Real gun issue is mental health, not the NRA?

[Sigh] Yes, well:

If a family member, law enforcement officer or mental health professional is concerned about the well-being of an individual, they should be able to have that individual held for a mental health evaluation.

And what if somebody is just posting anti-government screeds on forums or You Tube, is that good enough? As if that weren't difficult enough judgment call to make for a third party to make, wait, says Robbins:

But connecting the dots [with mental health records] won't help unless every gun sale is subject to an instant background check imposed on all licensed gun retailers.

Well, gee, the NRA is the #1 opponent of universal, instant background checks, citing the red herring of "insufficient funding" for the National Instant Criminal Background Checks System (NICS), so this whole idea is dead in the water and we're back to square one: we can't do mental health checks; nor can we do universal background checks.

If the NRA really wanted the NICS to be funded then it would be 100% funded in a heartbeat; anybody who thinks otherwise is naive or a partisan hack.

The real gun problem is mental health, not the NRA

By Mel Robbins

June 24, 2014 | CNN

URL: http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/24/opinion/robbins-mental-health/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

GOP establishment pundit: U.S. prisons are 'torture'

Deceiv'st thou me, mine eye?  Lo! boon unsought!  

First he decides, 6 years too late, that the Government should break up the Too Big To Fail banks, and now this? ...Is crusty conservative curmudgeon George Will really seeing the light when it comes to the American Gulag?:

America, with 5 percent of the world’s population, has 25 percent of its prisoners. Mass incarceration, which means a perpetual crisis of prisoners re-entering society, has generated understanding of solitary confinement’s consequences when used as a long-term condition for an estimated 25,000 inmates in federal and state “supermax” prisons — and perhaps 80,000 others in isolation sections within regular prisons. Clearly, solitary confinement involves much more than the isolation of incorrigibly violent individuals for the protection of other inmates or prison personnel.

Federal law on torture prohibits conduct “specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” And “severe” physical pain is not limited to “excruciating or agonizing” pain, or pain “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily functions, or even death.” The severe mental suffering from prolonged solitary confinement puts the confined at risk of brain impairment.

[...] 

Mass incarceration is expensive (California spends almost twice as much on prisons as on universities) and solitary confinement costs, on average, three times as much per inmate as in normal prisons. And remember: Most persons now in solitary confinement will someday be back on America’s streets, some of them rendered psychotic by what are called correctional institutions.

When solitude is torture

By George F. Will

February 21, 2013 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/ZsBSID

Ames: Christopher Dorner: Man, myth, murderer

Ames is right, people tend to see in Christopher Dorner what they want to see.  

But the fact that the LAPD is corrupt and racist is undeniable, and it's wrongful terminations were out of control: 

Los Angeles police brought an average of three times more lawsuits a year per officer than officers in Chicago and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Finally, Christopher Dorner did not give off any signs of mental illness until he "snapped," which is quite normal for rampage shooters, exposing, once again, the stinking red herring of the NRA and pro-gun conservatives that somehow mental health checks will prevent shooting rampages.

Wrongful Termination: Chris Dorner's Terrifyingly Banal Killing Spree

By Mark Ames

February 20, 2013 | NSFW Corp

URL: https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/chris-dorner-wrongful-termination

Guns and the media-mental illness red herring

The NRA and the Big Gun lobby are making the following fallacious argument right now in opposing restrictions on large magazines and semi-automatic assault weapons:

1) Mental illness, violent TV/movies, video games, etc. are more to blame than guns for gun violence.

2) These "causes" are really hard to address, for a variety of practical and legal-constitutional reasons. 

3) Since we can't do much about these causes, we shouldn't do anything about guns themselves.

This argument is absurd. It is basically saying, "Since we can't control everything, we can control nothing." Wrong. We can control legally the sale of guns and ammo. All Congress has to do is act.

No, change won't happen overnight. But if we stick to our guns (pardon the pun) and stop going back and forth on gun control every 10 years, then eventually we will see results. 

Shrink: Good presidents are a little screwy

It seems that great leaders don't just think outside the box, they think outside the sane.

Said Dr. Nassir Ghaemi, author of a new book on the advantages of mental illness for leadership:

"Creativity and resilience is higher in people with mania and realism and empathy is higher in people with depression compared to normal subjects. The problem often with mentally healthy, average leaders is — even though they're not weak in the sense of not having any of these qualities — they often don't have enough to meet the very high demands of crises."

Well, if mental illness is desirable in a president then I think Michele "2 dollar" Bachmann is the obvious choice.

Dr. Ghaemi goes on to say that the problem with mentally healthy leaders is that they suffer, like most of us do, from a "mild positive illusion":

"We think that we're slightly more intelligent, slightly better looking, than we really are. We tend to overestimate our control over our environment. And that can be quite fine under normal circumstances. That may actually help us to get more done because of that confidence, but a political leader needs to be realistic rather than just optimistic for the sake of optimism."

Nope, then that disqualifies Michele Bachmann because she's way too optimistic about her chances.

Seriously though, do mentally healthy people pursue the presidency to begin with? These politicians must all be damaged goods in one way or another.

'Madness' And Leadership, Hand In Hand

August 20, 2011 | All Things Considered on NPR

URL: http://n.pr/r0Rzep

No soul searching after VA Tech rampage

A brutal truth: Massacre is just part of everyday life in America

By Rupert Cornwell
April 18, 2007 | Independent Online

It is as if we are on autopilot. The ghastly tragedy swamps the news to the exclusion of all else. There are the heartbreaking stories of a university shattered and of the dozens of victims, their mostly young lives cut short so senselessly. We listen to the grief-stricken remarks of the President, and follow the breathless investigation of the perpetrator's background, his history of mental illness. We share the anguished second guessing about whether his murderous rampage could have been prevented. Yet everything is playing to a script we know by heart.
Virginia Tech, of course, is the worst incident of its kind in US history - and at one level, you would gain the impression from American television that Cho Seung-Hui has literally stopped the world.

He hasn't of course. On Tuesday, in what passes for a relatively quiet news day in Iraq, wire services reported the deaths of 56 people in violence across the country: some of them gunned down, some killed by a suicide bomber, some discovered as decomposed or decapitated corpses. But we heard not a word of that, nor of the trial in absentia in Italy of a US soldier accused of shooting dead an Italian intelligence agent, nor of the report that North Korea may be about to shut down a key nuclear reactor (which would be very big news indeed if true.) And somebody shot dead the Mayor of Nagasaki. But who cares? Instead, nothing but Virginia Tech.

Yet, however exceptional the event, there is something formulaic, even routine, about the coverage. There is no soul searching, no wondering what might be wrong with a society where such things happen so frequently. You hear no new arguments, for deep down there is nothing new to be said.
No detail of the tragedy is too tiny to recount; from where Cho went to high school to the thoughts of the postman who delivered mail, to where the family lived in the Virginia suburb of Centreville (and never met him). Yet America is showing scant sign of addressing the far bigger issue - of whether it is finally time to get serious about gun control.

"Today is the time to focus on the families, the school and the community," Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman, said. But, she added, "we must allow the facts of the case to unfold before we talk about policy." Reasonable enough. But if not now, in the white heat of stunned national outrage, when?

For public anger can force unexpected change. Over the course of a long career as a loud-mouthed talk radio host, Don Imus must have made hundreds of offensive remarks. Last week, he made what seemed just another one, about the Rutgers University women's basketball team. Astonishingly, public tolerance at last snapped. In three days, Imus was out on his ear.

Might not Virginia Tech be the Rutgers University joke for the gun lobby, the moment when violence-drenched America says enough is enough? Alas no. Yes, there will be debate, just as after similar awful incidents in recent years, from Columbine High School to the murder of the five Amish schoolgirls last October in Pennsylvania.

But the underlying mood is of disillusioned resignation. So President Bush formulaically speaks of a "day of sadness for our entire nation," and how Americans are "asking God to provide comfort for all who have been affected." It is less certain, however, that a President from gun-toting Texas, who has pursued the conservative vote his entire career, will try to mobilise temporal political forces to render comfort from the Almighty unnecessary.

Keep coming to our world-class universities, was the message to foreign students from Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman yesterday. Virginia Tech was "an aberration". As Donald Rumsfeld infamously remarked of the anarchy of post-invasion Iraq, "Stuff happens".

School shootings happen year in, year out, like tornados in the Midwest in springtime and hurricanes in the south in summer. There will be pressure to step up security procedures on campuses. But that, I confidently predict, will be it. Some even urge more guns, not less. The shooting was proof that "gun bans are the problem, and that Americans should have the rights to defend themselves", according to The Gun Owners of America, a firearms lobbying group. In the meantime, the mighty media river rolls on, washing everything else away. And copycats watch, and wait to choose their moment.

The massacre at Virginia Tech is alarming, not just because of its scale, or that the authorities missed warning signs about Cho Seung-Hui, or that he found it so easy to carry out his terrible mission. The biggest worry is the "copy cat" risk - or rather virtual certainty - that some other student who's feeling depressed or victimised and wondering if life's worth while, will see what happened at Blackburg. And then he'll decide that he too might as well go out with a bang (or more exactly, as many deadly bangs as possible).

The question is not whether, but where, when and how a new outrage will happen. Not, thankfully, at St Edward's University in Austin, Texas, or at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, nor at the University of Oklahoma. The first two received bomb threats yesterday and briefly evacuated their campus. At the third, someone was reportedly seen with a weapon. All three scares were unfounded. But sooner or later, the scare will be real, and more people will die because of America's inability to strip the glamour from guns.

Chief: The War on Craziness?

It's the Guns, Stupid
By Chief
April 18, 2007

There's a scene in Brett Easton Ellis' "American Psycho" in which the protagonist starves his pet rat, and then introduces it to the vagina of a naked, hogtied abductee. I shouldn't need to connect the dots between the rat's hunger, and the resulting gore. In any event, if ever there's been a piece of "disturbing" writing, one that should set off our collective alarm bells about the mental state of its author, this scene might be it.

"Richard McBeef" the largely incoherent one-act play by Seung Hui Cho, does not strike me as particularly "disturbing", and yet, that's what credulous, pop-eyed commentators are calling it: they're saying that this infantile drivel somehow anticipates or signals the shooting spree that Mr. Cho would eventually unleash upon the campus of Virginia Tech; they're saying, "all the signs were there, in his writing."

Bullshit! None of the circumstances of the slaughter are anticipated by Mr. Cho's "plays." No guns are mentioned in either of his on-line plays, no college campus, no bicycle chains to lock his prospective victims in an engineering building--not a single detail of either work heralds the events of Monday morning. Whatever these plays might be expressing, in terms of Mr. Cho's mental state, is extremely incohate, and could not possibly be interpreted as a warning sign that he would, someday, in the not too distant future, go on a killing rampage.

As many of you know, I have worked with crazy people for most of my adult life. The crucial thing to understand about crazy people is that they often say things that are beyond interpretation. Whatever it is that they think they mean, usually means nothing to you, their sane, impartial interlocutor. "Do you happen to know the name of the cemetery Vincent Price is buried in in California?" I was once asked by a squirrelly, super-secretive client of mine when I was working in St. Vincent's Hospital. This question, when it was put to me, did sort of raise the hackles on the back of my neck, if only because it offered such a startlingly incisive glimpse into the nature of this particular client's delusion. But I did not alert the authorites (in anticipation of said client going to California in order to exhume Mr. Price's remains) because CRAZY PEOPLE SAY ALL MANNER OF MEANINGLESS SHIT! Asking me, in furtive whisper, if I knew where Vincent Price was buried didn't necessarily signal anything about anything. It was just a lot of weird bullshit, and I'm proud to report that I treated it as such--by pretending to ignore it.

"Richard McBeef" and "Mr. Brownstone" deserve, and continue to deserve, similarly dismissive treatment. They don't tell us anything about Mr. Cho other than he was a messed-up little guy, and God knows, the world is bulging at the seams with messed-up little guys. Just as it is beyond stupid to prosecute a war on terror or a war on drugs, it is even more wrongheaded to prosecute a war upon quiet, messed-up little guys. There isn't anything a civil, open society can do to protect itself against an individual's psychosis. Attempting to institute a well-meant "hug your local psycho" program might make us feel generally better about ourselves, but it won't do a thing in terms of staving off some poor loner's break with reality. Sorry, do-gooders, but craziness always trumps hugs and asking the weird guy if he wants to tag along with you and your friends.

Crazy people are everywhere, and, perhaps regrettably, they will continue to be everywhere. The idea that the ramblings of crazy little guy roaming the world should prompt a police investigation is beyond stupid. The reality is, had Mr. Cho not had such easy, legal access to handguns, none of this would have happened. Insanity is not on trial here--unless you consider America's love affair with firearms insane. In short, if you want to prevent another rampage, you have to reverse the NRA's mantra: Guns do kill people. They just do.