Gun control is not enough

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By comparing being "deeply troubled" to having a mental illness, you are insulting many people who have a real mental illness. Being lonely and unable to function socially is not a mental illness unless there's a physiological reason behind it, such as neurotransmitter disorders. Similarly we could talk about "being sad" and "being depressed"-depression has physiological symptoms that are often understood.

You can't blame everything somebody does on a disease. Being compassionate doesn't extend to assuming there is an illness behind everything somebody does, bad or good. Mentally "healthy" people have the ability to make choices, and they can have bad periods of their lives where they make horrible, evil choices like carrying out this shooting, but this does NOT mean that they have a mental illness.

There is perhaps little merit in using the terms mentally disturbed and mentally ill interchangeably. What I was trying to communicate was that Lanza was mentally disturbed and deeply troubled and this was behind the crime.

I have said countless times that not everyone with a mental illness would perpetrate such a crime and that I did not mean to offend people with mental illnesses.

I don't even know where to start with your second paragraph as I never made half of the claims you are attacking. 'Being compassionate doesn't extend to assuming there is an illness behind everything somebody does, bad or good.' I wish you could detect the subtleties in what I've been saying rather than going down slippery slopes such as this

Reply 61

Slothsftws

Original post by OneGoodReason

I am not making out that he had mass killing disease, you clearly don't understand what I mean when I say he was deeply troubled.

Obviously not everybody who is deeply troubled will go onto to do this - they may cause harm to themselves, or to others through various methods other than massacre, as I asserted in previous posts. The point is some people will respond to their feelings of deep trouble in this way and if we did more to understand them and offer them better health care as and when they needed it, and our psychiatrists were better informed and better at handling patients (I don't know about America but there are some REALLY bad psychiatrists in the U.K.) and if society provided a better support network, those who did feel troubled and have unexplainable urges such as the urge to kill on a large scale, without feeling empathy (As I have outlined before) would not in fact do so, because they felt like they had a back bone and they had understanding.

How many times do you have to be told society HAS provided a better support network, this stuff didn't happen when there was a worse system in place during the 50's so your assumptions of more mental health care will stop this are idiotic and a complete fantasy.

Reply 62

Anonom

America has got a ridiculous obsession with guns and a delusional response to defending their obsession.The gun culture has become so integrated in America, with gaining possession of a gun being so easy and excessive media coverage on the latest shooting with the same stupid questions "How are you feeling?" and the latest video game that must have corrupted the mind of the offender with a delusional sense of reality and led them to going on a killing spree. The overall affect is that Americans are becoming more complicit to the presence of guns in their society and further removed from the fact that what they posses are killing machines. What's even more troubling is that these guns even have a 'materialistic' and 'glamour' value to them like they are literally buying a new toy. These guns are no longer hunting rifles they are sophisticated killing machines and are readily at hand.

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Every year, 17,000 people are killed in America, 70 per cent of them with guns, and nearly 20,000 people commit suicide by shooting themselves to death in the home

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There are nearly 300 million guns to be found there, one third of them handguns – which are useless for hunting purposes, but brilliant as tools for killing. This represents the highest concentration of private ownership of murder weapons in the entire world. The rate for murder by gunfire is 100 times that of the United Kingdom.

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The slaughter of children by gunfire in the United States is 25 times the rate of the 20 next largest industrial countries in the world combined.

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Around 80 people die due to shootings everyday in America.

The US population are adamant that the advantage of them possessing a gun is the power of deterrence and self defence. The most common thought is that "possession of a handgun protects us from random assault" although studies have show time and time again that possession of a gun proves opposite. Homes that do not have a gun hidden away are safer than those homes which do, the mere sight of a gun provokes a reaction. The only thing that a gun deters is thought.

Reply 63

OneGoodReason

Original post by Slothsftws

There is no need to take an angry tone.

I have listened, and said that the support network clearly isn't good enough if this sort of thing is still happening.

I've also addressed your point about how things like this DID happen in the past giving you an example of the Lizzie Borden massacre. For goodness sake, Hitler was one such sick individual, so much so that he thought the genocide of millions upon millions of people was ok.

My ideas about mental health are not idiotic and a complete fantasy; though your idea that a sane, mentally balanced person would kill 20 children is some what more worrying.

Reply 64

Slothsftws

Original post by OneGoodReason

There is no need to take an angry tone.

I have listened, and said that the support network clearly isn't good enough if these sort of things are still happening.

I've also addressed your point about how things like this DID happen in the past giving you an example of the Lizzie Borden massacre. For goodness sake, Hitler was one such sick individual, so much so that he thought the genocide of millions upon millions of people was ok.

My ideas about mental health are not idiotic and a complete fantasy; though your idea that a sane, mentally balanced person would kill 20 children is some what more worrying.

Well there is given I've had to repeat the same thing 3 times.

And your "clearly isn't good enough" response is futile as when the mental health system CLEARLY wasn't good enough in the 50's we didn't have these regular mass shootings.

No you haven't addressed my point, you pointed to someone who killed their parents, I never claimed murder never took place that would be absurd I claimed mass shootings never took place when mental health care was much worse WHICH IS TRUE.

Yes the idea that anyone slightly depressed, "weird", withdrawn or socially awkward should be given psychiatrist care and this will solve everything is an idiotic fantasy.

Oh MY idea that I have never suggested? :rolleyes:

I'm not qualified to say whether he was sane at the time of the crime, neither are you. To act as if the worse the crime a person commits the more mentally ill they must be is not necessarily true. The idea of killing innocent people is awful to most people, but plenty of sane people have done it. I find George W Bush's actions insane and morally corrupt that doesn't mean he is legitimately mentally ill. It is like you can't stand someone doing something bad without attributing a mental illness to it, taking away personal responsibility and finding an excuse.

(edited 11 years ago)

Reply 65

OneGoodReason

I have been reflecting on this matter and I believe myself to have jumped to the knee-jerk conclusion than Lanza was insane. Simply from the horrific nature of the attack, I immediately assumed that there was something deeply 'not right' about the man. When I hear of any sick or horrific act in the news, I tend to jump to this reaction as it is the only way I can possibly explain someone committing such a sick, unempathetic act.

I still believe there was definitely something not ok about Lanza, something unconventional and I can only conclude that someone deeply troubled would carry out such an act. You may not or may agree with me on this matter.

You say neither of us is qualified to deem whether Lanza was insane or not; for me, I was led to go back to the old Anders Breivik case. I feel this article summed up pretty well our two opinions - I am more lent towards the second paragraph, you more lent towards the first. ( I would suggest) :

'On the one hand, all criminal justice systems assume that people do wicked things, knowingly and voluntarily. That is why these systems exist in the first place. Whether or not criminals are convinced of their own rectitude is neither here nor there. In Breivik’s case, the fact that he believed it was justifiable and heroic to terrorise, main and kill large numbers of teenagers who had never harmed him, is if anything an aggravating factor rather than a mitigating one, in that it shows something very bad about his moral orientation.

On the other hand, some crimes are so terrible and out of the ordinary that it seems natural to conclude that the perpetrators must be somehow ‘mad’. Breivik’s crimes were hideous, and this, along with his strange account of himself as a ‘Knight Templar’ leading a resistance organisation, and his rambling internet manifesto, makes it tempting to think that he was so clearly out of touch with reality as to cast serious doubt upon his criminal responsibility.'

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/08/24/anders-breivik-narcissist-murderer-insane/

I feel that with the Lanza case, similarly to the Breivik trial, various assertions will be thrown around about the sanity of the accused. There were in fact two psychiatric reports written about Breivik, with contradictory conclusions. You have said in your previous post, that neither of us is qualified to deem Lanza definitely sane or insane; I would have to agree with you there, partly because of obvious reasons such as we are so out of reach with evidence or not 'qualified' to so do; but mainly because I'm not sure anyone is capable of making a truly objective opinion about who is sane or insane, and reviewing the Breivik case and the discrepencies between the two psychiatric reports only reaffirmed this notion. Who can say who is truly sane or insane? And then to merge this question with questions of criminal responsibility only throws a spanner in the works.

You charged me with denying Lanza's criminal responsibility; to you, I was using some alleged, un-substantiated claim of mental illness as an excuse the Newton shooting. What I aimed to do was in fact find some practical reason for why he may have behaved in the way he did, with the hope that society may one day come closer to filtering out such motives before they become larger, more uncontrollable, unsolvable problems. To you this notion is fantasy; to me it is optimistic and hopeful.

It is a slippery slope between finding reasons for a criminal's actions and finding justifications or excuses for them, and the nuances and subtleties may be debated by many. I denied the notion that I was justifying Lanza's actions, though perhaps to you I was. As I say, I was merely trying to find a reason.

There are many questions in this debate that remain to me vague and elusive at best, and insoluble at worst. But I do hope that somehow American society is able to pick up the pieces in a constructive manner and not look only to the issues of legislative control over guns but also to the profile of the criminal, because as I continue to assert, I believe that to be the start of a true resolution to the most grotesque maladies.