Six Weeks

Because your average mentally healthy human being doesn't go around shooting 10 people for no 'physical' reason. Mental illness can appear in anyone with varying levels of severity. During both of my psychotic breaks I was very, very paranoid and had very, very violent thoughts that I would have acted on if I were disturbed during that time period at the height of it. Thoughts that I do not usually have and if I do, are rare and with no desire to act on them. This also happens with my friend Sam, who's schizophrenic. He's literally one of the kindest people I know and he hates hurting things but during a psychotic break/episode or when his schizophrenia starts rearing its ugly head he does get very violent and borderline murderous and has acted on those in the past. It's a very small percentage of those who are mentally ill and commit mass murder/violence but the reason why it seems to be a culprit is because peace goes unnoticed. Those with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder who suffer quietly in the background don't make front page news, you don't see "Local Schizophrenic Gets Medication And Learns To Cope With Their Violent Thoughts" on the 6 o'clock news. School shooters like with Sandy Hook or Stoneman aren't part of some gang war where people get caught in crossfire, they have something very fucked up going on in their head in order to think that murdering children is okay. Normal, mentally healthy people don't go into a school and shoot children and teachers for existing.

Feb 18, 18 · +4 · Like · Report

8 comments

Cruiser_Katori

Yup. Most people with issues like that don't listen when voices in their head tell them to kill. This most recent one DID. It's the recency fallacy, if I remember correctly: just like everyone is so worried about "gun violence", as the idiots now call it, nobody worries about, say, heart disease, which is something we CAN change, and kills/injures A LOT more people per year. Furthermore, "it bleeds, it leads" plays a massive role: everyone hears about the most recent gang war, but nobody really hears about the 500,000+ or so defensive firearms uses by law abiding citizens, or the mass murders STOPPED by firearms carriers. Everyone hears about the guy who died shielding students, but nobody hears about the experiments done with simunitions where with minimal warning and a single armed teacher with even the bare basics of firearms experience is able to hold a classroom against an attacker reliably.
The problem is NOT firearms (not by a long shot, if you'll pardon the pun), or mental health across the general population (although for firearms-related deaths, it's BIG when it comes to suicides), or video games: it's lack of action on repeated red flags, and lack of readily available defensive ability in the form of carried firearms. It is a lack of trust in our fellow citizenry. And it is NOT something that will be easy to fix, not with the current ideologies competing for power over calls for rational, careful investigation into methods that will actually provide an EFFECTIVE solution to problems.

Feb 18, 18 · +3 · Like · Report

Six Weeks

And even then, how do we handle people who show red flags for these things? Do we lock them up? Do we put them in therapy? What happens when they refuse therapy or don't go to it? The FBI couldn't have locked him up only for a YouTube comment (although its terrifying how they 'couldn't track him' despite him using his real name), by that idea every person who makes an edgy joke or trolls would get put into therapy or surveillance. Although this guy had multiple red flags beyond that comment - an obsession with guns, killing animals (like a toad on his Instagram), the police being called to his house multiple times, and shit going on where he wasn't allowed on campus with a backpack or anything before being expelled. What could we have done to prevent this? Probably better background checks and mental health screenings and making it harder to get an AR-15. The laws here are so fucked that you have to be 18 to get an AR-15 but older by a few years to get a handgun. Somehow he passed those screenings despite his record and for some reason it's easy for a newly emerged adult to get a hold of a semi-automatic rifle that's extremely common in these kinds of shootings also because they can also be modified to be fully automatic iirc. And the government doesn't really give a shit right now, they're too busy fretting over tax returns and dossiers and Russian collusion to focus on issues that are costing people's lives and have some sort of solution (that isn't just "ban muh guns")

Feb 18, 18 · +2 · Like · Report

Cruiser_Katori

Cotard, you forget that in 1930, a ten-year-old could walk into any hardware store and walk out with a Maxim and multiple belts of ammo, a P-08 Schellfwer variant with multiple trommelmags, several boxes of 9x19mm, some hand grenades, and a few cases Alfred Nobel's finest, assuming that a ten-year-old had the cold cash to buy all that. They didn't have school shootings back then. Flash forward to the 1980s, and teens still had rifles and shotguns in unlocked cars and trucks, along with the occasional handgun. No school shootings. Only about 37-38 years later, and we have this. The availability of firearms was never the problem. If it was, th availability of common explosive precursors and chemical weapon precursors would be a FAR bigger problem.
The problem is that many adults don't respect eachother any more, and kids learn from that. Kids learn from a 24-hour news cycle that they can get fame for killing a bunch of people. They are constantly coddled and given banana stickers, then smacked in the face with Real Life(TM), suddenly exposing them to actual, long-term consequences. They are constantly unable to fight back against bullies, leaving bullies feeling empowered to do whatever they want later, and the bullied with massive stores of pent-up frustration. It used to be parents with little shits of children would actually discipline children, and so would the schools. Then the current wave of psychology came, and all that fell apart. And then the ignorance, across all of society... ARs are NOT "easily modified to be FA"; by BATFE regs and definitions, those are already MGs! ARs are common in those mass attacks because the little shits are copycats.
1/2

Feb 18, 18 · +1 · Like · Report

Cruiser_Katori

2/2
If they actually wanted mass casualties, chaining the doors shut, lighting the building on fire, and shotgunning folks as they tried to escape would be far more effective. Or, as mentioned above, a chlorine weapon, or a simple bomb. Remember li'll Timmy and Oklahoma? That bastard? Yeah, that was a van, some ANFO, and IIRC a nearly empty target. That killed 168 people, and injured over 600 more. A mass shooting attack, under optimal conditions for the terrorist, resulted in only about a third of the deaths back in Vegas. A simple ramming attack in Nice, France? Over 80 dead. I'm glad the little shits lack creativity and use firearms: you can defend against a rifle/shotgun/pistol/MG, and they only hit EXACTLY what they are aimed at. We already HAVE the best background checks we're EVER going to get, we HAVE all the mental health screenings, we HAVE all the laws. The problem is that the government, which everyone demands to "do something!", isn't doing its job. Which, if you know anything about federal, state, and local government, are very good at not doing anything.
You may not LIKE the answer, but the fact remains that the best defense is not more laws, laws proven ineffective by mass attacks in the states that HAVE them, but shooting back.Those little shits don't like a two-way shooting range, and about 70% of people shot in the US survive; that stat includes the suicidal folks that put the barrel up against their brain stem and pull the bang switch.

Feb 18, 18 · +1 · Like · Report

Mechanic Rex

And what does that tell you? Guns are part of the problem. If they were doing it because they wanted people dead, they'd use a car. They do it because they want to shoot people with a gun. It's a different scene. And the fact that school shootings are new doesn't vindicate guns, and it definitely doesn't dismiss them as part of the problem. Its just a new part of the problem. And there's other parts to it. People are hard to control.

Feb 19, 18 · +1 · Like · Report

Cruiser_Katori

No, firearms are NOT the problem here. Ban firearms? They'd use axes, knives, swords, spears, bows, cudgels, Molotov cocktails, gas, anything you can imagine to use to kill someone, almost all of which actually create a far more grievous wound than a modern firearm, only lacking in the hydrostatic shock "stopping" ability that makes a firearm so suited to defense. Mech, you are making the mistake of focusing on the instrument. If I kill someone, am I responsible, or my machete, my car, my scalpel, my hypodermic needle, my bioweapon, my gas, my firearm, my axe, or fist? If someone takes up arms to harm innocent others, THEY are the problem. I'm glad you admit that people are hard to control, because that leads into my next point.
People are hard to control. Society is hard to fix. But that is what you need to do, if you wish to avoid falling into the trap of the "this one little thing will do it" mentality. Because as you do those "one little things", they add up. Fast. Soon your culture is gone, and your society has become an Orwellian police state. Our society of today would already be unrecognizable and horrifying to almost any person from early 1900s USA. It's the hard fix, the recognition that we can't give those assholes fame, that we must fight back, that we must be willing to sacrifice all for our nation and fellow citizens, to literally die for our country, that is the terrible truth.
1/2

Feb 19, 18 · +0 · Like · Report

Cruiser_Katori

2/2
Because if we fight back, we make the attack unsuccessful, we don't give them fame, then we destroy the main reason for the attacks. It's harder than passing yet ANOTHER law. It's harder than demonizing a specific group of people who really have done nothing wrong (sound familiar?). It involves actually having a vested interest in the idea of the United States, the concept, not just the hunk of land. Because we are not just a place, or a people, we are an idea. We are the idea of self determination, and hand-in-hand, self-control, with all those strengths and sorrows that come with it. Destroy that, by force of law, by slow erosion, and you destroy the US, now and forever. I do not need to vindicate firearms, as they do not require vindication; they have done no harm. Limiting firearms will not fix the problem; the events may become smaller, but they will simply become more numerous, and the physically strong will once again lord over the weaker. Furthermore, crime will rapidly rise, as those that defend themselves using firearms are then unable to do so, and otherwise lawful persons will be criminalized for having a box with a spring in it. As for the criminals...

Feb 19, 18 · +1 · Like · Report

Cruiser_Katori

3/2 (Oops!)
http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2014/01/22/common-illicitly-homemade-submachine-guns-brazil/
http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2017/10/26/palestinian-p90/
http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2017/08/28/homemade-mac-11-submachine-guns-seized-alberta-canada/
http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2017/07/20/nigerian-homemade-revolving-shotguns/
http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2016/10/21/homemade-guns-concern-police-officer-south-korea-killed-shootout/
http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2016/01/25/poachers-silenced-takedown-gun/
http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2015/09/03/japanese-man-arrested-building-homemade-guns/
Even the Japanese and South Koreans cannot "stop the signal", as the saying goes. The only reason that there aren't the mass school attacks in countries outside like the on perpetrated recently in Florida is likely due to a cultural difference of simply not attacking your fellow citizenry for cheap fame. The why of how that difference first occurred is minimal. The what to do is most important, and what to do is to actually take personal responsibility to defend ourselves and fellow citizenry, as is our civic duty, and to teach out NEXT generation not to make the mistakes of the Baby Boomers and Gen-X-ers. It's a hard answer, to a hard problem, and it will take hard work to implement. Too bad, but it is the only one that will allow us to preserve our sense of self and nation, whole and united.

Feb 19, 18 · +0 · Like · Report

Sara

Mental illness scares everyone who doesn't understand it.

Feb 18, 18 · +2 · Like · Report

3 comments

Cruiser_Katori

That's exactly the point. Just about anything potentially dangerous that someone doesn't understand, whether firearms, airplanes, electricity, volcanoes, nuclear technology including power generation, wastewater, or basic chemistry. Folks understand cars, in general. They don't care that about as many people are killed in car *accidents* in the US every year as are killed deliberately by people misusing firearms; thus, there are no calls to ban cars, in spite of how dangerous they are in the short term and the threat they pose to the long-term environment. They understand heart disease to a certain extent, so they don't care that there are many times more *deaths* in the US from preventable heart disease as there are deaths *and* injuries involving firearms under all conditions. It's rather stupid, but that's how humans work.

Feb 18, 18 · +3 · Like · Report

Mechanic Rex

hm. interesting perspective. this is my fav answer so faa!

Feb 19, 18 · +1 · Like · Report

Cruiser_Katori

Mech, one of the biggest problems is that mass electronic communication and yellow journalism causes people to rush to judgement, to stampede, and NOT to think. Politicians know they can take advantage of that to grab MORE power for themselves. Hence, weapons laws, drug laws, mental health laws, etc. Laws really only WORK as a punitive measure, after the fact to keep the violent and dangerous locked up, or interfere with people who are pretty much harmless anyway; if you're following firearm laws, there really is no reason for them, as you are likely the type to follow laws against murder, rape, and robbery anyway! Against anyone truly determined, they are like a glass lid on the tip box: quite literally made to be broken. Thus, common sense dictates that you are prepared to deal with the violent or criminally desperate few willing to break that law, on an individual level as the community and public sector is to clumsy to be effective for singular persons and rapid response. That means personal armament. Against most of those attackers thusfar, it is distinctly possible that even a few armed persons at the site of the attack could have ended their rampage much earlier. At the very least, they could have delayed the attackers and prevented deaths and injuries. However, that requires members of society to be willing to actually think for themselves to some degree, and a lot of folks don't like doing that. If America is to survive as a nation, that MUST change, en masse.

Feb 19, 18 · +0 · Like · Report

SuperThePiplup

i think it depends on the severity of it all, like if someone has something really small it shouldn't effect them being sane but when it is something a lot worse then they shouldnt be allowed to have a weapon

True, but that's not the question I asked

Feb 18, 18 · +0 · Like · Report

Guessing because they aren't stable

either way i think whoever does the violence is a terrible human being and deserves to rot in hell

Meme™

BURN THEM AT THE STEAK IF THEY HAVE AUTISM REEEEEEEEEEE

^ This is the kind of crap that gets spread around the internet. It perpetuates steriotypes that translate into mainstream media giving it attention, etc. They spread this terrible message of mental disorters inciting violence and it's wrong.

>steak