Except that we are expected to follow laws -- by which I do not mean the laws of consent, but the laws that say that 17.9999 year olds are chattel and 18.0001 year olds are human beings.
I agree that in a world without such laws anyone bridging the age gap (and the problem would of course be the same if we were talking about 15.999 vs 16.0001 or 20.999 vs 21.00001 -- the age is arbitrary) would have no such fundamental issue, but since such laws exist the difference in consent is meaningful.
Hence, if one found oneself with pictures of someone at 17.999999 the reason for finding this immoral would not be the legally defined age of consent (which is often different from the age of majority anyway) but because that individual is a person without full human rights in their society. This is why I said "Yes and No" -- it's a judgement that has to do with law and is arguably meaningless without law (though an argument can be made that the same argument can apply when tradition or other non-law societal restrictions restrict the individual's rights in the same way) but the moral issue is not because the law says it's wrong.
Yes and no. The difference between 17.9999999 and 18.0000001 in many states is the difference between being able to legally work nearly any job vs needing parental/gaurdian permission, possibly school permission, restricted hours, etc. It's also the difference between the cops physically dragging you back to your parent/gaurdian's house vs the cops telling your parents "tough, shouldn't have pissed your kid off enough to make 'em move out"
There is a fundamental difference in ability to consent between people who have all the legal rights of adults and those who have none of them, even if they are only a day apart in age.
Well, you can pour your resources into making machines for the other side to pulverize while they pour their resources into making machines for you to pulverize, or both sides could pour their resources into space travel, ending poverty, social justice, curing disease, better fireworks, more condoms, whatever.
It really is our choice. War is a remarkably resource intensive way of dealing with conflict, even if nobody is dying.
Because Liberals are all one block of people who all think the same way...and Conservatives would never target eachother or act in authoritarian ways...
Seriously, the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law didn't sue Craig, they sued his company, and he isn't being 'targeted' -- Nobody claims that Craig is being discriminitory and certainly no one is suggesting that people lynch him in any way. To a large extent this is about how anti-housing-discrimination enforcement in online advertisement is going to be handled. This ruling says that Craigslist is not responsible for the content of housing advertising in the way that a newspaper would be, so each poster (who posts an ad with discriminatory language) will have to be handled individually.
While I have certain issues with the ways anti-housing-discrimination laws are sometimes enforced, allowing landlords to openly discriminate based on race leads to authoritarian issues as well.
Bwahahahaha!! Dude, I'm so calling myself this from here on out. "I'm not surfing porn/smut. I'm practicing amateur sexology.":)
Seriously, though, your list is incomplete. You missed about four of my interests and at least six more of people close to me...and I would have put 16, 18, and 20 under 4 and put 4 under 3.
More importantly, I question that much of the above was excluded and I question that there'd be such a large increase if all of this were considered, even if it were excluded. The data was gathered by considering random samples of Google's and Microsoft's internet indexes. I can't imagine that a person looking at most of the above would see it and consider it something other than porn.
As far as the ratio of "out there" erotica to mainstream porn, on one hand, yes, plenty of really out there stuff exists. On the other, a lot more mainstream porn exists. For every kinky person who is tying their spouse up or anally inserting duck pin balls (I'll believe bowling balls when I see them..I've seen duck pin balls) and putting pics or video on the net there's several (not sure how many, but I"d be shocked if as much as 10% of the population is into anything like the above list, not counting gay/lesbian because I consider that mainstream and I'd be *really* surprised if g/l porn wasn't counted, so I'd say the ratio is at least 1:10) "straight" folks putting pics and video of "normal" sex acts up. Most of the companies that are just in it for the money stick to vanilla or only a little kinky sex because it sells better and because it's less likely to acquire the attention of law enforcement officials.
But face it, it was just more fun to post a list of kinky activities to/. than to do whatever else was on your todo list today:)
Huh? The game makers are responsible for making certain that no one plays their games and then goes off to commit a violent crime (regardless of any other mitigating factors in the person's environment) but parents *aren't* responsible for making sure that their doesn't obsessively play violent video games?
This is some sort of "conservative" (or at least non-liberal) view that I've never heard before. Usually the conservatives are better at personal responsibility.
Trying to take responsibility from abusive parents only helps abusers, btw. I think that in a society that legally forces children to live with abusive parents (at the whim of social workers and other adults - it's amazing how often, even now, children reporting abuse get ignored and the abuse justified) such murders are inevitable. For some kids (teenage boys, esspecially) living under such abuse becomes an untenable situation, and when you aren't allowed to leave the options become disturbingly few.
BTW, I do think that media violence (TV, movies and video games) does desensitize people to violence. However, if they have as strong an influence as some believe, then there ought to be plenty of cases where the killer wasn't killing people who were a long term threat to their physical safety and emotional health or other mitigating circumstance. This is not a good test case for such.
Yes and no. If Aunt Tilly is over 65, you're right. However, when treatment restores a worker to the work force or allows someone to work (or work more) than previously, then health care *does* build value.
Great. If it's so damn easy come over here and coach me on how to do it the easy way. Seriously. I've read books and websites and repeatedly tried to implement other people's systems, finally figured out how to make my own and, well..there's progress, but if you think that these are skills that everyone can learn *easily*, you really ought to spend a few days around here. I've been working specifically on time management for about two years. It's coming together. I might actually have the whole thing down in another two. After much work over the two-or-so years before I started concentrating on time management, I have a semi-working physical organization system that combined with help from my OCD [yes, really, diagnosed] partner I can mostly find everything I need fairly quickly, but without him I struggle.
My email box would terrify you, but of all my organization woes (and what is time management if not the way one organizes one's tasks to fit one's time?) my email box is the least of my concerns. Prior to all the wonderful and not so wonderful email solutions people are extolling in this thread I could find emails using grep and cat with some pretty decent speed. I've never had a problem because I didn't see an email in an overcrowded box or couldn't find an email.
Obviously, I wouldn't spend years working on learning skills I didn't think were useful, but for some of us these things do not come easily. Of course, if you'd like to prove me wrong by coming over and teaching me your super simple easy skills, get in touch.
These are the same nashua cops who think smelling incense is probable cause to search an apartment (no search warrant), and that a baggie of tobacco is sufficient for arrest. (Note to all who are far out of jurisdiction: tobacco is still quite legal here, the cop kept implying that it was marijauna) From other situations I hear that they have no problem with threatening people with resisting arrest or other bogus charges if people try to refuse entry to officers that don't have a warrant. They are also the same nashua cops who will put out an arrest warrant, have that person come in voluntarily, claim "Oh, it was a mistake", let that person go and then arrest them again *three years later* (with no attempts to contact him in the meantime, even though he left his address and phone number and didn't move over those three years) and add other charges because he "should have come in earlier", keep him in jail a few more days and then let him out again with another "Oh, never mind, it was a mistake"
Given that sort of history. I'm not really inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt on this. The nashua cops (at least some of them) are ridiculous and out of control.
No, but generally sexually threatening twelve year old girls *is* considered a crime and not just due to being 'offended'.
RTFA
Cops should have gotten a subpeona first (they ended up needing two, and the bit about not being able to find the title sounds a bit sketchy to me, but maybe the title was remembered slightly wrong or somethign), but it did need to be followed up on.
I've been homeless in the U.S. Come to think of it, I thought I pioneered the pager/internet (and later cell phone) setup back in 2000 and then again in 2002, but my ideas were probably not all that original. I would guess that most intelligent and technology savvy folks would come up with similar ideas in similar situations.
That said, homeless shelters in this country are a joke. I've come to the conclusion that for most homeless people they are worse than the alternative except during extreme inclement weather. Not only was I physically assaulted by other shelter residents, but the few items I owned were in constant jeaporady not only from other residents but also from the people who ran the shelter (if you had something that they thought was 'too nice' for someone who was homeless, they'd take it. I heard rumours that if you fought this they would call the cops and claim you stole it from them, but I never witnessed that directly). If protecting myself and the small (a duffle and a backpack full) amount of property I had at the time wasn't enough reason to sleep on the streets, at 69th street station or basically anywhere *but* the shelter, the fact that in order to get shelter space I had to spend the entire day, starting at 10am, at the office. Leaving meant forfeiting your place in line and only the first X people (I don't recall the actual numbers, and they did change daily) would get a bed. This was a real problem for me, as I did have a job. I decided it was better to sleep out at night and get to my job. If I had done what the social workers told me to do (both times) I'd probably still be homeless.
Incidently, the reason I became homeless the first time was because my landlady/friend threw me out after I had maxed my own resources to move across country to come help her. It took about a month to earn and save enough money to get myself to another city where I could stay with a different friend. The second time was due to layoffs and disability (during good economic times it's a lot easier to find employers who will make disability accomodations, ADA or no), leading to the typical can't pay rent syndrome. The second time I was blessed to have a car, so I just slept in it. The shelters never saw me.
Oddly enough, some businesses still use checks (or cheques, I don't care) for paying contractors. Once that company hired me as an employee I switched to direct deposit, improving my life immensely.
Come to think of it, I still write three to four checks a month for my bills. My guess is many people are still paying the rent with checks, but probably not much else.
B of A has refused to cash checks written to me, drawn on their bank, unless I got an account with them. That was back in 2000. Not random personal checks, but paychecks. I offered to wait while they called my employer to confirm that the check was real and not forged, but they claimed that it was against policy and thus impossible for them to cash a check for ~$2k unless I got an account there.
Nothing like being told that when you have absolutely no cash because this was your first paycheck in months, you've just pulled off a move and your credit union doesn't have a local branch.
It's not malice that is spreading these beliefs, and I think that the original author is aware of that. Just how many times did he use the word 'idiots' in that article?
But it's definitely arguable that malice (or at least extreme greed, to the point of not caring about the truth, security, safety or anything else but profit) is behind the *starting* of these rumours. Then the computer-ignorant masses believe and spread the beliefs, because, after all, the security experts said so!
Actually, doctors are notorious for telling people they are being hypochondriacs when they actually have medical problems. No skin off the doctors' noses, as they get paid anyway, and often they get more because a condition requires more treatment when caught later.
I had reason to go looking for a good comprehensive math book last fall. The two smaller bookstores didn't have anything appropriate, but Barnes and Noble had two good options and a decent selection, though the entire science/math section was a single book case in a huge store.
It's not the people doing illegal stuff with (hydroponic growing medium||grow-lights||chemical oxidizers||flasks||guns||etc) that are taking away law abiding people's rights to do lawful things with these items, it's those people who theoretically are supposed to be representing us.
Put the blame where it belongs.
I grow food and houseplants indoors (apartment dweller) and I am concerned about the amount of police attention those who grow lawful plants indoors get, though I've not had such attention myself.
The concern is that people log in to read things like their friends pages and, as written, clause XVI.17.b suggests that if a person reads their friends page that contains entries from friends who have sponsored accounts with an ad-blocker while logged in then their own account (not the sponsored account) would be in jeporady.
Due to friends-only security locked posts, it makes sense to read while logged in.
It is possible that LJ intended it to only mean server side stuff, but as it's written that isn't clear and they need to clarify that.
Also, since the part of the sponsored account is viewing ads while reading as well as on one's own journal, I suspect that they really did mean to ban ad-blockers. If it only applied to sponsored accounts I think most people wouldn't mind.
Given the number of times in history where people with a political/cultural agenda have managed to get a hold of a press, printing company, school board or other means of communication (in this case, admin rights) one might as well use this as an argument for why print encyclopedias don't work, why books don't work, why computers don't work, why newspapers don't work (how many times have we seen the mainstream media happily report a complete lie as true just to be 'fair and balanced'?) etc
Not that I completely disagree with the ACs post here, but to say that Wikipedia flat out doesn't work due to this issue is an overstatement.
In most places in the U.S. (there may be a state or two that's an exception, but this is absolutely true of the states with the majority of the population) people who have been committed to a mental hospital previously cannot buy guns, and in places that require permits, those who have been committed cannot get a permit.
This doens't cover all 'psychos' but does cover most of them (as well as anyone who has ever tried to commit suicide and didn't suceed)
As a student in the UMass system, I can confirm this. Umass is in the process of converting to a non-SSN ID number, but not all of the campuses have been converted over yet. I believe (but could be mistaken) that Dartmouth (The Umass campus in question) is one that still has not. Even if it has, there's still quite a bit of 'grandfathering' of SSN requests on my campus, and it was the second to be converted. I know for certain that Dartmouth wasn't the first.
Though given the various seminars and such that I see advertised in my student email, I have to wonder if Umass wasn't specifically targeted because it's so very liberal. At least one of Michael Moore's documentaries was required for frosh english this semester, and much the rest of both the reading and viewing list looked very similar. OTOH, I've heard Dartmouth is more conservative. Troubling, whatever the details may be (and we'll never likely know anyway)
Slashdot Mirror
They're trying down near Cape Cod but the NIMBY folks don't want wind turbines because they'll mess up the view.
Except that we are expected to follow laws -- by which I do not mean the laws of consent, but the laws that say that 17.9999 year olds are chattel and 18.0001 year olds are human beings.
I agree that in a world without such laws anyone bridging the age gap (and the problem would of course be the same if we were talking about 15.999 vs 16.0001 or 20.999 vs 21.00001 -- the age is arbitrary) would have no such fundamental issue, but since such laws exist the difference in consent is meaningful.
Hence, if one found oneself with pictures of someone at 17.999999 the reason for finding this immoral would not be the legally defined age of consent (which is often different from the age of majority anyway) but because that individual is a person without full human rights in their society. This is why I said "Yes and No" -- it's a judgement that has to do with law and is arguably meaningless without law (though an argument can be made that the same argument can apply when tradition or other non-law societal restrictions restrict the individual's rights in the same way) but the moral issue is not because the law says it's wrong.
Yes and no. The difference between 17.9999999 and 18.0000001 in many states is the difference between being able to legally work nearly any job vs needing parental/gaurdian permission, possibly school permission, restricted hours, etc. It's also the difference between the cops physically dragging you back to your parent/gaurdian's house vs the cops telling your parents "tough, shouldn't have pissed your kid off enough to make 'em move out"
There is a fundamental difference in ability to consent between people who have all the legal rights of adults and those who have none of them, even if they are only a day apart in age.
Why do you think he had to create us? Deep love? Need for creation? No, he's just trying to get his degree ;)
Well, you can pour your resources into making machines for the other side to pulverize while they pour their resources into making machines for you to pulverize, or both sides could pour their resources into space travel, ending poverty, social justice, curing disease, better fireworks, more condoms, whatever.
It really is our choice. War is a remarkably resource intensive way of dealing with conflict, even if nobody is dying.
um..goddess..and that's her vulva she's holding open
Because Liberals are all one block of people who all think the same way...and Conservatives would never target eachother or act in authoritarian ways...
Seriously, the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law didn't sue Craig, they sued his company, and he isn't being 'targeted' -- Nobody claims that Craig is being discriminitory and certainly no one is suggesting that people lynch him in any way. To a large extent this is about how anti-housing-discrimination enforcement in online advertisement is going to be handled. This ruling says that Craigslist is not responsible for the content of housing advertising in the way that a newspaper would be, so each poster (who posts an ad with discriminatory language) will have to be handled individually.
While I have certain issues with the ways anti-housing-discrimination laws are sometimes enforced, allowing landlords to openly discriminate based on race leads to authoritarian issues as well.
> as an amateur sexologist/enthusiast
:)
/. than to do whatever else was on your todo list today :)
Bwahahahaha!! Dude, I'm so calling myself this from here on out. "I'm not surfing porn/smut. I'm practicing amateur sexology."
Seriously, though, your list is incomplete. You missed about four of my interests and at least six more of people close to me...and I would have put 16, 18, and 20 under 4 and put 4 under 3.
More importantly, I question that much of the above was excluded and I question that there'd be such a large increase if all of this were considered, even if it were excluded. The data was gathered by considering random samples of Google's and Microsoft's internet indexes. I can't imagine that a person looking at most of the above would see it and consider it something other than porn.
As far as the ratio of "out there" erotica to mainstream porn, on one hand, yes, plenty of really out there stuff exists. On the other, a lot more mainstream porn exists. For every kinky person who is tying their spouse up or anally inserting duck pin balls (I'll believe bowling balls when I see them..I've seen duck pin balls) and putting pics or video on the net there's several (not sure how many, but I"d be shocked if as much as 10% of the population is into anything like the above list, not counting gay/lesbian because I consider that mainstream and I'd be *really* surprised if g/l porn wasn't counted, so I'd say the ratio is at least 1:10) "straight" folks putting pics and video of "normal" sex acts up. Most of the companies that are just in it for the money stick to vanilla or only a little kinky sex because it sells better and because it's less likely to acquire the attention of law enforcement officials.
But face it, it was just more fun to post a list of kinky activities to
Our robot overlords would have you know that we taste like bacon and prosciutto.
Huh? The game makers are responsible for making certain that no one plays their games and then goes off to commit a violent crime (regardless of any other mitigating factors in the person's environment) but parents *aren't* responsible for making sure that their doesn't obsessively play violent video games?
This is some sort of "conservative" (or at least non-liberal) view that I've never heard before. Usually the conservatives are better at personal responsibility.
Trying to take responsibility from abusive parents only helps abusers, btw. I think that in a society that legally forces children to live with abusive parents (at the whim of social workers and other adults - it's amazing how often, even now, children reporting abuse get ignored and the abuse justified) such murders are inevitable. For some kids (teenage boys, esspecially) living under such abuse becomes an untenable situation, and when you aren't allowed to leave the options become disturbingly few.
BTW, I do think that media violence (TV, movies and video games) does desensitize people to violence. However, if they have as strong an influence as some believe, then there ought to be plenty of cases where the killer wasn't killing people who were a long term threat to their physical safety and emotional health or other mitigating circumstance. This is not a good test case for such.
Yes and no. If Aunt Tilly is over 65, you're right. However, when treatment restores a worker to the work force or allows someone to work (or work more) than previously, then health care *does* build value.
Great. If it's so damn easy come over here and coach me on how to do it the easy way. Seriously. I've read books and websites and repeatedly tried to implement other people's systems, finally figured out how to make my own and, well..there's progress, but if you think that these are skills that everyone can learn *easily*, you really ought to spend a few days around here. I've been working specifically on time management for about two years. It's coming together. I might actually have the whole thing down in another two. After much work over the two-or-so years before I started concentrating on time management, I have a semi-working physical organization system that combined with help from my OCD [yes, really, diagnosed] partner I can mostly find everything I need fairly quickly, but without him I struggle.
My email box would terrify you, but of all my organization woes (and what is time management if not the way one organizes one's tasks to fit one's time?) my email box is the least of my concerns. Prior to all the wonderful and not so wonderful email solutions people are extolling in this thread I could find emails using grep and cat with some pretty decent speed. I've never had a problem because I didn't see an email in an overcrowded box or couldn't find an email.
Obviously, I wouldn't spend years working on learning skills I didn't think were useful, but for some of us these things do not come easily. Of course, if you'd like to prove me wrong by coming over and teaching me your super simple easy skills, get in touch.
These are the same nashua cops who think smelling incense is probable cause to search an apartment (no search warrant), and that a baggie of tobacco is sufficient for arrest. (Note to all who are far out of jurisdiction: tobacco is still quite legal here, the cop kept implying that it was marijauna) From other situations I hear that they have no problem with threatening people with resisting arrest or other bogus charges if people try to refuse entry to officers that don't have a warrant. They are also the same nashua cops who will put out an arrest warrant, have that person come in voluntarily, claim "Oh, it was a mistake", let that person go and then arrest them again *three years later* (with no attempts to contact him in the meantime, even though he left his address and phone number and didn't move over those three years) and add other charges because he "should have come in earlier", keep him in jail a few more days and then let him out again with another "Oh, never mind, it was a mistake"
Given that sort of history. I'm not really inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt on this. The nashua cops (at least some of them) are ridiculous and out of control.
No, but generally sexually threatening twelve year old girls *is* considered a crime and not just due to being 'offended'.
RTFA
Cops should have gotten a subpeona first (they ended up needing two, and the bit about not being able to find the title sounds a bit sketchy to me, but maybe the title was remembered slightly wrong or somethign), but it did need to be followed up on.
I've been homeless in the U.S. Come to think of it, I thought I pioneered the pager/internet (and later cell phone) setup back in 2000 and then again in 2002, but my ideas were probably not all that original. I would guess that most intelligent and technology savvy folks would come up with similar ideas in similar situations.
That said, homeless shelters in this country are a joke. I've come to the conclusion that for most homeless people they are worse than the alternative except during extreme inclement weather. Not only was I physically assaulted by other shelter residents, but the few items I owned were in constant jeaporady not only from other residents but also from the people who ran the shelter (if you had something that they thought was 'too nice' for someone who was homeless, they'd take it. I heard rumours that if you fought this they would call the cops and claim you stole it from them, but I never witnessed that directly). If protecting myself and the small (a duffle and a backpack full) amount of property I had at the time wasn't enough reason to sleep on the streets, at 69th street station or basically anywhere *but* the shelter, the fact that in order to get shelter space I had to spend the entire day, starting at 10am, at the office. Leaving meant forfeiting your place in line and only the first X people (I don't recall the actual numbers, and they did change daily) would get a bed. This was a real problem for me, as I did have a job. I decided it was better to sleep out at night and get to my job. If I had done what the social workers told me to do (both times) I'd probably still be homeless.
Incidently, the reason I became homeless the first time was because my landlady/friend threw me out after I had maxed my own resources to move across country to come help her. It took about a month to earn and save enough money to get myself to another city where I could stay with a different friend. The second time was due to layoffs and disability (during good economic times it's a lot easier to find employers who will make disability accomodations, ADA or no), leading to the typical can't pay rent syndrome. The second time I was blessed to have a car, so I just slept in it. The shelters never saw me.
Oddly enough, some businesses still use checks (or cheques, I don't care) for paying contractors. Once that company hired me as an employee I switched to direct deposit, improving my life immensely.
Come to think of it, I still write three to four checks a month for my bills. My guess is many people are still paying the rent with checks, but probably not much else.
B of A has refused to cash checks written to me, drawn on their bank, unless I got an account with them. That was back in 2000. Not random personal checks, but paychecks. I offered to wait while they called my employer to confirm that the check was real and not forged, but they claimed that it was against policy and thus impossible for them to cash a check for ~$2k unless I got an account there.
Nothing like being told that when you have absolutely no cash because this was your first paycheck in months, you've just pulled off a move and your credit union doesn't have a local branch.
They are pretty high on my list of scumbags.
It's not malice that is spreading these beliefs, and I think that the original author is aware of that. Just how many times did he use the word 'idiots' in that article?
But it's definitely arguable that malice (or at least extreme greed, to the point of not caring about the truth, security, safety or anything else but profit) is behind the *starting* of these rumours. Then the computer-ignorant masses believe and spread the beliefs, because, after all, the security experts said so!
Actually, doctors are notorious for telling people they are being hypochondriacs when they actually have medical problems. No skin off the doctors' noses, as they get paid anyway, and often they get more because a condition requires more treatment when caught later.
Hrm....
I had reason to go looking for a good comprehensive math book last fall. The two smaller bookstores didn't have anything appropriate, but Barnes and Noble had two good options and a decent selection, though the entire science/math section was a single book case in a huge store.
It's not the people doing illegal stuff with (hydroponic growing medium||grow-lights||chemical oxidizers||flasks||guns||etc) that are taking away law abiding people's rights to do lawful things with these items, it's those people who theoretically are supposed to be representing us.
Put the blame where it belongs.
I grow food and houseplants indoors (apartment dweller) and I am concerned about the amount of police attention those who grow lawful plants indoors get, though I've not had such attention myself.
The concern is that people log in to read things like their friends pages and, as written, clause XVI.17.b suggests that if a person reads their friends page that contains entries from friends who have sponsored accounts with an ad-blocker while logged in then their own account (not the sponsored account) would be in jeporady.
Due to friends-only security locked posts, it makes sense to read while logged in.
It is possible that LJ intended it to only mean server side stuff, but as it's written that isn't clear and they need to clarify that.
Also, since the part of the sponsored account is viewing ads while reading as well as on one's own journal, I suspect that they really did mean to ban ad-blockers. If it only applied to sponsored accounts I think most people wouldn't mind.
Given the number of times in history where people with a political/cultural agenda have managed to get a hold of a press, printing company, school board or other means of communication (in this case, admin rights) one might as well use this as an argument for why print encyclopedias don't work, why books don't work, why computers don't work, why newspapers don't work (how many times have we seen the mainstream media happily report a complete lie as true just to be 'fair and balanced'?) etc
Not that I completely disagree with the ACs post here, but to say that Wikipedia flat out doesn't work due to this issue is an overstatement.
In most places in the U.S. (there may be a state or two that's an exception, but this is absolutely true of the states with the majority of the population) people who have been committed to a mental hospital previously cannot buy guns, and in places that require permits, those who have been committed cannot get a permit.
This doens't cover all 'psychos' but does cover most of them (as well as anyone who has ever tried to commit suicide and didn't suceed)
As a student in the UMass system, I can confirm this. Umass is in the process of converting to a non-SSN ID number, but not all of the campuses have been converted over yet. I believe (but could be mistaken) that Dartmouth (The Umass campus in question) is one that still has not. Even if it has, there's still quite a bit of 'grandfathering' of SSN requests on my campus, and it was the second to be converted. I know for certain that Dartmouth wasn't the first.
Though given the various seminars and such that I see advertised in my student email, I have to wonder if Umass wasn't specifically targeted because it's so very liberal. At least one of Michael Moore's documentaries was required for frosh english this semester, and much the rest of both the reading and viewing list looked very similar. OTOH, I've heard Dartmouth is more conservative. Troubling, whatever the details may be (and we'll never likely know anyway)