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Relapse wrote:
Taken together, what am I supposed to think?

That you're being trolled. Poorly.

 cincydooley wrote:

 Alexzandvar wrote:

 cincydooley wrote:
And you propose forcing these people to be evaluated by a mental health professional how?

Well already there are plenty of people we know have mental issues and want treatment that cannot get it (or are waiting for it) such as veterans. So thats a group of people already we can help get into a system for getting them aid and ensuring there safety.

Although your question on it's face is odd, since society naturally pushes people who are mentally unwell to the fringe, and in the fringe they are easier to find or are motivated by a desire to become able to be part of the rest of society by getting treatment. Parents often get their kids help if they need it, and if parent ignores a obvious mental problem that would cause their child to harm others they would be tried for child abuse (This is directly addressing Adam Lanza's mom's unwillingness to get him help)

Also: do you know how many homeless people are such because of mental illness? Often times the police are puzzled on how to deal with these individuals since they have noone to hand them off to, which ties into the point about refining our healthcare system for mental patients.

You touch on one of the reasons why the solution isn't simple, but what solution to a large problem ever is?

I know in your wide-eyed, college freshman naivety you're trying really hard to put some solid arguments together, but the fact remains that we can't force treatment on non-violent people. Can't do it, save for some very specific situations, all which require previous incarceration or hospitalization.

But we should have laws that force people who might hurt others to get treatment.

Yes it sounds bad, but what do we tell the family's who watched a persons refusal to get treatment destroy their life? I just don't see how you justify letting crazy people just do what ever with the justification that because it's mental health the person may ride scot free and go on to harm other's because getting them treatment for a crippling issue is somehow "immoral"


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 Breotan wrote:

Relapse wrote:
Taken together, what am I supposed to think?

That you're being trolled. Poorly.

Yes because me defending myself from the rather damning accusation I have little regard for soldiers death's and my family is trolling.

Well you were the one who said it's part and parcel with our job, so why should it be anything special.

 Alexzandvar wrote:


But we should have laws that force people who might hurt others to get treatment.

Yes it sounds bad, but what do we tell the family's who watched a persons refusal to get treatment destroy their life? I just don't see how you justify letting crazy people just do what ever with the justification that because it's mental health the person may ride scot free and go on to harm other's because getting them treatment for a crippling issue is somehow "immoral"

And we do if they have a history of violence, both against themselves or against others. But not until then.

This isn't a Philp K Dick novel. We can't predict crime. Not all schizophrenics commit violent acts. Are they more likely? Maybe more so than your average person. But that doesn't mean we can or should force them to see a mental health professional. Black males are statistically more likely to be violent with guns than other races; should we make it harder, therefore, for black males to get firearms even If they have no criminal history? Of course not.

 djones520 wrote:
Well you were the one who said it's part and parcel with our job, so why should it be anything special.

The assertion military sacrifice is no less important because of the inevitability (or commonality of it) of it is part of what I was saying for about half this thread.

I also asserted that it was "part" of the job as it goes was to make the point that soldiers willingly give their lives for what they believe in, and that using their death as a stepping stone on your political ladder is not okay as you are twisting the memory of that person with unnecessary political rhetoric.

Not to mention the fact why I said I hold high regard for dead soldier's is because the are more than a few who share my last name....

No guns to Crazies ,every time this subject comes up it forces me to post.

Approximately 20% of the population undergoes a breakdown at some point in their life , coupled with roughly 5% of people who have an ongoing illness. People here are talking like Crazies and non-crazies are in two clearly defined groups , they aren't and never will be. I'm all for increasing mental health support but just one action will not lower incidents , it will be a combined result of many actions .

Forcing people to get treatment is generally counter productive as it feeds the patients developed or nascent paranoia , or the psycho active drugs change the users personality so much that they don't wish to take them (I cannot imagine having a completely different headspace / personality foisted on me by drugs , it would be very strange). Mental health issues are inceadibly murky and never think someone who has a mental illness gets a free ride anywhere.
Always remember the line between you and the Crazies is one breakdown.

 djones520 wrote:

 carlos13th wrote:
I hate misinformed reactionary law no matter what the subject matter. I am not sure if I would go as far to say I am anti gun but I am not pro gun either. I am glad guns are illegal in the UK but that doesn't mean I think the same thing would work for America.

Longer wait times, limit on Magazine size and compressive background checks are all things I personally would consider reasonable laws. Others more knowledgable may disagree and I would be happy to hear their reasons.

Laws by people who do not understand what they are legislating and are too lazy to do the research are ridiculous. Especially laws that ban things because they look scary.

I think there are plenty of morons on both sides of the gun control debate. Gun control laws should be about keeping people safe and reducing harm not about scoring political points, hell all laws should be about that. Its a shame that working together seems to be an alien concept in politics.

Also did a poster from the UK really say the police can come into his house uninvited any time without his permission? Because warrants are a thing in the UK too, I am not a lawyer but pretty sure the police are not allowed to do that.

Well, I'll address one of your "reasonable" laws. Take a look back at a picture on the first page. That'll show you how well magazine restrictions work. I could also post tons of video's that show people proving that smaller magazines in no way mitigates a firearms ability to sling led.

Yeah I saw that. Pretty crazy invention.

It would require them to reload slightly more often which may help somewhat in reacting . I can understand that the difference made by the smaller magazines may be negligible to the point where the enforcement of said law is useless.

I still think if people are afraid of more mass murders taking place money would be far better spent in mental health care than gun control.

I think both would be the way to do it. Mental health spending is fine but you are always going to get the spree killers who appears "normal" before they go human hunting.

 djones520 wrote:
The Census doesn't keep track of name, social, address, etc... it just counts numbers.

What your advocating is for any joe schmoe at a counter to know whether or not the guy standing across from him has mental health issues.

They are not in any way shape or form equal.

And how would that have stopped something like the Naval Yard Shooter? He had no record of treatment, diagnosis, etc...

Had he instead gotten the help he needed, instead of getting stuck in the VA Beuracracy...

Could they not have a system where the guy in the counter sends of the application and just gets back an approved on not approved notice back. They dont need to give shop owners details.

Thats before we get into the matter of what problems do and don't allow someone to own a gun, and who decides that based on what criteria.


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Bullockist wrote:
No guns to Crazies ,every time this subject comes up it forces me to post.

Approximately 20% of the population undergoes a breakdown at some point in their life , coupled with roughly 5% of people who have an ongoing illness. People here are talking like Crazies and non-crazies are in two clearly defined groups , they aren't and never will be. I'm all for increasing mental health support but just one action will not lower incidents , it will be a combined result of many actions .

Forcing people to get treatment is generally counter productive as it feeds the patients developed or nascent paranoia , or the psycho active drugs change the users personality so much that they don't wish to take them (I cannot imagine having a completely different headspace / personality foisted on me by drugs , it would be very strange). Mental health issues are inceadibly murky and never think someone who has a mental illness gets a free ride anywhere.
Always remember the line between you and the Crazies is one breakdown.

This is a very good point and one worth keeping in mind. Metal health issues are hugely misunderstood, underfunded.

I agree with you comments of forcing treatment too, I understand if someone is violent it may be needed but forcing treatment on someone who is non violent but troubled is a great way to ensure they never trust a medical professional again. I know I personally would be scared to death if I was forced into a mental hospital and treatment was forced upon me.

 Grey Templar wrote:
It also doesn't solve the problem of people using stolen firearms, of which a very large chunk of gun violence is committed with. Criminals are not completely stupid, they aren't going to go and buy a gun legally and then commit a crime with it. They'll buy a stolen one off the street, they're as easily acquired as cheap ciggs at a corner store.

Large number of gun murders are committed without any premeditation. You're right that it wouldn't reduce the numbers of crimes in which the gun was stolen (or purchased as a gun stolen by some other person), but it might have an effect on the number of murders in which a legally owned firearm was used in a spur of the moment situation.


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 Grey Templar wrote:
If you really want to reduce gun violence, you focus on the "robbery gone wrong" type of crimes. Not the once in a blue moon killing sprees.

Agreed, to a point. Murders committed in the act of another crime kill more people than spree killing by a couple of orders of magnitude, but they in turn are only a fraction of the total murder rate. In fact, going by the figures in the table below, getting killed because someone is committing a crime is almost half as likely as getting killed in an argument (1,923 murders from a felony, vs 3,215 from 'other arguments').

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10shrtbl10.xls


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 cincydooley wrote:
And you propose forcing these people to be evaluated by a mental health professional how?

While I agree that forced treatment without a crime is a dangerous precedent, the number of people who have little or no treatment because they refuse it is very rare. It is far more common for such people to be given inadequate treatment because of a lack of resources in the mental health system. Too often people drop out of the system while on a waiting list, or are pushed out of care too soon because a bed is needed for another patient.

But murders like that tend to be committed with whatever is laying around.

If a gun wasn't to hand they'd just have used a knife or any heavy object that was nearby.

Those also are not always going to be committed by someone who is mentally unstable, just someone who got too angry at that exact moment. Anybody could snap like that with no warning, certainly nothing a mental screening would catch in any appreciable numbers.

Thing is if you have a gun and want to kill me I am fethed.

If you have a knife I may be able to run.

If you have an heavy object I might be able disarm you.

I cant outrun bullets, I cant close the distance and redirect the line of fire before you can squeeze a trigger. Unless you stand really close and I am very very lucky.

Not enough to make enough of a difference. If someone wants to kill you its a seriously bad situation no matter what the weapon is.

Yeah but you have a chance of out running melee weapons. You have no chance of out running a gun.

 carlos13th wrote:
Yeah but you have a chance of out running melee weapons. You have no chance of out running a gun.

Only if you run in a straight line...

 djones520 wrote:

 carlos13th wrote:
Yeah but you have a chance of out running melee weapons. You have no chance of out running a gun.

Only if you run in a straight line...

Yeah. You need to stand your ground and do some sick slow mo action;

Anyone thought of those with PTSD? Be it from OIF/OEF, possible from Bosnia/Kosovo, Somalia, 1st Gulf War, Grenada, Panama, Korean War, Vietnam, and WWII vets?

 Jihadin wrote:
Anyone thought of those with PTSD? Be it from OIF/OEF, possible from Bosnia/Kosovo, Somalia, 1st Gulf War, Grenada, Panama, Korean War, Vietnam, and WWII vets?

Yeah, that's a tricky one.

 djones520 wrote:

 carlos13th wrote:
Yeah but you have a chance of out running melee weapons. You have no chance of out running a gun.

Only if you run in a straight line...

What do you suggest instead? Zig Zagging? I wouldn't wanna be the one to test your theory.

 carlos13th wrote:

 djones520 wrote:

 carlos13th wrote:
Yeah but you have a chance of out running melee weapons. You have no chance of out running a gun.

Only if you run in a straight line...

What do you suggest instead? Zig Zagging? I wouldn't wanna be the one to test your theory.

Actually, that was a HUGE thing learned in WW1. When you stopped running in a straight line, your chances of getting shot dropped astronomically.

I did make that comment a little tongue in cheek though.

 carlos13th wrote:

 djones520 wrote:

 carlos13th wrote:
Yeah but you have a chance of out running melee weapons. You have no chance of out running a gun.

Only if you run in a straight line...

What do you suggest instead? Zig Zagging? I wouldn't wanna be the one to test your theory.

Well... if the bad guys has a fully automatic Grizzly Bear chasing you downhill... zig zagging is the way to go as the Bear can't turn like that down hill. Their mass would roll down hill...

 Grey Templar wrote:
But murders like that tend to be committed with whatever is laying around.

If a gun wasn't to hand they'd just have used a knife or any heavy object that was nearby.

When you have a tool that makes a task easier, you are more likely to use that tool. This applies to murder just as much as it applies to DIY letter boxes.

And think about it, and just look at the link I posted above. Taking out the murders committed in the act of another felony (and a proportionate amount of the murders with an unknown motive), and we're looking at 9,990 murders. That's more than double the murder rate here in Australia, more than four times the rate in the UK.

All the other factors that affect the murder rate - education, poverty, measures of effective policing etc are more or less on par. And it just doesn't make sense to declare the people of the US are just somehow a more murderous country, a people who'd be murdering each other at a rate far in advance of other developed countries even if all they had to do it with was rocks and blunt knives.

At some point you have to look at the saturation of all those tools that make killing quite a bit easier, and make the fairly direct conclusion that when you make something easier, people tend to do it more.

Those also are not always going to be committed by someone who is mentally unstable, just someone who got too angry at that exact moment. Anybody could snap like that with no warning, certainly nothing a mental screening would catch in any appreciable numbers.

I agree that such murders are committed by people with no mental issues, but I think you're wrong in claiming these murders are committed as a snap with no warning. There is almost always a long cycle of incidents before the murder, increasingly heated arguments, incidents of actual violence etc. Often with the police called, though obviously not always with charges being followed through on.

Whether or not a system could be established to take guns away from people identified in those situations, or even to get people in those situations to agree to temporarily give up their firearms, well it'd be interesting to see it attempted. Of course, there's also a hell of a lot of scope there to begin reducing the murder rate (early identification of downward spirals etc) without even looking at guns, but no-one looks at any of that because unfortunately most people are still massively in denial about what constitutes most murders.

 sebster wrote:

I agree that such murders are committed by people with no mental issues, but I think you're wrong in claiming these murders are committed as a snap with no warning. There is almost always a long cycle of incidents before the murder, increasingly heated arguments, incidents of actual violence etc. Often with the police called, though obviously not always with charges being followed through on.

Would you mind citing your source for that?

Its also a bit harsh to say that anyone who has had a series of incidences like that, which are really pretty minor, should be put on a mental watch list and denied their 2nd amendment right because they might become killers.

That's practically convicting them of a crime with no trial, the punishment of which is the removal of a constitutional right.

Someone who can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality as a normal state of affairs, should probably not be allowed to own a firearm (or a nasty history of going off their meds and making poor decisions, depending). Someone with a manageable condition that poses no great risk to themselves or anyone else, isn't the kind of person who need to be denied such a thing and isn't really who people are talking about when they bring up the issue.

 sebster wrote:
[
And think about it, and just look at the link I posted above. Taking out the murders committed in the act of another felony (and a proportionate amount of the murders with an unknown motive), and we're looking at 9,990 murders. That's more than double the murder rate here in Australia, more than four times the rate in the UK.

.

How many murders are we looking at If we remove the gang related ones?

I mean, correct me if I'm wrong but I think in 2011 something like 9000 of the 11,000 total gun murders were gang related.

 Seaward wrote:
Would you mind citing your source for that?

That murders aren't committed out of the blue, but are generally preceded by an escalating cycle of violence? You really want a source for that?


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 Grey Templar wrote:
Its also a bit harsh to say that anyone who has had a series of incidences like that, which are really pretty minor, should be put on a mental watch list and denied their 2nd amendment right because they might become killers.

That's practically convicting them of a crime with no trial, the punishment of which is the removal of a constitutional right.

Only if one assumes that on identifying such a problem, the only response must include the state forcing itself in to the situation. Instead of, you know, offering help, telling people 'hey, it's clear you're spiralling here, how about we provide a service to help work you through these issues'.

Note, by the way, that this stuff gets talked about by criminologists all the time. The issue isn't with the range of intervention methods, which are known to be effective even when non-mandatory (in fact, they are much more effective when non-mandatory). This is because the vast majority of people aren't, in fact, complete fething idiots who want to piss their lives away by murdering someone.

The problem is with actually identifying the people in this spirals while they are happening. The police are a reactive service and for obvious reasons don't spend their time looking at series of incidents and making predictions, and many other important indicators are included in other systems (court records etc). This information can be accumulated and used to good effect, but the time delay means the final event has already happened.

 sebster wrote:
That murders aren't committed out of the blue, but are generally preceded by an escalating cycle of violence? You really want a source for that?

I'd like a source for this, yes:

There is almost always a long cycle of incidents before the murder, increasingly heated arguments, incidents of actual violence etc. Often with the police called, though obviously not always with charges being followed through on.

 cincydooley wrote:
How many murders are we looking at If we remove the gang related ones?

I mean, correct me if I'm wrong but I think in 2011 something like 9000 of the 11,000 total gun murders were gang related.

In 2010, of the total 12,996 murders, the reason was known in 8,340 instances. Of those, just 849 or 10.2% were gang related. You can add the total number of murders that were committed in the act of a crime (drugs, burglary, mugging, rape, stolen car etc) of 1,923 to get a total number of murders that can be attached to any kind of crime of 2,772, or 33.2%. And that leaves you with 5,568 murders, or 66.8% of murders that were committed because of disputes over property, romance, and all sorts of other nonsense.

And from that, you can conclude, that no, the issue most certainly isn't a gang problem, in fact only a minority is related to crime at all.


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 Seaward wrote:
I'd like a source for this, yes:

There is almost always a long cycle of incidents before the murder, increasingly heated arguments, incidents of actual violence etc. Often with the police called, though obviously not always with charges being followed through on.

Uh, okay. I mean, I'm just repeating what I've told by a couple of people who do this for a living, and while I've asked them to clarify plenty that they've told me, I never asked about this, because, you know, it seemed kind of obvious. I mean, are you actually doubting that most murders don't just come out of the blue?

Anyhow, a quick google search will give you stuff like this;
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-06-10/domestic-violence-signs/55496458/1

Is it illegal for gang members to have guns?