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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.
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.
lol i no rite
Seriously, it's not going to work with the presence of popular internet shorthand.
it'll "work". ... but what they'll actually do is hang around on gun nut boards and try to sell illegal automatics to the people hanging around there. because think crime isn't enough but seemingly creating the actual crime is legit.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
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
Though if they try to sell "illegal automatics" on most gun forums, they'll find themselves banned and reported to the ATF faster than you can empty a magazine.
"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? ...
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
Man is not a rational animal. He is a rationalizing animal.
Heinlein.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
With their badge numbers?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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.
more stringent background checks
How about "Are there any crazy people living in your house?"
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
This has worked so many times in the past; how can it fail?
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.