<p>also, perhaps the vaunted news media should consider not making shootings into 24/7 news productions… it can’t be helping, and it might even be encouraging more.</p>
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<p>A comment by a neighbor about the mom. I’ll never understand people who collect guns.</p>
<p>Mental health care (doctor’s appointments, counselor appointments, and meds) is EXPENSIVE! We’re barely keeping up with the cost for our two sons. If we didn’t have medical insurance, it would be impossible to afford the meds. And our health insurance premiums are going up 42% next year - the monthly cost is almost as much as our house mortgage. It’s scary. I cannot even fathom what would happen to my two guys if they weren’t getting good care.</p>
<p>I am all for the public mood being against glorifying violence. I would love it if the next Quentin Tarantino blood bath movie didn’t earn one dime at the box office. I would love it if giving violent video games at Christmas was viewed as tantamount to child abuse.</p>
<p>This horrific event might have been the tipping point. Not a peep from the NRA; their social media guy must have gone home sick. Such a huge torrent of digital rage that they’ve shut down their Facebook page and have been receiving thousands of tweets like:</p>
<ul>
<li>The NRA is the enabler of mass murders (D Rep Jerrold Nadler) </li>
<li>The NRA Can Go To Hell: Connecticut Shooting Tragedy Should Be The September 11 Moment For Gun Control (St. Louis Magazine)</li>
<li>How many people have to die before the NRA drags itself into the modern world? (HuffPo)</li>
<li>Yes, shooters are mentally ill, so why make it easier to get a gun than a driver’s license in some places? (Susan Sarandon)</li>
<li>@NRA you should blush with shame today. The souls of those 20 children have felt your fire. (Oliver Stone)</li>
<li>“Thanks to our tireless work here at the NRA, there’s never been a better time to be a homicidal maniac than right now!” </li>
<li>Grief counselors dispatched to NRA headquarters to deal with employees who must work late today rewriting fundraising emails. </li>
<li>NRA = No Reasonable Accountability (Harvey Fierstein)</li>
<li>NRA points out that if grade school children are allowed concealed handguns, at least one of them might shoot the next school shooter. (Joyce Carol Oates)</li>
<li>Let’s not all attack the @NRA. Let’s work together with them to create bulletproof children. </li>
<li>@NRA Our thoughts and prayers go out to the gun owners whose rights may be threatened because of today’s shooting. </li>
<li>When the @NRA is more important than the lives of our children, we as a society have failed. Every single one of us. </li>
</ul>
<p>and, shockingly:
- Terrible news today. When will politicians find courage to ban automatic weapons? (Rupert Murdoch)</p>
<p>"I would love it if giving violent video games at Christmas was viewed as tantamount to child abuse. "</p>
<p>But don’t even think about doing anything relating to having stricter gun law?</p>
<p>One is persuasion, the other is coercion. </p>
<p>Those Hollywood people quoted above could start by cleaning their own houses, ie. speaking out against the gratuitous violence in their own industry.</p>
<p>Sorry, people go to jail for child abuse, hardly a persuasion. I think you have some good feel for the issues but somehow you have a big hang up with sensible limitation to people easily getting their hands on deadly weapons. Sorry, I can’t be very empathetic to all the people that could not somehow shoot powerful guns with large rounds in short amount of time or if they have to go through a more strict background check. I am not sure I equate that to coercion.</p>
<p>“Mental health care (doctor’s appointments, counselor appointments, and meds) is EXPENSIVE”</p>
<p>Amen. It’s not covered under my insurance. I figure we’ll spend close to $10,000 this year for my son’s care - and that’s just therapists and meds. Imagine something more involved, like hospitalization?</p>
<p>Yes, Susan Sarandon’s housekeeper is to blame! And all those violent Harvey Fierstein TV episodes! Thanks for pointing that out.</p>
<p>this is a painful and shameful day in our country. it is unfathomable to imagine what those innocent kindergartners experienced as they were assaulted. we must do better.</p>
<p>katliamom–what kind of insurance do you have that doesn’t cover mental health care? the mental health parity law was supposed to insure that insurance covered mental health care equally, but only if the policy covers it.</p>
<p>Since Columbine, how many innocent people have been killed by legally obtained guns? How many have been killed in crimes or accidents involving legally obtained guns? Shooting sprees, mistaken shootings, accidents where one kid kills another, suicides? We know about twenty-eight of them from today, twenty of them kindergarteners. How many others since Columbine?</p>
<p>And then, how many people have been saved by gun use?</p>
<p>I’m afraid that the first number is vastly bigger than the second. How many more innocents have to die, before we say enough is enough?</p>
<p>Thoughts and prayers for all the children and families. So tragic. :(</p>
<p>It seems a lot of the calls for increased mental health care after horrific tragedies have the underlying implication of “…because mentally ill people are dangerous and just waiting to snap.” However, a vast majority of people with mental illness will never hurt anyone and those that do are fair more likely to hurt <em>themselves</em> than others. That doesn’t make acts of violence committed by people with (or without) mental illness any less devastating and horrific, of course, but it is important to remember that violence and mental illness are not synonymous.</p>
<p>Wouldn’t a better underlying message be that increased access to mental health care can improve people’s well-being in any number of ways, from helping to prevent such tragedies to decreasing mental illness-related disability and suffering to helping the victims of tragedies cope? That would be a much more complete picture of the benefits of mental health services at least.</p>
<p>DocT – any update on your friend’s child(ren)?</p>
<p>psych_, that is always the problem when this issue comes up. It is truly an issue of civil liberties, and I certainly understand that commitment for mental health reasons was sometimes abused in the past. But we just have NOTHING now to help a family member or friend or teacher or whoever identifies that someone is at risk of committing a violent act – and when those who know them well worry that they are a risk to society, we should be able to do something to get inpatient treatment for them more readily without waiting for harm to occur. </p>
<p>And while we work on that issue, keeping people with mental illnesses like schizophrenia away from guns is just common sense. I certainly would not say that every diagnosis in the DSM warrants a limitation – I expect most do not. But some do. And we should have better tools to get a diagnosis on people other than just hoping that when a problem occurs they will get themselves to a doctor or ER for a mental health checkup.</p>
<p>“Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”</p>
<p>In stead of gun control, control people, i.e., strictly monitor gun owners.</p>
<p>Yes, I learned to my sorrow that people over a certain age (in HI, I believe it is 16) do NOT get mental health services unless said people CONSENT. The parents and others CANNOT require such treatment unless there is IMMINENT harm threatened to the individual and/or others. This leaves gaping holes where people choose not to get any services, treatment or medication and while perhaps are not IMMINENTLY dangerous, are still not safe to be out and about without any sort of treatment and/or monitoring. If they run away from home, the police and others will not help find them and/or bring them back to their home or wherever they were living.</p>
<p>This is one reason that some young people in HI are sent to Utah, where at least until they are 18, they can be required to live in a sheltered environment and will be brought back (with police assistance if needed) if they run away. </p>
<p>The current system obviously is broken and needs to be reformed.</p>
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<p>I think you’re right. This terrible day simply cannot go unanswered.</p>
<p>So what I want to know now is what triggered this (possibly) autistic, shy (according to the NY Times), fidgety, nervous anti-social kid who wanted to blend into the background into committing such a horrible act? A kid who was described by one of his classmates as having a “flat affect” and whose emotions couldn’t be read? I mean, what motivated this kid to don black battle fatigues and a bullet proof vest and kill his mother and then shoot up her classroom? Where does a kid like this get that idea? </p>
<p>OK, so his brother left home for college and his parents’ marriage collapsed. The bedrocks of his life were destabilizing. Sure, we’re all in shock and focusing on the guns, obviously, but that’s not going far enough. There is an unending stream of violence in the media that passes for entertainment, movies, video, TV, computer games.I could cite any one of these with just as much passion, but I don’t know enough yet and the story is still developing. Personally I think a lot of the gratuitously violent stuff that spews out of Hollywood studios should be banned, and violence-based video games as well. They not only offend me and disgust me but they set up a certain model of behavior that, through repetition, becomes the norm for a large swath of the population, desensitizing the individual to accept increasing levels of violence as acceptable. Who can say with a straight face that guns are not acceptable in our society but violent video games and movies that glorify gun-based murder and mayhem are because they entertain us? How sick is that?</p>
<p>Did repeated exposure to violent entertainment flip this kid into commando mode? Dunno, but you won’t hear a peep from the Hollywood crowd. The line I’ve heard in the past coming out of there is that violent movies don’t cause crime, criminal people do. If violent content coming out of the movie studios or computer gaming circles had any part in this, stuff spewed out in the name of “entertainment” and “just giving the public what they want” then an argument can be made that they are as culpable as guns in this horrific murder and should be accordingly and swiftly controlled as well.</p>
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<p>We had a kid like that at work.</p>
<p>He graduated from MIT at a very young age and was brilliant. He was quite odd to socialize with though because he gave one word answers when you asked anything about him and he didn’t pick up on normal social cues.</p>
<p>I’ve never associated autism or Aspergers with violence. I can understand schizophrenia, or bipolar because they can come with delusions.</p>
<p>How did the kid get a bullet-proof vest? I thought that only law-enforcement personnel could get these.</p>