Is it time to talk about guns?

I beg to differ with you
DSM-5 definition of mental disorder. A mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or development processes underlying mental functioning.Apr 12, 2021

anyone who shoots an innocent person would most certainly fall under the above

 

That would be true if the shooting is deliberate. In Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud told us we're all a little crazy. From a practical standpoint, that doesn't get us far in identifying likely mass shooters. Apart from the 1% of shooting deaths per year that are accidental, others are the result of gross negligence or heat of the moment, which seem to correlate with youth and maleness--e.g., the Kansas city post-Superbowl shootings. Two armed juveniles, previously strangers to each other, got into an altercation and opened fire, killing one innocent person and wounding 22 others, including 11 kids. While those might come under the rubric of the DSM's definition, finding a specific diagnostic category for them would be difficult, and IMO futile. After the fact diagnoses aren't particularly helpful.

 

Well in your above example its unlikely that any form of gun control would have been effective as they were juveniles and obtained the guns illegally even if they took them from parents who legally owned them.
I did not grow up around guns but learned to respect them as tools later in life, my spouse grew up around guns and started shooting at a very early age and was taught to respect them

 

Gun per se have their uses. Folks living in the country need them to take care of varmints, and city folk in some of our urban areas may need them to defend themselves against the two-legged kind. My concern is mainly about assault-style weapons and the ease by which everybody and his dog, including juveniles, can acquire firearms--like the parents of disturbed teenager Ethan Crumbley in Michigan, murderer of four classmates, whose parents were just found guilty of manslaugher for their negligence in helping him to acquire the SIG Sauer firearm. I think that was a good verdict.

 

The proliferation of assault style weapons is definitely concerning, hell the proliferation of handguns is disturbing but it is a slippery slope when you start banning one type of weapon. maybe someday a reasonable solution will be found , I have my doubts though.
I would rather see verdicts and out comes as you cited above , then the suing of companies that manufacture the weapons

 

Bullets should cost 5,000 dollars a piece. That way you know if someone buys a bullet--a motherfucker NEEDS to be killed!---Chris Rock.

 

I never said anything WAS banned, just that the actual banning was slippery and I will hold to that statement

 

Oh Wow.... So, non-Citizen migrants are OK to carry now in Illinois. How can this make sense?

Illinois judge rules illegal migrants can carry guns

 

It’s not that simple and both parties are responsible.

Every President’s wife picks a cause to lobby. Nancy Reagan focused on drug abuse (“Just Say No to Drugs”), Hillary Clinton focused on healthcare, Laura Bush focused on education, Michelle Obama focused on destroying school lunch programs, and Rosalyn Carter focused on mental health reform. Rosylyn Carter’s efforts were well intentioned because patients with mental health issues were often ignored or mistreated, but her efforts unfortunately resulted in the closure of hundreds of mental health facilities that were sorely needed. Not all mental health patients should be released onto the street, but that’s what happened. Most of these closures didn’t happen until after Reagan was sworn in, so he often takes the blame, but they were Carter era policies. But Reagan didn’t stop these policies from going into effect, so he deserves some of the blame.

Thirty five years later, it’s still taboo to talk about mental health reform. Any mention of re-institutionalizing violent offenders is met with outrage from activists on the left who think drugs (prescribed meds) are the only solution, and folks on the right who aren’t vocal enough in the the need to deal with mental health problems in a realistic manner (some people need to be locked up), so we have a stalemate and complete lack of action from both parties.

 

Did you have kids in school when Michelle Obama tore apart school lunch programs? I did. And my wife was a lunch lady. There weren’t any vending machines at my kid’s schools, so that wasn’t an issue, but kids being fed so little they were hungry the rest of the day became a problem. Their school already served fruit and vegetables, but under the new rules a lot of that was taken away because for example, they could now only be served one apple. No asking for another apple and God forbid you give your apple away, that resulted in a parent/teacher meeting. Crates of fruit (and yogurt) were thrown away every week because they weren’t allowed to be given to the kids who were still hungry. Their schools also already had free lunch programs so that was already covered.

Shutting down mental institutions actually began with Kennedy. He coupled it with funding for new community health centers but most were never built. Rosalynn’s MHSA was a continuation of Kennedy’s plan to close institutions while relying on community health centers. Yes, Reagan ended MHSA (not all of it, but a lot of it) with support from Congressional Democrats in a budget bill, but he didn’t defund community health centers. Instead the money was given to states as grants to be used to fund their community health centers themselves (which was a horrible idea because states obviously funneled it elsewhere). The closing of mental hospitals was definitely a continuation of Rosalynn’s (and Kennedy’s) efforts. That was their goal. They believed (as did a lot of the medical community) that they could just pump mental health patients full of drugs to solve their problems instead of locking the most seriously ill ones up. As for the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, it did a lot to end abuse of mental health patients by ending indefinite institutionalization, creating the 5150/5250 system as a legal framework to determine when someone should be institutionalized against their will. Rosalynn had the best of intentions and I applaud her efforts, but she wanted mental hospitals shut down. She got her wish. Reagan definitely dropped the ball in getting community health centers funded by putting the onus on the states to use those federal grants properly, and one could easily argue he wasn’t too concerned about it, but so did Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter.

The “taboo” I was referring to wasn’t mental health itself, but discussing reopening state run mental hospitals. I’ve done a lot of work at state run mental hospitals (MA Dept of Health was one of my clients) and some of those hospitals, especially the ones with extremely violent patients, are definitely needed. I’ve been in wards where there had to be “eyes on” a lot of patients 24/7 so orderlies were forced to sit in chairs at the doors to their rooms all night while the patients slept. They even had a full lockdown because one of our technicians misplaced a phone cord. It’s a topic that should be part of any discussion of mental health reform, but nobody wants to talk about it.

 

Very well said South Paw. Unfortunately "Guns Bad!!" is the Montra.

 

I'm not surprised that you don't understand.

 

Well there are mental health issues, and then there are gun culture issues, macho culture issues. Violent video games do not not help.

 

But also gun issues. Of the five, which is easiest to correct? I'm thinking, assault-style weapons, and access to them by people with a known propensity for violence.