Re: suicides … I recall reading that when England phased out gas ovens, the suicide rate dropped. Apparently ease of access to a reliable means had a strong correlation to people attempting - and following through on - the act. I’m not so sure those 18,000 were in fact destined.
edit: Not that it matters, but the number of motor vehicle deaths is closer to 32000 than 40000. Presumably a percentage of these are suicides or the result of suicides and should not be counted as well.
Starting to wonder if other numbers are sketchy as well.
For example, the raw comparison of numbers works if, say, 100,000,000 people are firing weapons in public for 3-4 hours each each day. Since they are primarily for sport or recreation than transportation, maybe snowmobiles or off road motorcycles would be a more apt comparison. Anxious to see the numbers.
Quite happy shooter saved Va the cost of trial and later execution. We live withing 20 miles of SML and go there for breakfast some weekends. Most unlikely place for such an event you could find. Her dad was awesome in statement and local news interviews.
Without knowing more, I don’t know what it means to say that the EEOC “rejected” his complaint. 99% of the time, no matter how weak a plaintiff’s stated case may be, the EEOC rubber-stamps it by giving the plaintiff a “right to sue” letter. On the other hand, they take on only a small percentage of cases to prosecute themselves. So I don’t know if the EEOC refused to give him a “right to sue” letter (very unusual, and, it seems to me, indicative of an obviously frivolous case), or simply declined to take the case themselves, leaving him to bring any lawsuit on his own (standard practice).
Yeah, this guy had issues with a lot of people - he says he felt double discrimination as a black, gay man and just wanted to get back at people.
Thanks for the correction on the number of vehicle deaths. However, mathematically the magnitude difference stays the same, as the number of digits are unchanged - XX,XXX vs XXX. I read the posts, fine. Philosophically, I am not a liberal who looks at government as the arbiter of my personal and my family’s safety and well-being, so we will never agree. I leave dependency to others.
Philosophically, I’m an engineer who gets picky about correlation vs causality and specific numbers at work and sometimes has trouble leaving it there.
I do not agree. There are people like myself who would be dead if we had had a gun or another easy method to kill ourselves. A gun makes things much easier. Ask the dad of the 10 year old who shot himself with the gun the boy got as a birthday present, and kept loaded in the boy’s room. Oh, and dad said bullying at school was the cause. A simpler example is that my parents kept their alcohol away from us kids. My friend’s parents kept it in the kitchen easily accessible. Guess if me or my friend was drinking at home when the parents were at work?
And then once you go to homicide, look at the French high speed train case. The terrorist had the gun over his shoulder. He had a hand gun in his hand and shot someone in the neck. He had a boxcutter and slashed at one of the heroes. One guy not only nearly lost his thumb in the slashing, but he managed to save the guy who had a gunshot wound.
Do you think that if the gunman had the assault weapon firing, there would have been any chance that these first few guys would have survived? Do you really? One bullet wound to the neck, and that guy survived. Mass tragedy averted because the assault weapon was not used.
I just still can’t get why people think the Second Amendment has no limits, when it does, plus the other Amendments have limits as well. You have free speech, but you can get arrested for hate speech. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is fine, if you don’t hurt anyone else doing it.
“Let’s stop calling them disgruntled employees and call them mentally ill people who shouldn’t have a gun. Disgruntled employees do thinks like come in late and leave early/gossip about other co-workers, etc… they don’t kill people.”
I take exception to this. I happened to be working with a client who has a developmental disability and a treated mental illness when this came on the news. She commented on it and said something to the effect of “what’s wrong with people? He must have been really unbalanced.” Yes - whatever it was that unbalanced him he was unbalanced. There are many high functioning people living with treated mental illness of one kind and another. They also usually don’t go around shooting people. The shooter WAS a disgruntled employee who had anger management issues.
Well, of course not all people with mental illness commit crimes, and many, many people with mental illness are high functioning people. And yes, they don’t go around shooting people, but the large majority of people who do go around shooting people, have a mental illness. People with healthy psyches don’t go around shooting people.
@saintfan I completely agree with you. Most mentally ill people don’t go around shooting people, but unfortunately until society sees mental illness as the illness it is , people will continue to think that anyone who commits such a heinous crime is “crazy”. Evil exists in this world and not only in the minds of the mentally ill.
The scary thing for me is that my relative who committed suicide was the LAST person I would have ever thought could do something like that. He could have gotten a gun permit with no trouble at all. There’s just no predicting.
Agreed. There were times in my life when I almost certainly would have used a gun on myself if I’ve had one. It seems so “easy,” regardless of the reality.
I am so sorry for your loss, ML. If you feel up to it, read some of the writings of Dr. Thomas Joiner, a psychologist at Fla State, who is an expert in the field, and lost his own father to suicide.
Kudos to CNN for not mentioning the murderer’s name or showing his face - not once while the living room TV was on for an hour. These bastards do not deserve the publicity! May he rot in hell.
I was shocked . . . DH had the news on to one of the networks and they actually showed the video with a moment of impact right at the top of the story without warning. It was horrible IMO to have that on TV. There’s no need for it and it’s terribly inconsiderate to their loved ones.
One can have an “unhealthy psyche” and not be mentally ill in the classic sense. And actually, most people who shoot other people are just regular people with a bone to pick or a hot temper or poor coping skills . . . or straight up criminals.
@teriwtt, source on most violent criminals having mental illnesses? Everything I’ve read–and I’ve read on this topic a fair amount, as a violence researcher–indicates that the only consistent, significant connection between mental illness and violence is that people who are mentally ill are more likely to be the victims of crimes than those who are not, I’m not aware of any studies that have found an actual link between mental illness and increased/elevated perpetration of violence, though many studies have examined this–and failed to find it, (There is a link between substance abuse and violence perpetration). I honestly think that much of this argument comes down to the circular reasoning of “that person must be mentally ill because they committed that crime and that person committed that crime because they were mentally ill.” People can be violent, hostile, and even homicidal without being mentally ill, and most (probably more than “most”) people with mental illness aren’t these things. Saying that these shooters are de facto mentally ill and that people with mental illness are therefore dangerous is a logic leap and a harmful one, especially when “mental illness” is so broad a term.
" until society sees mental illness as the illness it is".
I think part of the challenge with mental illness is that while one can be diagnosed with depression, bipolar disorder etc. the public at large doesn’t really understand it and I don’t think are confident the experts do either. Many of the drugs we use to control the symptoms often come with warnings that are more terrible to us than what the symptoms of the disease. Unlike most physical illnesses which primarily affect the individual with the illness, mental illness does carry stigmas and a lack of understanding by the public and even professionals about how the mental illness and the behaviors it generates might affect others.
