<p>Sigh. Seems like a broken record. Best wishes that no one was seriously injured or worse. Seems to be an active situation.
Hopefully the mall was fairly empty given the late hour- I don’t know the mall or the area though.</p>
<p>Sounds like he was shooting in the air. Probably just a depressed, angry kid who found out he did not have it in him to kill innocent people. </p>
<p>I partly blame the single shooter video games these guys have grown up on. Add in some mental health problems and you have created testosterone fueled time bombs.</p>
<p>Sorry for his family. So glad he didn’t hurt anyone else.</p>
<p>I live near the mall. They now know the shooter was a 20yr old male from a nearby town. He was known to the local police for using/dealing drugs. He left a suicide note at home before going to the mall. If there is a silver lining, its that he did not shoot at anyone, he appeared to be shooting up. No shoppers/employees were hurt. It is a very busy mall and the outcome could have been horrific. They are also reporting the police had him cornered in the mall just after 3am when he took his own life.</p>
<p>Sorry Razor but I need to know more. I want to know what it is that has caused the erosion, if not total disintegration, of the societal “norms” that used to [more often than not] restrain people from acting out their frustrations, disappointments and anger by violent means.</p>
<p>20 yr. old unemployed male with drug abuse issues. What do these guys have to look forward to when there are so few jobs to be had for a living wage. Watching TV where everyone your age is portrayed as having money and a great life. Early mistakes in life that can dog you for years. Young age where emotions are raw and you don’t have the perspective of that of an older person who has seen times get better. Also schizophrenia usual rears its ugly head in the early 20’s. So many variables that come together for one person without the ability or core family to deal with them.</p>
<p>I could go on and on. As we become a nation of have and have nots we will be seeing much more of this in the future.</p>
<p>Terwitt, I say this with all sincerity, but would ‘lunatic’ be a more appropriate word to use? Honestly, I am quite upset and rather frightened by the accommodation society seems to be making for violent behavior by lunatics of late. And I don’t mean just gunfire. Every few days it seems someone can be found engaging in selfish and truly bizarre public behavior that could harm others. Clearly some of these folks are just poor souls; the mentally ill. Others are simply predators with unrestrained impulses for self-satisfying mayhem.</p>
<p>LakeWashington - I’d really rather defer to the mental health experts to answer your question. My understanding (60 Minutes did a piece on this earlier this year) is that the majority of people who engage in selfish and truly bizarre public behavior (this is a relative term) that could harm others are mentally ill and haven’t been adequately treated for their mental illness. Again, the definition of selfish and truly bizarre public behavior is going to be defined differently depending on who you ask. </p>
<p>But we do a major disservice to the truly mentally ill person when we refer to them as nuts and lunatics. We perpetuate stigmas that can often prevent people from getting the help they need, in fear that they will be labeled a nut or lunatic. In the 60 Minutes piece, they gave a statistic of what percentage of inmates in the Cook County (Chicago) jail suffered from a major mental disorder, and I think (trying to recall from memory) the number was upward of 75%, and the majority of those suffered from untreated bi-polar illness. </p>
<p>Again, we have to be careful because we don’t want people to start assuming that the majority of people who have mental illness are going to commit a crime; indeed, a majority of mentally ill people never commit a crime. But a large percentage of our incarcerated population have been diagnosed with mental illness. I’m in no way saying they shouldn’t be incarcerated for their crimes, but it seems to me that one way we could tackle this problem would be to provide better, more available and more affordable care to those who need it. It is then their responsibility to take advantage of that care if/when it is made more available/affordable (I say this full aware of the fact that some people are so ill that they can’t recognize their own need for help, and will require outside intervention).</p>
<p>Am hoping that some of our mental health experts on CC will chime in on this.</p>