What if it's not a mental health issue?

[ReliableOstrich]

There's no answer. That's the reality, I'm afraid. The only people powerful enough to reform the system are the ones that benefit the most from it. They're never going to change that. The rest of us are left to either accept it, or to become disenfranchised. Less and less people seem willing to "sit back and enjoy it".

So the prevailing theory is that the gun lobby has dumped enough money into the pockets of lawmakers that they wouldn't dare legislate against them. Got me thinking about what it would take to over power ($$) them...

I did a quick google search and it appears the "gun lobby" spent over $30m in 2014 on political advertising and lobbying legislators in Congress and state houses. Also, the Koch bruhs dropped a $5m check off at the NRA last month. So let's just go high end and say 2015 gun lobby spend is $40m.

Is $40m really that much? Like a $10 from 4 million Americans would cover that (or a nice donation from a Buffett/Zuck/Gates type).

I assumed the lobby was pouring 9 figures (or some insurmountable number) into this, are our Congress really so beholden to their thin slice of a $30m pie that they won't act on what's happened at Sandy Hook (among others).

Leads me to two thoughts:
1 - are we falsely led to believe the gun lobby is uber powerful/rich in order to pacify us though resigned apathy?
2 - is it the legislators themselves who honestly don't care for any gun control (why?) because this money isn't enough to persuade them to vote contrary to their own beliefs.

Congress took on a (presumably) more wealth tobacco lobby, wall street lobby (well barely, lol), among others. So #2 above really seems like it might be the case.

 

[NY_22_Nole]

Out of 330,000,000 people roughly 14,000 people die from gun violence a year, so 00.0042%. I would hardly qualify this as an epidemic.

Agree....but it feels like an epidemic.

 

[NDallasRuss]

Agree....but it feels like an epidemic.

Conversely, 50k/yr are still getting HIV, and Charlie Sheen is the only one I've heard about. We get desensitized about bad stuff, and we stop caring about it.

 

[ReliableOstrich]

I still don't think the system failed Farook, but I agree 100% with your last two paragraphs.

May I ask what specifically that we know at this stage about Farooq makes you think the system didn't fail him in some way?

Also just a semantic thing, but you'll notice in my previous posts I use the phrase "believe the system has failed," I didn't say it had failed them personally. A small but important distinction, both can lead to someone begrudging society.

 

[Formerly Rockymtnole]

May I ask what specifically that we know at this stage about Farooq makes you think the system didn't fail him in some way?

Also just a semantic thing, but you'll notice in my previous posts I use the phrase "believe the system has failed," I didn't say it had failed them personally. A small but important distinction, both can lead to someone begrudging society.

I mentioned everything in an earlier post. By all accounts he was living the American Dream. There's nothing society did to him or his wife to justify their actions. I don't give a damn how aggrieved you feel, you don't build bombs and shoot up a conference room full of your coworkers at a Christmas party. I felt the same way about McVeigh, Kaczynski, Holmes, Roof, etc. and of course all the radical Islam nut jobs who shot up Paris and those who killed the Charlie Hebdo guys because the paper dared print cartoons of Muhammad. F 'em all and their wacky ideologies.

 

[flmom777]

Now the facts regarding the killers in San Bernardino.

They had a virtual ied factory at a home they rented, but law enforcement is not sure they actually lived there.

They were in contact with Isis websites.

He had contact with individuals on the FBI terrorist watch list.

They had enough ammo with them in the rented vehicle to target another site.

The bombs were created with remote control devices recommended by Isis instructional materials, very similar to the Boston Marathon bombers.

Was this a radical Islamist attack? All signs say yes.

 

[DFSNOLE]

I've asked once for folks to get off the gun issue in this thread and stick with Russ' original premise. I just deleted the latest post that didn't honor that request. If it keeps up, this thread will be regretfully done.

 

[RangerNole]

Someone earlier stated that we are becoming or really have become a very me oriented narcissistic society and I really think that is a large part of the issue. As a society we now have a disease or name for anything and everything that happens. It sure seems as a society we try and find every reason why someone does something and then find something other than the person was evil/bad to explain it. Reality is there are bad people out there and why they do stuff really doesn't matter. Look at all the videos out there nowadays of people just walking up and beating people, the knock out game, animal cruelty etc. Some will say that well the internet just shows us more of this today. IMO that is garbage the Internet has been around for a while and I sure don' remember this many incidents of people just being flat out horrible to not just other people but total strangers. As a nation we seem to have lost accountability and responsibility; now instead of actually taking responsibility society finds some reason to give you an out for being a piece of crap.
As far as the incident in Calf. they were terrorists plain and simple. The sad thing is we will see much more of this coming because as a society we go out of our way to find an excuse and not actually state what is really going on. You don't have to look much farther than the news coverage of the Calk attack. The media went of there way and some media still are to not call the terrorist attack what it was; and heaven forbid that it was radical islam, can't call that out it would be unfair. By all means though lets continue to try find objects to blame or some new disease.

 

[seminole97]

That's ~1.5% you've sampled and determined to be "gang banger crap".

How many do you want me to go through? I think the majority of them are going to fall in that category, do you disagree?

Not that I understand why "gang banger crap" is acceptable,

No one said it was acceptable.
I do consider it to be separate with regard to solutions from the mentally ill who conduct what the term 'mass shooting' invokes (nutter at the theater, restaurant, mall, etc.).

I think of murder in I guess roughly three contexts: Murder She Wrote, where someone plots and carries out the killing of someone else for a motive that Columbo could figure out (e.g. the prof murdered in Betton Hills). The 'gang banger' crap, where someone shoots the car full of people trying to buy an ounce so they can rob them, or 'mean mugging' in line at the club leads to someone spraying the front door of the club on their way out of the parking lot. I think part of that is a culture with way too little respect for human life, but not part of the last category - crazy like Ted Bundy, or someone who wants to shoot up a campus library of random people who share one thing - if they are obeying the law they're sitting ducks.

but putting that aside,

The best solution to strawmen is not bring them up in the first place.

what portion of the 355 mass shootings this year need not be "gang banger crap" before we decide that it's a problem worth addressing?

Why another strawman suggesting this isn't worth addressing? No one in this thread is making that suggestion.
I do believe the solutions to four people getting robbed/shot trying to pick up an ounce isn't going to be in the same ball park as a solution to some guys violent and psychopathic tendencies being improperly addressed.

Look at the Colorado theater case. This guy didn't pop out of nowhere, the system failed:

"Dr. Fenton said that Mr. Holmes told her he had homicidal thoughts three to four times a day. She testified that Mr. Holmes’s hostile behavior and alarming statements in therapy eventually prompted her to alert a team of university officials and call his mother. But she said that because Mr. Holmes never spoke of a specific threat or targets, she couldn’t have had him institutionalized on a 72-hour psychiatric hold.
“He never met criteria for me to hospitalize him,” she said."

If other countries are faster to lock these people up and protect the rest of us from them, is that worth looking into? In the 1950s we had way more locked up in mental health facilities than those European nations do now, and these kinds of things happened less.
I think maybe the pendulum has swung too far.

 

[ReliableOstrich]

I sure don' remember this many incidents of people just being flat out horrible to not just other people but total strangers.

You'll recall that this country has a very strong history of race related murders/lynchings, whipping, slavery, internment, mistreatment of native americans (putting it lightly),
So I'd say historically we've shown quite a profound tendency to harm strangers. What some would call the "good old days" others might call "hell". Just a thought from an alternative perspective.

To your greater point, in a round about manner narcissism very well could have something to do with this rash of mass shootings. I think an earlier poster pointed out that people with a grudge have found that mass shootings are the quick/easy way to make a name and feed that narcissistic desire. Between the availability of guns and the media's perverse fetish for covering these stories, it's become the quick way to make a splash.

 

[Nole Lou]

You'll recall that this country has a very strong history of race related murders/lynchings, whipping, slavery, internment, mistreatment of native americans (putting it lightly),
So I'd say historically we've shown quite a profound tendency to harm strangers. What some would call the "good old days" others might call "hell". Just a thought from an alternative perspective.

To your greater point, in a round about manner narcissism very well could have something to do with this rash of mass shootings. I think an earlier poster pointed out that people with a grudge have found that mass shootings are the quick/easy way to make a name and feed that narcissistic desire. Between the availability of guns and the media's perverse fetish for covering these stories, it's become the quick way to make a splash.

Exactly, humans have always had badness in them, and Americans as well. The crime of choice changes based on the needs or availability of the time. The motivations change. But Americans (all people) have always been capable of great harm and cruelty. This being the current outlet du jour is particularly noticeable both because of the information age and because the body count per incident is higher.

 

[jeffy]

That's just ridiculous. I really don't know what else to say about it. It's bad all the way around.

 

[Ward17]

Also I believe higher IQ minds are more susceptible of falling out of the loop, since they process more than others (such as angst, sorrow, loneliness, turmoil, etc)

I think you're oversimplifying here.


None of these folks were murderously crazy from day one. A series of events led them to it.