Guns don't kill people ....

[footfootfoot]

Oh, no worries about me. It's the deer I'm after.

[sexobon]

Just make sure they're not flying reindeer, I want my Christmas presents.

[DanaC]

Surely it depends on what that mental illness is? Somewhere in the region of one in four adults will suffer some sort of mental illness or debilitation during their lives.

Do we include depression? After all the work that has been done to combat prejudice and taboos around that common condition. Do we include body dysmorphia in that? OCD?

'mental illness' is a pretty wide category to employ.

[xoxoxoBruce]

The mother of a violent 13 year old write about how she's trying to prevent her son from becoming another murderer, and getting no help.

In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness.
snip
A few weeks ago, Michael pulled a knife and threatened to kill me and then himself after I asked him to return his overdue library books. His 7 and 9 year old siblings knew the safety plan—they ran to the car and locked the doors before I even asked them to. I managed to get the knife from Michael, then methodically collected all the sharp objects in the house into a single Tupperware container that now travels with me. Through it all, he continued to scream insults at me and threaten to kill or hurt me.

That conflict ended with three burly police officers and a paramedic wrestling my son onto a gurney for an expensive ambulance ride to the local emergency room. The mental hospital didn’t have any beds that day, and Michael calmed down nicely in the ER, so they sent us home with a prescription for Zyprexa and a follow-up visit with a local pediatric psychiatrist.

We still don’t know what’s wrong with Michael. Autism spectrum, ADHD, Oppositional Defiant or Intermittent Explosive Disorder have all been tossed around at various meetings with probation officers and social workers and counselors and teachers and school administrators. He’s been on a slew of antipsychotic and mood altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian novel of behavioral plans. Nothing seems to work.
snip
I am sharing this story because I am Adam Lanza’s mother. I am Dylan Klebold’s and Eric Harris’s mother. I am Jason Holmes’s mother. I am Jared Loughner’s mother. I am Seung-Hui Cho’s mother. And these boys—and their mothers—need help. In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness.

It's worth reading.

[DanaC]

The thing is, if you ban anyone with any kind of mental illness, including depression and OCD, from owning guns, it increases the likelihood that some people suffering from such conditions will not seek help.

There is already a massive stigma attached to even run of the mill psychiatric conditions. The more aspects of life which are officially closed off from people on the grounds of mental health, the more mental health problems will go unreported and untreated. Some parents may even be inclined to not seek help for children they suspect of having some mental condition such as mild ADHD or depression, in order not to mark them out in a world which may well discriminate against them on that basis.

[piercehawkeye45]

This quote is falsely attributed to Morgan Freeman but I think it makes some very good points:

"You want to know why. This may sound cynical, but here's why.

It's because of the way the media reports it. Flip on the news and watch how we treat the Batman theater shooter and the Oregon mall shooter like celebrities. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are household names, but do you know the name of a single *victim* of Columbine? Disturbed
people who would otherwise just off themselves in their basements see the news and want to top it by doing something worse, and going out in a memorable way. Why a grade school? Why children? Because he'll be remembered as a horrible monster, instead of a sad nobody.

CNN's article says that if the body count "holds up", this will rank as the second deadliest shooting behind Virginia Tech, as if statistics somehow make one shooting worse than another. Then they post a video interview of third-graders for all the details of what they saw and heard while the shootings were happening. Fox News has plastered the killer's face on all their reports for hours. Any articles or news stories yet that focus on the victims and ignore the killer's identity? None that I've seen yet. Because they don't sell. So congratulations, sensationalist media, you've just lit the fire for someone to top this and knock off a day care center or a maternity ward next.

You can help by forgetting you ever read this man's name, and remembering the name of at least one victim. You can help by donating to mental health research instead of pointing to gun control as the problem. You can help by turning off the news."

[footfootfoot]

Yes. In The gift of fear" author Gavin DeBecker talks about this, and has suggested (my paraphrasing) that rather than glorifying the shooters, the newspapers and TV should refer to them as "typical losers" as in ...another typical loser acted like a complete loser moron... and then spend all the rest of the time on the people who were killed or injured, barely mentioning the perp's name.

Surely, no payoff for them as regards fame and notoriety.

Also found this excellent site: www.justfacts.com

Supposedly rigorous fact checking about many topics including gun ownership and crime in the us and other countries.

[Clodfobble]

ALLEGED typical losers.

I hate that "alleged" shit. If you're talking about associating a crime with a real person's name, I get the reasoning, but things like "the alleged gunman," as if there may or may not have been a person pulling the trigger, or the bullets may or may not have been fired via slingshot instead...

[Nirvana]

JMO I don't think in this particular situation the young man had the inclination to be famous. I don't know what his pay off could be and maybe we cannot know for sure. I don't have enough information but I cannot imagine that his mother thought he would kill anyone or her since she taught him to use the firearms. His brain did not work quite right > gut feeling His mother's either apparently...

[Spexxvet]

Originally Posted by Big Sarge

Our Constitutional Rights are sacred. Think how many have fought and died for these rights. I'm willing to keep our right to bear arms, even if it did endanger my precious angel.

You might feel differently if your angel was shot dead.

Originally Posted by Big Sarge

We need to start putting our country and constitution first. To be a free country, you often have to pay a price

The price you just paid was the lives of 20 children, and that's only partial payment.

Originally Posted by sexobon

That, folks, is the difference between the shepherd and the sheep.

No, he's just a sheep who belongs to a different shepherd.

[Spexxvet]

true

[Spexxvet]

...

[ZenGum]

There is far too much media fascination with the killer.

I'd like to see a lot more media focus on the teachers.

Many of them successfully hid their classes, misled the killer, and were murdered. Unarmed, untrained for this sort of thing, yet died saving the children in their charge. It doesn't get much more heroic than that.

[glatt]

The school has around 670 students. 650 of them walked out of the building and were reunited with their families. That's due entirely to the teachers and the heroic office staff and all the times they had practiced lockdowns.

I've always thought the locked school doors and lockdown drills were overkill, but this incident shows I was probably wrong about that.

[orthodoc]

When we first arrived in PA I thought the locked school doors with cameras and the need to be buzzed in by office staff were way over the top. Then we moved back to Ontario for a couple of years and I noticed that drug dealers loitered in the front hall of the high school my kids attended with pit bulls in tow. My second son was assaulted by one of them; had a knife held to his face with the promise that he'd be cut into ribbons the next time the guy saw him.

The school ignored it all, and the police told us there was no use arresting the guy, he'd be out within an hour.

I'm all in favor of locked school doors and secure campuses.