School Shooting

[Imran Siddiqui]

Don't Protestants and Catholics have the same New Testament? Except Protestants tend to stick to what's actually in the Bible instead of making up stuff about an "immaculate conception" and an "assumption of Mary".

That was well done... and even if it is revealed to be trollish, I can't see how it can be ignored by Felch

[Felch]

Faith alone is a Protestant teaching, one that the actual Church regards as insufficient. Of course, I'm not shocked that Protestants don't know their religion.

[regexcellent]

Guynemer, would you support increasing public funds to research mental health issues?

I'm not sure I think that would be all that helpful but I think it's the most positive knee-jerk reaction the government could take.

[Felch]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]173139[/ATTACH]

Only in America.

I know. It's terrible that you can't get cold medicine without an ID. Why do the Republicans force blacks to suffer through cold and flu season without any medicine?

[Jon Miller]

Guynemer, would you support increasing public funds to research mental health issues?

I'm not sure I think that would be all that helpful but I think it's the most positive knee-jerk reaction the government could take.

How about just real funding for public mental health?

Most homeless people in the US (at least, back ~10 years ago) were mentally unwell.

People are not kept in mental hospitals because it costs money and it is difficult to regulate properly, but the result in horrific crimes and suffering of the mentally ill.

"The United States has experienced two waves of deinstitutionalization. Wave one began in the 1950s and targeted people with mental illness.[43] The second wave began roughly fifteen years after and focused on individuals who had been diagnosed with a developmental disability (e.g. mentally impaired).[43] Although these waves began over fifty years ago, deinstitutionalization continues today; however, these waves are growing smaller as fewer people are sent to institutions.
A process of indirect cost-shifting may have led to a form of "re-institutionalization" through the increased use of jail detention for those with mental disorders deemed unmanageable and noncompliant.[44] In Summer 2009, author and columnist Heather Mac Donald stated in City Journal, "jails have become society’s primary mental institutions, though few have the funding or expertise to carry out that role properly... at Rikers, 28 percent of the inmates require mental health services, a number that rises each year."[45]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_psychiatric_institutions

JM

[Jon Miller]

Guynemer, would you support increasing public funds to research mental health issues?

I'm not sure I think that would be all that helpful but I think it's the most positive knee-jerk reaction the government could take.

How about just real funding for public mental health?

Most homeless people in the US (at least, back ~10 years ago) were mentally unwell.

People are not kept in mental hospitals because it costs money and it is difficult to regulate properly, but the result in horrific crimes and suffering of the mentally ill.

"The United States has experienced two waves of deinstitutionalization. Wave one began in the 1950s and targeted people with mental illness.[43] The second wave began roughly fifteen years after and focused on individuals who had been diagnosed with a developmental disability (e.g. mentally impaired).[43] Although these waves began over fifty years ago, deinstitutionalization continues today; however, these waves are growing smaller as fewer people are sent to institutions.
A process of indirect cost-shifting may have led to a form of "re-institutionalization" through the increased use of jail detention for those with mental disorders deemed unmanageable and noncompliant.[44] In Summer 2009, author and columnist Heather Mac Donald stated in City Journal, "jails have become society’s primary mental institutions, though few have the funding or expertise to carry out that role properly... at Rikers, 28 percent of the inmates require mental health services, a number that rises each year."[45]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_psychiatric_institutions

JM

[Guynemer]

Guynemer, would you support increasing public funds to research mental health issues?

I'm not sure I think that would be all that helpful but I think it's the most positive knee-jerk reaction the government could take.

Are you serious?

You're talking to a doctor who specializes in children. At the moment, I'd be willing to take the entire defense, social security, and medicare budgets and thrown them all into medical research, especially mental health research.

[Guynemer]

So what are you going to do? Assess everyone and shove people into two different boxes: one box for people a psychiatrist thinks is not going to kill people and a box that he thinks will kill people?

Do you even realise that all this went to the supreme court and it's illegal for you to detain someone that is not of imminent risk of injuring someone?

Perhaps you (as a society) should actually look at treating people first instead of deciding to lock people up. But no, that would cost money, and it's socialized healthcare...

In fact, the truly retarded thing is that you already detain people that are risk to society.

Jesus tap dancing Christ on a cracker.

1) I fully support socialized medicine.

2) I am aware of the current legal situation, as well as the murky questions of morality, to say nothing of the logistical problems. You will note I said "rebuild the entire mental health structure of the country" in my initial post.

Save the disdain for someone who deserves it.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Faith alone is a Protestant teaching, one that the actual Church regards as insufficient. Of course, I'm not shocked that Protestants don't know their religion.

The non-shocking thing is that Catholics don't understand what James actually means to Protestants and the relationship of deeds to faith.

[MRT144]

The point is that effective gun control measures from your PoV are unlikely to ever happen in this country and such debates by gun control advocates only serve as a form of mental masturbation to make themselves feel better. The point is given that undeniable fact, why not start searching for real things to do that might actually solve the ****ing problem.

What problem. According to you guns are on par with pencils as a harm vector.

[MrFun]

So according to DD, mentally ill people are not deserving of civil rights, nor human rights.

[Hauldren Collider]

I don't agree with institutionalizing people who haven't actually committed any crimes. I don't care if they are murderous and insane. We can't let the government lock people up based on its definition of insanity.

[MRT144]

I don't agree with institutionalizing people who haven't actually committed any crimes. I don't care if they are murderous and insane. We can't let the government lock people up based on its definition of insanity.

Well especially with the people in congress who think homosexuals are mentally ill.

[DinoDoc]

So according to DD, mentally ill people are not deserving of civil rights, nor human rights.

Do they deserve greater respect than the victims of the Newtown Massacre or Aurora Shooting?

[DinoDoc]

Follow onto that point:

There is a drumbeat of demand for a new federal assault-weapons ban to prevent more tragedies like the one that happened in Connecticut. If we had not tried the experiment, you could honestly wonder if it would do any good. But the policy has been tried and found wanting.

In 1999, the National Institute of Justice published a study by criminologists Jeffrey Roth and Christopher Koper, “Impacts of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban: 1994–96.” It examined the effects of the federal assault-weapons ban in its first two years of operation and found no statistically significant reduction in murder rates. “The ban did not produce declines in the average number of victims per incident of gun murder or gun murder victims with multiple wounds.” The study also was unable to find any clear evidence that it reduced murders of police officers. The reason was simple: So-called assault weapons were never commonly used for murders before the ban, and more conventional-appearing weapons were effective substitutes for criminal misuse. Any assault-weapons ban that does not ban firearms that are equally lethal (such as those many Americans already own) is ineffective.

What does work? Professor Stephen P. Segal’s recent study of murder rates and mental-treatment policy, “Civil Commitment Law, Mental Health Services, and U.S. Homicide Rates,” examined state-by-state murder rates and mental-health services and found that “less access to psychiatric inpatient-beds and more poorly rated mental health systems were associated with increases in the homicide rates of 1.08 and 0.26 per 100,000, respectively.” There was an even greater difference in the homicide rate between states with different involuntary civil commitment (ICC) laws. “Broader ICC criteria were associated with 1.42 less homicides per 100,000.” In short, states where involuntary commitment was easy had roughly a third less murders than states where it was very hard to civilly commit a mentally ill person.

The reason that more mental-health services and more relaxed involuntary-commitment standards make such a difference in murder rates is very simple: Mentally ill persons are disproportionately involved in violent crimes, including murder. As of 2002, about 26,000 inmates in state prisons across the United States who were convicted of murder were also mentally ill. A detailed examination of Indiana prison inmates convicted of murder found that 18 percent were diagnosed with “schizophrenia or other psychotic disorder, major depression, mania, or bipolar disorder.” Many of the random mass murders that have so plagued not only the United States but many other industrialized societies in the last few years were committed by persons with clear evidence of severe mental illness, usually schizophrenia.

If we are serious about reducing these relatively rare (less than 1 percent of U.S. murders are incidents of mass murder) but terrifying tragedies, we need to be looking at the root cause: untreated or inadequately treated mental illness. Focusing on the weapons may be good politics, but the experimental evidence suggests that it is bad public policy.

Preventing Mass-Murder Tragedies: What Works, What Doesn’t