us from three or four crazy lunatics that we'll never actually be able to protect society from, anyway" because it's going to "save so many innocent people (presumably, children)".
With this sort of math, we need to be sacrificing a lot more rights and liberties across the board for every other thing which results in more deaths than school shootings (in other words - EVERYTHING INCLUDING JAY WALKING). After all, if every life has a precious cost associated with its lost that is of such intense value to society that all of society must make sacrifices that are most "sacred" to the foundation and existence of our entire society (the Constitution), then why focus on the random unavoidable nutjobs that conduct "mass" shootings? What about seat-belts? What about parents who drink or smoke and put children at risk? What about mothers who bring questionable "step-dads" into the family? What about jay-walking? What about soda? What about sports? What about lighters, pocket knives, stairways, sidewalks, and bicycles?
If the important thing is the value of a life, then why is the life of someone shot by a nutjob more valuable than that of someone who is killed through any other accident or negligence or criminal act? Especially when those things happen far more frequently?
The secret key here is that: Yes, bad shit will happen to people and that is the cost of enjoying a free life and society. Bad shit doesn't go away just because government clamps down on society. The only thing lost there is your freedom. You *gain* nothing. And all in the effort to do the impossible -- protect every last human being from unpredictable freak occurrences. Crazy shit that pops out of the brush and happens. And it will always happen. And we will always be shocked (that's the nature of it being a FREAK occurrence).
I can guarantee you a great deal of safety and security. Just let me lock you in an underground bunker and control everything you consume and everything you do. It won't be enjoyable and it won't be a life worth having lived, but you'll probably live longer than being out in the big scary world with all sorts of awful things that can happen to you, including being t-boned in an intersection by a guy running a red-light or a nutjob in the office that loses his shit when he's fired and brings a firearm to work. :)
One reason that we can not track mental patients is that most people spend a portion of their lives with some form of mental illness
BULLSHIT.
Most people spend a portion of their lives being diagnosed with some bullshit invented form of "mental illness", because it has been the medical oppression's goal (and that of the government, I suppose) to ensure that the DSM provides at least one diagnoses that could apply to EVERY HUMAN BEING. Are you an underachiever? You have ADD! Are you an over-achiever? You have an overwhelming need to please authority and seek approval, you secretly depressed narcissist!
Even being critical of your government or questioning authority qualifies for a mental illness diagnosis.
Easier said than done. There are many, many people who match the same symptoms and most of them are not about to start shooting people.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Yeah, that will zurely work.
I'm sure this will work great, since all of the people who do these kinds of thing are very social people who love telling others what they're about to do, and in detailed ways that will trigger a detection.
Then what? If they haven't committed a crime, what are you going to do? Just watch them? If I was a NYC resident I would be pissed that resources that could be used to prevent crime occurring IN NYC were being diverted to look for future criminals on the Internet. Is Bloomberg's term up yet? Will that kind of political statement get me placed on a watch list? Considering one of the last psychos that was planning to kill people in NYC was an NYC cop, this doesn't make me feel safe.
Nice. Let's just call it a 'pre-crime' division. More likely it'll just turn into another expensive entrapment racket. Go Go Police State! By the by, forcing the 'deranged' into prisons has its own repercussions on society, not to mention forcing medications with dubious claims of efficacy upon the unwilling.
Trouble is it is cheaper to ignore the problem, than do anything about it.
No, it's not.
Yeah, it is. Abandonment costs are what you're describing for funerals and emotional support, which are a real expense, but the cost of living itself isn't redeemable. Everyone dies, so the cost of living isn't more wasted by an unnatural or untimely death. The abandonment costs are less expensive than lifelong mental health care for a bunch of deranged people. The rest of your reasoning is a series of cognitive illusions.
Anchoring. Logically, investors should base their decisions on current prices and expectations. But they often fixate on past prices, such as what they paid for a particular stock. That’s why investors often refuse to sell at a loss—even when they could earn more by moving their money elsewhere.
Loss Aversion. In a purely rational world, the risk of loss and the possibility of gain should carry equal weight. But investors tend to put twice as much importance on avoiding losses. In other words, in order to accept a 50% chance of losing $100, most people will demand a 50% chance of winning $200. This last tendency may explain why investors traditionally have demanded higher returns on stocks than bonds—even higher than the relative risks would suggest. They put an excessively high premium on the stability and predictability of bond returns.
The quotes were from todaysinnovativewoman.com, an article named The Pitfalls of Investor Psychology (it's the first article I came across).
Trying to argue in favor of morality on the basis of cost is a huge mistake. I think it's valid to keep convicts alive, and provide mental health care, but it isn't less expensive - it's just better. It's humane.
Oppositional - Defiant Disorder.
Yep.
You fit.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
this guy went on a rampage because he was going to be involntary comitted
what stops this sort of crime is when we start treating people better. Mental Health serivces create these sorts of disasters
but that never seems to be an option.
in the USA. It amazes me that they think they can operate as if they are the CIA/NSA/FBI/DIA/DEA/Marshal all combined into one. Yet, they have not discovered one major terrorist plot...ever... The poor tax payers are getting reamed paying for all this wanna-be Feds who, really, need to be working in a supermarket, bagging groceries. NYPD=losers.
It's simple, really. They monitor all your communications and bring you in (for the safety of yourself and of others) when crimethink is detected.
You have a problem with this, citizen? What are YOUR crimes? What do you have to hide?
for the same reason that most of these "police state" measures only get brought up immediately after a tradgedy when emotions run high. They need to enact legislation before people start bringing in inconvienant facts and statistics.
AC makes some sense for once.
Mental Health industry is one giant fucking scam, to enforce the current social order.
What the fuck are you doing with those commas?
Well, apparently two people on the U of Iowa admissions committee saw something wrong with him before the fact -- the program director, Daniel Tranel, said "Do NOT offer admission under any circumstances". I don't think Tranel has ever said what he saw, though.
But in general, if you want to maintain anything approaching a free society, you can neither lock up everyone you think might be a homicidal nutcase, nor restrict everyone to the level of freedom appropriate to homicidal nutcases.
Before Oppositional - Defiant Disorder was recognised, would those who insisted that it should be recognised suffer from Oppositional - Defiant Disorder?
But I'm also not sitting in jail for uselessly firing a cannon at PayPal or Visa.
I would insist on a jury of shrinks from no less than four different mental health agencies.
What makes you think that those four different mental health agencies pursue different goals?
they needed to be treated as human beings for being such.
His mom was fucking a lunatic.
We need to stop being such a police state, and we'll stop seeing men do desperate things to escape it.
As long as we're going to live in the police state, is there any chance we could stop drunk driving? More people die daily from alcohol related accidents than died in that school shooting. This was not in the news recently. Weird, huh?
>Another really thorny problem is that substance abuse is behind much of the violence that we see.
You may have this backwards. People with 'problems' are the ones more likely to abuse substances in the first place.
this, I wish I had mod points. +1
"Even being critical of your government or questioning authority qualifies for a mental illness diagnosis."
which is were they are going with this, they want to arrest critics, and even potential critics, by labeling them mentally ill, and vaugely "dangerous".
Again, lets review,
Forcible incarceration, no jury, no trial, no lawyer, no appeals, you lack the basic rights even prisoners have, and access to REAL medical care while incarcerated.
Do these idiots have any idea what they're talking about? I think they just append cyber this and cyber that to their usual nonsense and pretend they have a clue.
Also, why does a police department have an intelligence department? The NYPD ought to be disarmed and disbanded immediately, this isn't fucking Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Red Flags are more paranoid and disinfomration to get you more scared of your peers than authority figures.
A common theme among these shooters is they have all been systematicly disenfranchised and the solution always seems to be systematicly disenfranchising MORE people, than fixing a broken system which leads to broken people, which leads to a rare handful of shootings.
How many lives are ruined because people accused of being killers, or murders, with no real evidence are ostracized, arrested, get the typical law enforcement "spy on them, and then use their weaknesses to push them until they fuck up", to run ruin life tactics on otherwise innocent people.
All what, so some people can have a scapegoat to push off the cliff so they FEEL safer. Guess what, its not making you safer. Its making you less safe. The cameras, the mental health zoos, the laws are not there to protect you, they are there to protect the system, and all of this is disinformation to make you so scared of your neighbors, you run into the arms of the police state.
By "deranged gunman", they really mean "government, business, and social leader" critics.
I would insist on an jury of PEERS chosen from the population.
I would choose the burden of proof is "beyond reasonable doubt", there was an intent to harm.
We need to stand up to this rhetoric, before we further strengthen laws that authorize extra-judicial detention.
There also needs to be a right to apeal.
You don't have to ignore the problem, but it would be nice if the government and the press did not go into hysterical overreaction. Many conservatives, who traditionally support smaller government, want to hire hundreds of thousands of armed guards to guard every public school in the nation. Many liberals, who traditionally oppose censorship, want to ban this type of violence in all computer games. Instead, maybe we could just enforce the laws we have now and go on with life. 27 people (or so) died in the shooting. 30 people a day die in alcohol-related accidents.
With their badge numbers?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
One guy get crazy and do a shooting carnage? Let's spy the whole population!
in early morning spray paint the ground in pink when he washes it off the fertilizer having over killed the grass washes paint away to reveal its gonna be there a while
ROFL
Yes, in a rationally run society, we would provide mental health services as well as other heath services. But, this is the USA where your right to rot in prison, or die due to lack of medical care is enshrined.
We had state run mental health services in California until Republican Pete Wilson put all the institutionalized folks out on the street. These are the homeless folks you see arguing with pigeons in almost every California city. A minority of these are the same type folks who shoot up an elementary school because they are off their meds, and they, "don't like Mondays."
As long as the political cast believes it is advantageous to throw money at police, prisons, and the military-- at the expense of everything that makes for a civil society, the US will continue to have this problem.
So, of course, the US "solution" is to go after thought crimes. It is the only way to address such an issue within the US's framework of prisons, police, and military at the expense of everything else. For the same reason, we imprison drug addicts-- we know that prison doesn't help with addiction, but we have prisons and police-- we don't have drug rehab programs for these non-violent offenders (or at least don't have the political will to treat rather imprison these folks). Hell, we have police tasering, handcuffing, and arresting 5 yr. olds for being disruptive in class!
The US imprisons more people than any other country on earth-- when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Of course, corruption and racism also play a factor.
Two judges were _caught_ sentencing hundreds of _children_ to unreasonably long sentences in a private, for profit, prison in exchange for millions of dollars in bribes (e.g., a year for shoplifting a candy bar). These same corrupt folks, operating these private prisons, who make their money stealing lives of others, including children, lobby (aka legal bribe) our corrupt political cast to make ever more draconian laws to keep their prison beds filled.
There are more black men imprisoned today than there were black men enslaved at the height of legal slavery in the US-- and no, there isn't some crazy crime spree by black men; most are convicted of minor drug offenses which are just as prevalent within the white population, only the enforcement, sentencing severity, and conviction rates differ. Things like New York City's stop and frisk law, where you can be searched solely for the crime of being non-white (there have been 3 times as many stops under this law as black men living in New York, so you will be stopped an frisked, multiple times as a black man; black and brown folks are going to be caught with that blunt in their pocket at a higher rate than whites who are not randomly stopped and searched. Crack cocaine (more prevalent than powder cocaine in black communities) sentencing is much more draconian than powder cocaine that is favored by whites, etc.
Looks like he should have been involuntarily committed a whole lot sooner. Mental health services do not "create these sorts of disasters" any more than hospitals create serious accidents.
Don't get me wrong: mental health services can go bad just like surgery after a serious accident can be done incompetently. But for the most part things are better off there than staying at home and trying to deal with it without any professional help.
I would insist on a jury of shrinks from no less than four different mental health agencies.
What makes you think that those four different mental health agencies pursue different goals?
Exactly. Having multiple shrinks only helps if their judgements can be treated as statistically independent events. Which they can't-- the four shrinks would share common goals and common belief systems, and they would be strongly influenced by what their colleagues say.
The bottom line is you can't incarcerate someone (except for brief periods) based on the presence of "red flags". Nor should you be able to. Here's what you *might* do, though:
* If the shrink is evaluating someone and sees a red flag, empower the shrink to communicate with a) the state agency in charge of gun licenses ("Don't give this guy a firearms card") and/or b) the DMV ("You need to suspend this person's license").
* Require a psychiatric screening for everyone that applies for a gun license.
There is some precedent for both ideas. Currently, you're allowed to contact the DMV if someone has uncontrolled seizures and should not drive. And I think Great Britain requires a psych eval of new gun owners.
Hey, not saying this would work 100% of the time (there would be false positives as well as false negatives), but at least it's worth thinking about.
FUCK YOU
But it's okay, cos you still got your 2nd amendment and guns to stop them doing this shit! Oh, wait..
"Dre don't get as high as me.... I'm Cheech and Chong" - Snoop Dogg
Why was his mom a fucking lunatic? Because she was a shooting enthusiast, had lots of guns, and encouraged her kids to shoot as well? Or was it because she didn't institutionalize her troubled son "just in case"? I genuinely don't know if there is new information that points to her mental state...
The problem here is in terms of mental health issues, let's say you are institutionalized for being suicidal. Does that mean you can never have a gun, ever? Why? This "reform" of the mental health system people are clamoring for is nothing more than an end-round play to ban guns based on "mental stability." I hate to break it to the /. crowd, but most of us could be considered "unbalanced" if the state, or an overzealous mental health system (or relatives) decided we were. Do we want to go back to the early 20th century where we put everyone who didn't fit a mold (gays, mildly retarded, sexual "deviants") into an institution and shocked, prodded, and medicated them until they really WERE fucked in the head?
The rational thing to do is to stop inching towards a police state in ALL aspects. That includes these symbolic "bans" on "assault" weapons and other horse shit. Return to a minimal Constitutionally sanctioned federal government...
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
This has worked so many times in the past; how can it fail?
Since all the gun advocates love to bring up Switzerland - why not go all the way and implement their gun laws as well? They don't seem to live in a police state, they're nicely federal... really, what give? Does not being able to own as many semi-automatic rifles with large calibers and long barrels and high muzzle velocity really mean that you live in a police that? Is the next step after that really locking everyone in an underground bunker?
No. And making these arguments makes you sound like a nut job I need to ignore. Start being rational, acknowledge there are a wide range of options to deal with mass shootings, and stop with the paranoia.
protect every last human being from unpredictable freak occurrences
Strawman. No one is arguing that. However, we do argue about the wisdom of having large amounts of deadly weaponry available to anyone who asks.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The propaganda just spent months establishing that 'fact'.
Remember the good 'ol days, when you could have someone committed and lobotomized for political reasons?
Google's working on it.
Funny how "apolitical" is used as nearly a synonym for "deranged." I tell people I'm apolitical all the time. I'm fed up with parties on all sides, and a broken mockery of a system used to give people the illusion of choice and blind them from what the powers that be are really doing in the world. I consider these facts self-evident to anyone who is able to cast off a lifetime of American indoctrination and take a true and honest look around them. Yes, I feel all these things and more. But that is nowhere near what it takes to go on a shooting spree. I'm one of the most peaceful people you'll meet; I've never fired a gun, and never been in a fight. Can I agree with some of these perspectives without immediately being accused of being a mass murderer? In the future, will I have cops showing up on my door for writing a comment like this? And will they still try to tell us that we have free speech?
With every tragedy, law enforcement agencies rise to the occasion to form special programs which require massive funding which inevitably result in no real change. But in the end, I get paid more and everyone FEELS safer.
Exactly... Who will watch the watchers.
I can tell you from experience that Federal judges have a very poor sense of humor.
Billy Joel needs to do a 2013 version of "We Didn't Start the Fire."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
That's what I've been saying since columbine. I could kill more people without a gun than with, and stealthier. People are fragile creatures and collect in packs, eat from the same troughs, drink from the same spigots, and breathe the same air... Usually under the same roofs.
Guns have a con to them, you have to aim and they (usually) have a loud report. You have a finite amount of time once you start.
Property developers were after the Victorian buildings with high ceilings and bay windows - that architecture had been specifically chosen to provide patients with plenty of sunlight (cure against depression) and fresh air (cure against lung infections).
MP's spun this as saving costs in maintaining dilapidated buildings (could have been renovated instead) and social integration (allowing the patients to live in the community. They did the same with special-needs schools.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Everyone dies, so the cost of living isn't more wasted by an unnatural or untimely death. [...]The rest of your reasoning is a series of cognitive illusions.
Cognitive illusion is to think that every nutcrack in the world has the right to go free killing people.
Of course every human being has rights. But what you fail to acknowledge is that the killed kids have rights too. As their relatives.
So, who we prosecute in order to protect the people's right to be alive?
The fact that everybody will die someday is a pitty of an argument, and makes me think that *YOU* don't make any kind of value (no necessary financial) to human life per se.
I'm make huge investments on my kid's welfare, even by knowing he will, also, die someday. But I'm making this investments anyway, as I want him to have the best lifespan I can afford to him.
I pay taxes. As everybody else (including the victims's relatives). Why our right to be alive is less important?
The quotes were from todaysinnovativewoman.com, an article named The Pitfalls of Investor Psychology (it's the first article I came across).
Trying to argue in favor of morality on the basis of cost is a huge mistake. I think it's valid to keep convicts alive, and provide mental health care, but it isn't less expensive - it's just better. It's humane.
You totally loose the point.
I'm not talking about morality. I'm talking about civil responsibility.
GP stated that it's cheaper to let these nutcracks loose. I counter-argumented that it's more expensive. It's appear to be cheaper because some people thinks like you, what prevents that the bastards that make decisions about out life can be accountable by their mistakes.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
They will just use sharp pointy objects instead. Is that really too hard to understand?
Murderers stick to knives...(UK shows where we are headed)
UK Times online ^ | January 23, 2009 | Richard Ford
Posted on Saturday January 24, 20:43:33 GMT+0100 2009 by Robert357
Knives or other sharp objects are the enduring weapon of choice for murderers and robbers, according to yesterday’s crime figures.
Fatal stabbings reached a record high in England and Wales last year, despite a government drive to tackle knife-crime in ten “hotspot” areas of the country. More worryingly for the Government, robberies at knifepoint on the street jumped by almost a fifth in the year to the end of September. However, they make up less than one quarter of all robberies.
Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, said: “We remain concerned about serious violence, and in particular knife crime. That is why we are taking targeted action in ten areas.” She said that 700 mobile airport-style security “arches and wands” had been provided to police in the ten areas to reassure the public and get knives off the streets.
Chris Grayling, the Shadow Home Secretary, said: “It is particularly alarming that robberies involving knives have soared and that fatal stabbings are at an all-time high. The Government’s complacency is proving fatal.”
While fatal stabbings increased last year, gun-crime deaths fell from 59 to 52. Gun crime overall remains rare in England and Wales, and more than half of all recorded offences are concentrated in London, the West Midlands and Greater Manchester.
It's already happening.
Brandon Raub anyone? Post lyrics to facebook, get committed.
https://www.rutherford.org/key_cases/key_cases_brandon_raub/
Yeah but if you provide health care to the people then you turn the country into a socialist state and nobody wants that.
By your logic, it's bad to keep drunken drivers from the street. =P
Look, pal. I'm not a defendant of a police state. But you can bet you damned ass I'm a defendant of the people's life.
We are not talking about natural disasters, but about predictable and avoidable disasters that happens to be promoted by ourselves! We deliberately give up every single chance to detect and correctly deal with these nutcracks.
I'm not talking about killing them. I'm not even talking about locking them (but if this is the only choice, better them than us!). I'm talking about to correctly dealing with them.
This will cost money? OF COURSE IT WILL. As costs money to hunt and prosecute drunken drivers.
The question is: it will worth it? My answer is YES.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
In "Distraction" the US government (whats left of it) has software to do this, and it works. But it has been repurposed. Now the idea is to find the borderline crazy guys and spam them with messages saying that is a drug dealing paedophile commie terrorist who needs to be shot. So now has to cope with a steady stream of crazy shooters. Even if survives, they will be too busy dodging the crazies to cause any more trouble.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
If the profile was always 'young white male, bit of a loner,' I'd start to wonder, openly, why it is that they ALWAYS fit that mold. Like there is some sort of factory somewhere that just stamps them out for officers to pick up. Does this not bother anyone else?
Seriously, I'd start to question my reason for existence. I've been created, to catch 'criminals,' which are, like the endings of Scooby-Doo episodes, always the same guy. And I am not, for whatever reason, supposed to think "if they are always the same guy, doesn't that signify that there is something wrong on a higher level?" I mean, these are human beings, they have brains capable of anything -> so why does this one type always choose to be a loaner, be white, be male, and to shoot up a school? It's almost like they're programmed to do it. Why is there never any major changes? The guy visits his mother's grave before he shoots up the school, or he was an outgoing football player, or whatever? Or, given that our population is more than 50% female, one from their gender?
Does everyone just blindly accept the reasons they're given here? "Oh yeah, he was a white male, a loaner, that happens to them sometimes."
I am John Hurt.
Yep. You are right too.
We live in a society that fails to prevent the most basic "accidents" (it's God Damned easy to avoid drinking and driving!).
However, I think the same logic applies. We can't restore a life, but we can issue the people responsable for it a hell of regret for doing that. Not only the perp, but everybody else that enabled him/her.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
"They don't need to be institutionalized, they just need to be stopped from buying guns. Is that really too much to ask?"
How about preventing them from buying fertilizer and Diesel? Or chemicals to make Chlorine gas? Or sprinkling the salad bar with Ricin? ...
Nice strawmen. When any of those become as predominant as shooting people with guns, we can deal with it.
Need I say more?
What happens when we realize we can slow it down but are powerless to stop it.
Of the US did become a police state, so you seriously think even the combined strength of all the gun owners in America would be able to prevent it?
The 2nd Amendmeny was written when parity or near parity of force could be reached relatively easily because wars were fought with single shot firearms and cannon. But it want even a century after the Bill of Rights were written that the combined strength of the Confederate States was insufficient to defy Federal might for more than a few years.
Any gun owner who thinks the only thing standing between then and tyranny is their weapons is by definition either an idiot or insane.
To some extent I can buy the self defense argument, though the first victim of this latest mass shooting was a Prepper. Sadly the NRA is incapable of seeing the irony in that.
Yes mass shootings happen, even where there is gun control. But the rate of gun deaths in the US is so out of lunch with other Western countries that there has to be some explanation beyond insane people alone. I think no small part of the problem is found in your post; a sort of gun fetishism bordering on worship, to the point of where any gun debate is seen by a sizeable portion of the population as heresy.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
A professor at VT tried very hard for several weeks before the shooting to get the VT's mental health services to evaluate Seung-Hui Cho. That prof was on some NPR news roundup show this past week.
A constant theme around these is that plenty of people noticed "red flags" in the person, and yet none of them did anything about it to get them help. I think this is probably more 20/20 hindsight than useful observation.
This whole idea of "red flags" regarding "anti-social" people is what really scares me - and should for a lot of Slashdot. I'm single, fairly quiet, only have a few friends. By most of those definitions I'm likely to be an anti-social nutcase just waiting to go off.
It almost seems like they're trying to criminalize being a quiet person that keeps to yourself.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Can you provide substantiation of this?
Economic inequality is a good predictor of violence, and the U.S. has a vast problem with that. The U.S. is also, IIRC, the only industrialized democracy nation without universal health care. And it has a unique situation regarding race; given the mammoth differences in white vs. black murder victims, this cannot be ignored.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Has been claimed by one person, with others contradicting it. Other than a vague belief, for reasons currently not clearly known, that the shooter may have thought his mother loved the children he shot more than him, we don't really have anything concrete at the moment. It's certainly not a statement of known fact that he was about to be committed. Even if it was his mother's intention, the "committed" version of the story doesn't suggest he was about to be, rather that his mother was about to start a process that would, in a few months, result in his committal.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
A constant theme around these is that plenty of people noticed "red flags" in the person, and yet none of them did anything about it to get them help. I think this is probably more 20/20 hindsight than useful observation. And then everyone gets the idea that if only the system worked better, they'd have got help.
And it's nothing new.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Guess I've been falling behind on my kiddie-script loser news. I hear they get caught more recently using their Xbox handles over IRC.
I would insist on a jury of shrinks from no less than four different mental health agencies.
A jury of shrinks all working to DSM. If the powers-that-be manage to get "disagreement with government" as a key indicator of a serious disorder in a future edition of the DSM, the job is done.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Wow.... Good point. Didn't really think of it like that.
I agree with the ruining of lives. I met one guy who had been accused of molestation from a boy scout when he was a troop leader in the 80s. I didnt know the guy well, but a good friend of mine did. The accusations turned out to be completely false (like without a shadow of a doubt according to my friend). I met the guy 10 years after the fact, he was a shut in, was scared to even come near a kid,lived alone (explain this to a women), just got done paying all court costs (10 years latter!) and had a crappy job because of the trial on his record (he had a masters in a decent field, I cant remember which). His life was completely ruined because some kid evidently hated him.
[User was re-educated for this post]
"Strawman. No one is arguing that. However, we do argue about the wisdom of having large amounts of deadly weaponry available to anyone who asks."
"to anyone who asks"? Now there's a straw man. Physician, heal thyself.
Your point is fair, but how do you stop bad guys getting access to guns? You can't. What you'll only do is stop law abiding people from getting them.
Murdering people is already illegal but it still happens. If a psychopath wants to kill 30 people he'll do it. The problem isn't the tool of death, the problem *is* the people committing the crime. I don't have a solution to that, and the suggestion that mental health needs to be looked at isn't an end-round play, it's just another suggestion. But banning guns is not a solution that will actually work to prevent deaths. It's a feel good move for people unfamiliar with guns, and unfamiliar with the levels of motivation a person must have to commit mass murder.
"The state tells its people that the cameras are there for their benefit and to prevent crime, but the crime they are preventing is insurrection."
The reason we subjugate ourselves to law is to better procure justice. If law does not accomplish this purpose then it m
if you understand the difference between the swiss socialist state and the american police state, then you understand why the freedom to own weapons is of primary importance here, and not there.
"Any gun owner who thinks the only thing standing between then and tyranny is their weapons is by definition either an idiot or insane." you believe that trying to beat them by their own rules is an option? no, the physical force you can exert IS the only thing standing between you and tyranny, even if it's not enough.
We have to sacrifice our rights and live in a police state, because that is the "price to protect us
I would rather walk free and take the risk that I'll be killed by a nutjob/terrorist, besides that's one of the exciting about living in a true democracy, society was chaotic enough that anything could happen.
In the meantime everyone just got on with their lives.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
>Another really thorny problem is that substance abuse is behind much of the violence that we see.
You may have this backwards. People with 'problems' are the ones more likely to abuse substances in the first place.
It's actually more of a positive feedback loop. Person has minor problems and starts to use substances. As a result, problems become larger, so person uses more substances. And so on...
But it isn't enough by orders of a magnitude. It's rather like saying "the only thing standing between me and lethal staph infection is this wheel of Danish blue cheese."
If the US government becomes a tyranny you're fucked, and even if you kill off a few cops with your assault rifles, sooner or later they'll just blow you to Kingdom Come. You're so far from parity even from a moderate sized city's police forc that what you wrote is laughably idiotic.
The Second Amendment was a lovely idea for securing liberty in 18th century, but as I said, by 1864-65, not even the Confederacy with its West Point graduates, seasoned generals from the Mexican-American War, and no lack of men willing to lay down their lives could keep Federal forces from crushing them.
Just be glad the US isn't actually a tyranny.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
/sarcasm on
Well, of course. If you don't have hundreds of friends and post every last detail of your personal life on Facebook, you obviously have something to hide, and therefore are probably a terrorist. /sarcasm off
In seriousness, I do wonder if the idea of "red flagging" the so-called "anti-social" people is just an attempt to pressure everyone into posting boatloads of private details. Then those people would be "normal".
By your logic, it's bad to keep drunken drivers from the street. =P
No, that would be an example of punishing the actual law breaker. What gun-control advocates usually suggest is punishing all gun owners.
Why? Safety. They want more of the same safety that the TSA offers. They're pro-tyranny.
Report, that is.
Except that the guy in China who tried to stab children didn't kill very many of them.
Well, apparently two people on the U of Iowa admissions committee saw something wrong with him before the fact -- the program director, Daniel Tranel, said "Do NOT offer admission under any circumstances". I don't think Tranel has ever said what he saw, though.
Another important question to ask is how many other applicants he similarly denied. Apparently he had one true-positive, but how many false positives? Tests that try to pick out extremely rare conditions require extraordinary precision, and I really doubt that the Tranel test offers that precision.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
First of all, know how the mental health system works. It's not about help, it's about keeping them captive and them keeping them drugged after being released from captivity.
If a person is danger to self, danger to others, or deemed gravely disabled, they can be held in-patient (5150 hold) for up to 72 hours. Chances are good they will be drugged with Haldol, Risperdal, Abilify, or Seroquel during their stay. If they act up and resist treatment, some hospitals may force IM drugs on them (Haldol and Ativan injected in the glutus maximus muscles).
After that, if the shrinks deem they need more help, they can recommend they remain voluntarily, or if the patient refuses, they can be held in-patient for up to 14-days (5250 hold).
If they 5250 the patient, the patient can get a hearing challenging the 5250 hold, and they can also petition the courts for a writ of habeas corpus. (Anyone with a 5250 hold, by the way, is federally prohibited from owning a gun for life if they do not win their hearing or get their writ of habeas corpus.) Celebrity news has it that at least one pop singer was, in fact, 5250 held and was even issued a court ordered conservator, so it's not just your everyday person with "signs" that have been burned by the mental health system.
Additional holds beyond the 5250 hold require additional justification and the patient is entitled to additional hearings as needed. Look it up, they can even go all the way to conservatorships if they deem the patient needs a conservator. Something Lanterman-blah-blah explains all this in more detail, look it up it's scary how the mental health system is these days.
Anyway, whenever they discharge the patient, they can recommend supplemental outpatient care. Given the assumption that whatever drugs they were given during the in-patient holds didn't fry the patient's brain, they will see a p-doc as part of their outpatient treatment who will very likely prescribe yet another drug and meet with the patient periodically.
Finally, keep in mind that the DSM version latest is what is being used to diagnose and label the patients with a mental disorder to begin with. Mental health "treatment" isn't even a true science, it's just observations and opinions based on the shrinks in the hospitals during the in-patient holds and whatever p-doc meets with the patient after they are discharged. Very likely, these are p-docs who just took the easiest way to their degree and got into the mental health field of medicine.
Or, TLDR, just because they don't use barbaric type electric shocks anymore doesn't mean mental health care isn't shit, and oh yeah, electric shocks can still be used by p-doc recommendation or court order depending on the patient diagnosis and whether other treatments have worked or failed.
It occurs to me that, with the imminent implosion of the Federal Reserve system, it makes sense for New York to expand into new ways of exerting political influence on the rest of the countryside.
No doubt these "deranged gunmen" will be just happen to be more children of tax-avoiding executives or financial-fraud-tracking scientists.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I think the NRA's proposals should be adopted, that is to have some armed guards in every school. The deranged gunmen will all volunteer for such jobs which will make them easy to find. What could possibly go wrong?
If someone writes nonsense to the public on the Internet and gives others to read, you should take into account the fact that this nonsense will also read and analyze the police.
Wow. that was the worst grammar ever. You need to practice your second (or third whatever) language in person with some one who speaks English as a first language, it seems you understand enough to be able to do that accurately pretty quickly.... or you were drunk when you posted that.
That's what I've been saying since columbine. I could kill more people without a gun than with, and stealthier.
But you don't.
The same arguments were made when Australia banned many types of firearms after a mass-shooting in 1996. And while mass shootings virtually stopped, there was no corresponding increase in non-firearm mass killings. No bombings, no mass poisonings.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
The purpose of the program is to appear to be Doing Something. This doesn't require that the program does something, but it is vital that it appears to do so. Hence the announcement that "We are Doing Something" is the core of the program requirements.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
I love sewing and stuffing and stuffing and I will be stuffing until the cows come home. And then I will stuff them. I live in a shoe box in the middle of the road.
Or is a taxidermist one who applies the cool yellow checker design to taxicabs? I'll do that too. Then I'll stuff it. With people. I'll stuff the trunk with their backpacks and signs. And drive them to City Hall. Where we'll set up a protest rally.
The signs would say,
"Mayor Bloomberg -- you, like the Giuliani before you -- are 'mission creeps' who somehow believe that human behavior and criminal intent can be algorithmically inferred with less than a 98% error rate. Why does NYPD have a precrime division staffed by folks who believe every CSI Hollywood hacker cliche and statistical cheat?
But go ahead... staff that giant precrime center with Internet workstations and former Enron scammers. In batches of 100, 2 to surf the web for patterns and 98 to sift out the noise and irrelevant garbage they produce. When you tour the basement facility and hear the reassuring buzz of a hundred power-agents at work you will not realize that they (like they did at Enron) spend most of their time talking to each other not the outside world. And playing networked violent shooter games.
This precrime center actually sounds like a breeding ground for sociopath terrorists! The problem is that while they are connected to the world they are not part of it and exist solely on the notion that they are arrogantly superior to those they place under surveillance.
There will be an underground cafeteria and apartments for the Agents too so they never need to emerge into the sunlight. And they will call you 'Mother'. Affectionately at first.
Meanwhile New York City will be reduced to a single aging beat cop with a rusty flashlight roaming the streets.
And when the Precrime Project is some day dissolved by citywide bankruptcy the Agents will crawl up the stairs and out the exits and you will see what you have unleashed upon the World."
They would have to be really big signs, to say all that.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
You have no understanding of "the laws". Currently, there are no laws to lock up a crazy nut, they have rights. Ask the ACLU, they'll tell you. My sister, manic depressive at the least, did a runner once from her apartment after moving all her furniture into the street. We searched, we contacts all the police agencies, the hospitals. It was as though she fell off the Earth. After 2 weeks, we happened to call one of the hospitals and a nurse told us that even though she couldn't tell us my sister was there, she was there. Turns out she showed up at a police station and they took her to that hospital. We talked to those cops before we found her, nope, they'd not seen nothing, never, not here.
After several tumultuous years, Adult Protective Services told Ma that if my sister forced them to come out one more time (she was now living at home with Ma), they would remove Ma from the house. Not my sister, my Ma. Why? Well, mental illness patients have rights, you know.
Billy Joel needs to do a 2013 version of "We Didn't Start the Fire."
No, trust me, he really *doesn't*.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Trouble is it is cheaper to ignore the problem, than do anything about it.
No, it's not.
The problem is that there's no legal mechanism to send the bill to the society.
To every kid being killed, there're expenses on funeral and emotional support for his/her relatives, but there're also all the practical expenses of the day-to-day life, as medical/dental bills, educational expenses, toys and little amusements, vacations, necessities (clothes, etc) that go to the trash bin.
To every adult being killed, we have all that expenses since his/her childhood, more the LACK of the future (and present) funds to do the same with his/her kids. With luck, another adult will take for him/herself this expenses - at the cost of the expenses of his/her own kids (present of future).
So, YES, there're a lot of waste of money on every people being killed by a nutcrack. People are used to avoid talking about this, because we're used to think that a "human life is invaluable and, so, can not be monetized". What I, also, agree - there're no money on the world that can pay my life.
However, the COST of being alive is measurable. If a life can't be brought back, the costs incurred on being alive can be.
So, NO. IT'S A HELL OF SHIT EXPENSIVE ignoring the problem. Thing is that the bill does not goes over the shoulder of the bastards that make that decisions.
It sounds to me like we just need to steer these shootings to the schools where the Free Shit Army send their children. In some places in the US, wiping out a classroom of kids would save society and the government tens of millions of dollars in hand outs, prison expenses, addiction recovery services and damage inflicted on the rest of society.
Also, by your logic, it's better to kill them while they are young as the sunk cost is less.
Oh fuck off.
Swimming pools kill far more kids than guns do.
When all the pools are gone, we can work on the guns. Mmkay?
Anybody that thinks the citizens can't beat the government isn't aware of the term "force multiplier" and how easily they are created in a mixed friendly/enemy environment.
If "working within the system" breaks down to the point the citizens think the government needs to go, it will go. Especially if the government turns on citizens first. Those droolers that think the feds are going to somehow use a battle tank to win a fight of ideology with the citizens are mistaken."The government" side will be absolutely fucked no matter what form the fight takes.
More than likely, there'll be three or four "the governments" which will begin to fight amongst themselves with the citizens killing all of them. There is no possible way to plan for, or engineer a "win" in that situation.
So you're saying there were mass shootings regularly, and that abruptly stopped when they banned those firearms? Or that there was one, and none since then; which may or may not have anything to do with that ban?
That's because he used a poor choice of tool for it. He slashed about the head instead of going for actual kill strikes. A robust stabbing weapon with a wide blade to the thorax would have killed a high percentage of them. Had the Chinese guy been as calculating as the Lanza kid, the death toll would have been much higher in China. Lanza was an exception (and exceptional in a lot of ways), the average "Run Amok" person isn't as effective because they don't think it through. (Probably because thinking it through causes them to not act at all. It's only when we get the crazy cranked up to a high degree like Lanza do we get the high body count.)
We don't even know if the Chinese guy was actually TRYING to kill the kids or not.
Don't think someone like Lanza, with a proper non-firearm tool couldn't rack up a similar body count against 2nd graders. That hypothetical person absolutely could do so.
If the important thing is the value of a life, then why is the life of someone shot by a nutjob more valuable than that of someone who is killed through any other accident or negligence or criminal act? Especially when those things happen far more frequently?
Because it is more common, people are more used to it happening. If the Connecticut shooting had been planned, reasoned, predictable, etc. it would still be terrible, but people wouldn't have nearly as much difficulty dealing with it. It is the fear of the unknown, the random act of violence, the "one-off" situation which cannot be reasonably anticipated or planned for, which terrifies people.
A person is intelligent. People are stupid, panicky animals.
There were several mass shootings but there has not been one since the gun laws were passed. That's the fact. Whether it was due to the gun laws or not is a matter for speculation.
Here we treat a flag as our flag and we don't pretend our guns are flags or symbols of manhood and courage instead of the tools that the guns actually are. That made passing the gun laws simpler than would be possible in the USA with it's odd gun fetish.
So you're saying there were mass shootings regularly, and that abruptly stopped when they banned those firearms?
Approximately 1 every 18 months over the two decades before the new restrictions. Reduced to just 1 in the 16 years since the change (using matched criteria for classification. Although it was at the bottom limit of the classification.) A ten-fold reduction in the number of mass shootings so far, and a greater than ten-fold reduction in the number of people killed in mass shootings. Realistically, 16 years isn't long enough to work out the true post-reform rate, it's too low to measure.
We have the same media, movies, TV, music, video games, as the US. We didn't improve our mental health system, we didn't improve our economy, we didn't change our law enforcement systems. Other crime rates followed their prior trends, some small differences that may be attributable to the change (reduction in murder rate (ditto suicide), increase in some other categories) but they're all around the 10% variation, too small to show causation. None as sharp and dramatic as the immediate near cessation of mass shootings. Hell, even the number of firearms returned to the previous level within a couple of years. So it's not even a matter of weapon numbers.
We restricted certain weapon types, and magazine capacities, we had a buy-back of newly banned weapons and accessories from law abiding gun owners (at market value + 10%, IIRC)... and the number of mass shootings dropped by an order of magnitude. And there was no increase in other forms of mass killing; bombs and poisonings, mass-knifings, mass cricket-battings, etc.
The myth that the mass-killers will just find other ways to mass-kill is demonstrably false. They don't. Regular criminals, yes, nutters, no. There's something about certain types of firearms that is deeply empowering to paranoid delusional freaks.
And I don't know why.
Seriously, I didn't see it working. Although I'm okay with reasonable gun control, I could not see the new laws having any impact on mass killings. I remember saying as much online at the time. Outliers are notoriously immune to systematic changes, and this change just screamed "knee-jerk politics" (just like this NYPD story)...
And yet... the numbers are there.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Thanks a lot for elaborating, that helped a big deal. Though of course I can't explain it to you either... but it just occured to me that there used to be a huge "problem" with getting soldiers to shoot at enemy soldiers. I guess that "problem" got solved too well, now we even have civilians getting a kick out of it.
Personally, I learned to glorify (movie) violence long before I learned it sucks, which is pretty much western standard. Strikes me as a doublethink problem, we clearly want people to be sociopath slaves, but then when they are shooting random people and the world drowns in its own feces and lack of imagination, we kinda don't want that bit of it. Thing is, it's all in one piece.
Can you please tell me, what happened throughtout history, when populations, on-mass, had denounced their 'efficient weaponry' of the time? (I'll give you a hint, they are not around to tell their stories).
Humans are crafty and stupid at the same time. The 2nd amendment is perfectly suited for the moden age. Since the government is composed of people, it's possible to exploit the stupid if you exploit your own craftiness. Lather rince repeat. No govermnet is infalliable, and their mistake is to delude themselves into that position.
That's about all they got, actually.
A decade ago some very wealthy types created a Free Market solution to Mental Health Care. These materialistics have now decided that Mental Health Care requires a War Lord at every elementry school. Do these "all for one, and the rest for me" types feel any responsibilty for their actions? Is their concept of voting using your wallet working for you?
By the way, when FBI puts that psyco's computer back together again, it's going to be very interesting what see what mom was using the computer for. I would be very surprized if her searches were on how best to arm a socialpath.
That doesn't even make sense. What is it you're trying to say?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Be on the lookout for those who think the "War on Christmas" is literally a "War".
Against second graders, maybe. Against an unarmed adult, not so much.
These days a lot of people seem to assume that a "police state" means "a state that has police"
And if you're going to cite "white vs. black murder victims", you should point out "white vs. black murderers" or be immediately identified as attempting to mislead.
So-called universal health care is theft on a grand scale and economic illiteracy at its wildest.
Seen a lot of millionaires shooting up 7-11's and rioting? Jealousy is a mental state, a symptom of a poisoned mind. Honorable poor people, working and holding their own, do not engage in systematic violence. Dishonorable poor people, looking for a handout and thinking the world owes them a living, do. This is a moral problem, not a wealth disparity problem.
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We can show that when communities arm themselves the crime rate almost disappears. That didn't happen in Australia. Other crimes went up. If they instead adopted common sense laws like more guns - conceal carry and such, it would have been far better than lying about it and saying it was somehow an epidemic. A disease to be fixed. Maybe you forgot about that part? Get the book - "More Guns, Less Crime" and learn a lot. It's all in there, with real numbers.
A single person against a city police force loses. But if the government is recognized by even a third of an armed populace as a lethal tyranny, an enforcer will have a poor life expectancy.
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"Cost" can be measured in terms of the lives of those who have to pay it. It should always be considered.
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The news I've heard indicated she was expecting a collapse of civilization. Although that alone does not qualify her as loony, it's not a good indication.
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And more: quiet people aren't newscasters. Blabbermouths and nosy-parkers often think everyone should be like them, and those who aren't are hiding evil secrets. People who "shape public opinion" are often loudmouths, afraid of and willing to denounce people who spend a lot of time thinking.
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what they should be doing is improving mental health services.
Sorry but that is never going to happen. Almost every state has gutted their mental health hospitals in order to pay for "Cadillac" retirement plans for government officials.
Hasn't this kind of "keyword profiling" been discredited by every study that has ever been performed on it?
Yes mass shootings happen,
No. Mass shootings does not simply "happens". They are done. By someone.
Other than this, I agree with you.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
If my poor grammar if the worst thing you can pinpoint in my post, then thank you for implying I'm right. :-)
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
It sounds to me like we just need to steer these shootings to the schools where the Free Shit Army send their children. In some places in the US, wiping out a classroom of kids would save society and the government tens of millions of dollars in hand outs, prison expenses, addiction recovery services and damage inflicted on the rest of society.
Also, by your logic, it's better to kill them while they are young as the sunk cost is less.
Strawman. I didn't imply anything of this.
What I said is that is a lot of cheaper to correctly deal with the problem (and I don't even touch on the definition about what would be the correct thing to do) than to let it goes as it is now.
You are the one stating that killing people is a acceptable way of doing things. Not me.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
I think he is about to have a bath.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
It's a gun debate so critical thinking is not required
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
What utter bullshit. If all of the Jews in Germany had been armed and had decided in 1934 to resist Hitler they still would have been killed, armed Jewish resistance wouldn't have made the Nazis back down, it would have given them the excuse they needed to start the Holocaust a few years earlier. Or let's take the example of the Japanese American internment. What do you think would have happened if Japanese Americans had decided to arm themselves and resist deportation to camps such as Manzanar? Would the government have backed down on deporting the Japanese Americans if a couple of prominent advocates of internment, say Earl Warren, the AG of California at the time, and FDR, had been assassinated by Japanese Americans? No, given the racist tenor of the times the Japanese Americans would have been slaughtered.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Psychiatry is as much pseudo-science as science. We simply don't have the measurement tools for anything else to be the case. There have been many studies showing this. Any policy that would rely on these people to make informed judgements is dangerous and foolish. You might as well ask lawyers to decide what should constitute legal ethics! Oh, wait, they already do. Oops!
What the fuck are you doing with those commas?
Come on! Give William Shatner a break!
Well, apparently two people on the U of Iowa admissions committee saw something wrong with him before the fact -- the program director, Daniel Tranel, said "Do NOT offer admission under any circumstances"
If they hadn't listened to that prick, would the world be different today? Would James Holmes and all the theater victims still be alive?
Maybe the solution isn't more "us vs them." Maybe we should listen to Jesus instead.
Even if it was his mother's intention, the "committed" version of the story doesn't suggest he was about to be, rather that his mother was about to start a process that would, in a few months, result in his committal.
What's your point?
What if YOUR mom was trying to have YOU committed as a crazy guy? How would that make YOU feel? What if you had been treated that way by her your ENTIRE LIFE?
If you want to actually SOLVE these types of problems before they become a massacre, more police and security isn't going to do is, and neither will more fascism. What we need is more love and caring and compassion.
I think one of the first things we need to do to reduce the number of nutcases from commiting these mass murders is to deny them their 15 minutes of fame. A simple law preventing news outlets from releasing the names of these nutjobs would be a good first step. Back that up with stiff fines for anyone, tabloid newspapers etc. from releasing their names to the public. Take away their 15 minutes of fame and, I believe, it would cut down this type of activity greatly.
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!
It's a gun debate so critical thinking is not required
Problem is, they don't use critical, sound nor even half way informed thinking. Usually won' t listen either. Though I'd like to think I've changed some minds out there. I have changed some minds of parents of some Boy Scouts. They went from thinking it was only ever used to kill to owning a guns. They love shooting now. Used to be many schools had a range in the basement or outside. Even in Washington DC. One of the most rabid anti gun places out there now. The old ranges are usually used for storage.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Indeed.
If he just didn't want to be committed, he would've simply run away. The fact that he went on a shooting spree shows that he should've been locked up, as he had serious issues. Normal people don't just execute kids when they find themselves in those kinds of situations.
If songs could be rated -1....
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I mean that the government is not infalliable. It's right in my post, actually. I explain why, and that is because it's made out of people, and I suggest, very generally, how... use your brain against their brain. Any other questions?
Hahahahahahahaha, oh you're so funny that I just shat myself.
You are comparing apples to oranges. The Jewish population is hoplessly outnumbered while at the same time integrated into the population. Same problem with the japanese. So I congradulate you on picking the few situations that are completely impossible. Now lets get back to my actual question... where are the *civilizations* or *nations* or what have you that did not use the most advanced weapons of their time? This time, stop being pandantic over what's irrelevant to the question.
Fuck You.