Every time, when the media posts pictures and names of murderers, they help create more copy cats.
I feel like this was an exception to the rule, since he was still at large for a while and it was imperative to the public safety that people knew who he was and what he looked like.
That said, yes, the media does need to pull back on publishing details about the killers in these situations.
At the time, maybe, but he's dead, no reason to keep parading the name and picture around anymore.
Fair
🤔 uhh ... Should I remove his name from the title of the post?
Yes honestly
I am 2 days late, but I did it
That's ok, I read it as Report Card anyway
What they need to do is start showing the bodies. Graphic photos. Everywhere we look we should see them.
Therefore we shall have the state enact limits on speech to help suppress it
Better if individuals smash their windows or harass their editors when they try to pee
Quit naming them in the titles! Just let their legacy evaporate.
There's definitely a lot of truth to what you're saying, but it seems like this overall effort is an attempt to shift attention away from gun control and focus on individual culpability.
I mean, sure would have been nice to have a living suspect for the criminologists or psychologists.
I bet we can figure out his motives and mental state through good ol' fashioned detective work. I'll take the first step for them, and tell them to look at his social media history. Freud would shit himself if he were alive today and could scroll a facebook feed.
He was an America-First conservative, what else do you need to know?
We’ve learnt all we can from these psychopaths, to be honest.
I’m just angry he got off so easy. He should have had to face what he did.
I disagree. More data points are useful to show the future how batshit insane our policy choices are.
What policy choices? He should have had his weapons confiscated after his recent issues under Maine's yellow flag laws, but the police did nothing once again.
You answered it yourself. Police policy.
I wouldn’t want to be the guy responsible for taking away the guns of a mentally ill person. No thank you, let some other sucker handle that.
Don’t we already have ample data to support that? Like, what could we learn that would make a difference? I’m not being facetious, I’m honestly asking.
in an ideal world, what would move the needle?
Data is data. A guy being interviewed about how he came to his plan, the setbacks he had, what his goals were, etc.
Like, are the victims just dumb luck because he originally intended a different plan that could have had higher casualties?
A deader body is also easier to sweep under the rug, can’t happen again cause we caught him, etc etc. No worries about further court dates, or him talking about his love for guns…
Sure, I get that. My career was like 80% data.
You also have to know when to stop wasting time collecting data and start spending that energy on solutions, because the data becomes redundant.
We’ve got soooooo much data on what motivates people; we’ve got excruciatingly intricate data on exactly how and why they do these things. We know which solutions are likely to work and which definitely don’t.
We need to stop endlessly analysing and start fixing this shit. We know what’s broken, so let’s stop talking about what and why and how, and start implementing solutions, like now.
The problem is there’s little public will to fix things – little ability to see these as preventable tragedies – and too much looking and hoping and denying.
Don’t worry though – there are another couple of hundred people waking up today who will be dead next month and over whose corpses we can continue this debate. I really hope nobody reading this comment will be one of them.
(Sorry for the snark; I’m beyond exhausted with this.)
You didn't get down 👇 voted so probably no one's offended. I totally agree with You btw. And I just wanted to add this; I think our government and corporations should fix this shit ASAP. But I don't think 🤔 "We the people" can do much about it if politicians don't listen to our outcry for better gun control policies
I’m just on edge, so I’m preemptively apologising for my snark.
‘We the people’ elect those politicians, so yes, ‘we the people’ can do something about it.
And that’s the least we can do. There’s very rarely an actual public outcry over these things. This one was weird because he evaded capture for a while. They usually either shoot themselves on the scene or are captured within hours.
I believe majority of Americans want stricter gun laws. So why are the politicians that the people voted in not doing anything about it (then)?
Same way I believe that majority of Americans want affordable education, housing, medical care, ETC...
Why doesn't the government (whether Republican or Democrat run government) do much about it, or why are they never able to fix the issues?
That, detective, is the right question.
NRA?
Fear is profitable.
We’ve learnt all we can from these psychopaths, to be honest.
What makes you believe this?
I’m very interested in abnormal psychology and have read many studies, watched tons of hours of police interviews, read loads of psychiatric notes and court transcripts, prisoners’ diaries, etc – it’s all out there and freely available if you’re interested.
This issue is decades old. There’s a ridiculous amount of information available. I developed morbid curiosity after Columbine, and have seen and read things I probably shouldn’t have for my own mental health, but I feel it’s important to know things like this.
It’s not my belief – just look at the raw data and what psychologists say. We don’t know everything, obviously, but we know quite enough.
e: I’m not talking about what psychologists can learn, I’m talking about us, the public.
It’s not my belief – just look at the raw data and what psychologists say. We don’t know everything, obviously, but we know quite enough.
What psychologists say that we know enough? I've never heard this claimed by a professional in the field before.
e: I’m not talking about what psychologists can learn, I’m talking about us, the public.
It's not up to the public to learn the intricacies of psychopathy. You and I aren't the ones who need or can make use of that data.
It looks like I worded my comment poorly.
I meant we, as in regular people, not psychologists or the FBI, or other professionals.
We already know more than enough to enact laws and policies to fix this shit. We don’t need more data. These aren’t lone wolves, and they haven’t been for ages. They have very similar beliefs. We know the who, what, and why they do these things, and we have for a long time.
We don’t need to ponder these things anymore.
And yet, warning signs are still ignored by most people, and travesties like this continue to occur almost daily in this country.
I'd argue that we don't know as much as we'd like to think we do.
Obviously not enough for predictive analysis. Hunan behavior is predictable with enough data. Not that we should be collecting the amount of data necessary…….. right?
not sure what you’re suggesting.
Obviously the FBI and other authorities do predictive analysis.
I’m not talking about agencies – I’m talking about us. Regular people. We’re not doing predictive analysis. We’re not trained for it, and that would be a disaster.
I’m talking about regular people and the random nut jobs we elect to office. We have plenty of data to formulate and implement solutions, and discovering exactly which region of Norway the gods this loser thought he was listening to hailed from (or whatever, fake example obviously) won’t change that.
bunches of those in prisons already though.
It really disappoints me to see people say this when the dude clearly had mental issues, potentiated by the Army. It clearly says that the dude was hearing voices and wanted to shoot up a military base and everyone was like " 🤷♂️ let's throw him in a psych ward for two weeks, that will fix the issue".
Dude didn't get the help he needed, that was someone's child too....
He got all the help anyone could give him. We simply can't cure "I'm hearing voices and want to kill people" in a couple of weeks.
What we can do is ensure that it's not cheaper, faster and easier to go on a killing spree instead of recovering.
But that might impact the profits of the gun lobby, so they insist we instead cure every single person of every single mental health problem before they kill people with their legal guns.
It's possible for both things to be valid. I'm not American so the whole owning guns thing is weird to me anyway but surely the bare minimum is banning weapons that are expressly made for killing humans, like hand guns and assault weapons.
But alongside that, it's a fact that this guy did not get the help he needed, certainly not all the help anyone could give him. Two weeks on a ward is nowhere near enough time to treat someone in acute psychosis.
Literally all guns are made for killing, that's their primary purpose. There are tons of gun owners that don't use it for that purpose though. IMO we should work on mental health reform (and reforming other things) so people don't want to go out and commit mass murders. Of course, there's always going to be the unhelpable people but you can at least get rid of about 75% of them.
As I understand it, the primary purpose of some guns is not for killing humans - hunting rifles etc - but for those that are, the bare minimum of a total ban seems proportionate.
Do people not think that these guys will choose another gun if they ban all assault rifles? Semi-auto handguns are a thing. Also Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK with a bolt-action rifle.
That's why I said 'bare minimum' - as I said elsewhere, I'm not American so the whole owning guns thing is fucking weird to me anyway, I think the US would be much better off totally banning all guns but as that's very unlikely to happen, banning all guns created with the express intent of shooting humans seems logical.
The thing is, some people need guns. The US is so vast that North Dakota is completely different from New Jersey. In North Dakota, you could be living on a 50 square mile cattle ranch, and you have to protect hundreds or thousands of cattle from predators. If a pack of wolves jumps your fences and starts to attack your cattle, what are you going to do without a gun to protect them? Yell at the wolves? Use a bow and arrow? Those predators are literally destroying your livelihood. The cops, game warden, or Department of Fish and Wildlife aren't going to come to your rescue. You're on your own.
What if you live in Alaska out in the wilderness and a 600 pound Kodiak bear shows up on your property looking for food? Are you going to let it destroy your car, food supply and possibly harm your family?
People in these areas "live off the land", they fish, they farm and they hunt wild game to stay alive. They don't go to supermarkets and pick up packaged food and bring it home, they slaughter and prepare it themselves or else they starve. Guns are a necessity for them, using anything else isn't efficient.
In New Jersey, even in the most rural places, you only 5-10 miles or so from civilization. In more populated areas people feel that they need guns for protection from other people because the police forces largely suck in this country. If someone breaks into your house, it could take the cops 10 minutes to get to you. Are you supposed to let them do what they want while you're waiting for the cops or do you draw down on them as soon as they break in and say "GTFO or die"?
My parents live in a larger city in South Jersey with a few acres of land (3 houses in a row), my dad owns a few guns and is known in the neighborhood to go outside at night if he hears something unusual with a pistol stating "come out and get shot or get the fuck out of here." A few years ago about 5 houses on our street were broken into, they hit houses on either side of my parents three houses, but didn't touch any of the three they own. I wonder why... 😉
These are real things people have to worry about here. Europeans (and others outside of the US) simply don't realize how gigantic and diverse the US is. Watch Yellowstone if you want a sense of what it's like living out in the rural Midwest, or Life Below Zero which is a reality TV show about people living in or below the Arctic Circle.
The problem is that you can't say "only people that live in the wilderness can have guns" because it's written into our constitution that we can own guns (well, technically, it says we have a right to form a militia, but I digress...) and that isn't easy to change. It's a big problem without an easy solution.
But alongside that, it's a fact that this guy did not get the help he needed, certainly not all the help anyone could give him. Two weeks on a ward is nowhere near enough time to treat someone in acute psychosis.
No, it's not nearly enough time. But it's also far more time than it takes to buy a semi-automatic weapon in America.
The help he received is the limit of what any healthcare system, anywhere in the world could have given him.
The only mental healthcare system that would make America's gun laws safe is one that involuntarily comitted people for the rest of their lives, purely because they weren't healthy enough to sell guns to.
The help he received is the limit of what any healthcare system, anywhere in the world could have given him.
If by 'limit' you mean 'bare minimum' then I agree. Because it definitely is not the amount of help he would've received in some other countries. Two weeks would barely be enough time for an assessment to take place in some countries, let alone treatment.
As for your other points, I agree. I don't see why American's think owning a gun is in any way a good or positive or useful thing (unless you're a farmer or similar). But, if a countries leading cause of child death is guns and that country still does nothing about guns I really don't know what it would take to make change happen.
If by 'limit' you mean 'bare minimum' then I agree. Because it definitely is not the amount of help he would've received in some other countries..
There was only a few months between him receiving emergency mental healthcare because he'd been hearing voices and him killing as many people as he could with a legal firearm.
That is not enough time for any doctor, in any country, with any form of treatment and any known medication, to have made significant progress.
This was not the fault of doctors.
I don't know enough about how the medical system works in the US to say who's fault it was he wasn't treated appropriately and neither do I know what his exact mental state was upon release. All I'm saying is that two weeks on a ward is barely enough time to assess someone who's in the grip of acute psychosis, let alone begin treating them.
I don't know what your experience is with psychosis (I have schizophrenia) but it very often is not something that is ever going to be 'cured' in that you go to a ward, they give you a handful of meds and two weeks later boom you're safe (and by safe I mean no danger to yourself, the vast majority of people with psychosis are not violent). It can take years to get to a stage where you feel stable.
This guy should not have been discharged after two weeks. And that is not particular to him - I can't think of any situation where any person with acute psychosis should be discharged from a ward after only 2 weeks. It's simply not enough time to treat someone.
Is it the discharging clinician's fault? Or the fault of the mental health system (or lack thereof) in the US? Or inadequacies in both? I don't know, I don't know how the system works over there. But that guy should not have been discharged.
Guns aren't the problem, it's the people that are the problem. Guns just make it easier for them. I'm all for stricter gun control laws federally but there are so many other people that need mental help and focusing on gun control doesn't help them.
Also you can stop the "I'm hearing voices and want kill people" in a few weeks, we do it all the time with medication, the problem is administering said medication because you can't force someone to take it.
The number of people who support gun control but oppose socialised healthcare is virtually zero.
Voting Republican ensures they get no help before they decide to become domestic terrorists but the moment they decide to buy a gun and kill as many people as possible, Republicans have their back.
So were the 18 people that fucking died. I get it, all the bleeding hearts need to help every wounded animal they find, but for fucks sake, how many chances do we give murderers and rapists? How many people have to die so that one can get the help they need. As a world, as a species, we have to learn when it is OK to let the wounded animal die. Not every choice has a perfect answer, but letting this asshat off himself instead of hoping that we can fix him and he won't do it again is the better answer. There is now a 100% chance that he won't kill anyone, and that's a much better chance than we'd have if we sent him off to a shrink and locked him up in a broken prison system.
I think you misunderstood @pete_the_cat 's point. They weren't suggesting retroactive treatment had he been caught, they were suggesting that if he'd been properly treated he might never have committed the crimes he did.
At least someone understands me 😉
It's ridiculously difficult it is to get adequate mental health support here in the US. I finally got myself help about 2 years back and luckily it was easy for me to find therapists and psychiatrists since I was in NYC. They're a dime a dozen. My parents live 3 hours south in NJ, my dad's psychiatrist retired and there's apparently no one in the area that he can see (he says he doesn't want to talk with a female therapist for some reason and feels video chatting is impersonal, he's 73). The closest ones available are about a 45 minute drive away.
I left NYC and my shrink couldn't write scripts for me anymore since he wasn't licensed in NJ. He was prescribing me 1.5-2 pills of 10 mg Ambien every night because everything else that we tried wasn't effective (I had been taking Ambien for like 15-20 years previously but it tended to make me feel like shit in the morning, but we solved that issue), and the only other thing that works for me is smoking weed. I attempted to see another psychiatrist through the same company (it's a telehealth company) but that turned into an absolute shit show. The only one I could see before a 3 week waiting period was a new guy. He wanted to follow the rules exactly and refused to listen to me, I told him the hour long intake was worthless since he should have a year's worth of notes from the previous guy. He wanted me to take all these tests to see if I was on it or needed it. After arguing with him for an hour, he said he would see if his supervisor would authorize it, they did after a week... But it was only for one pill a night, so I went through it twice as quickly. I couldn't get any more after that because I was moving states again and didn't want to go through the same bullshit again. They were more than happy to throw ADHD meds (Stratera, not a stimulant like Adderall) at me though! So here I am writing up this comment at 2:30 AM after drinking two 6% ABV beers, walking 7 miles today, taking 40 mg of melatonin and 100 mg of Benadryl. If I had weed, I'd be asleep by now but it's only medically legal here and I haven't figured out how to apply for a medical card, also my tolerance is stupid high. This could all be solved if they would just give me my damn Ambien that I need.
My dad has the same problem with getting his Ambien as well, though a different insurance company and doctor.
You know how other countries have these weird things in place to get people treated before they go on killing sprees. How about that shit?
Just saying "Oh good, that asshole is dead, let's move on" is the American Way.
That's the most fucked up thing about the past decade or two. This shit keeps happening and people are like 🤷♂️ "let ban the guns so they can't commit mass murders easily! That'll fix the problem!" meanwhile completely ignoring the reason that causes all these people to go out and commit mass murders against people that they don't even know. All this does is incite more violence and rage by those that feel that the government is overstepping its boundaries (second amendment douches) and they feel that they need to fight back against a tyrannical government. This country sucks for a lot of reasons, it's better off than some other countries, but it's just getting worse since the rise of social media, smartphones and internet adoption in general by the masses.
This dude could have been treated, he was suffering from paranoid delusions and probably had PTSD. IDK if he actually fought in the wars in the Middle East or if he was just purely in the Army Reserve, but if he was in the wars, he probably saw a bunch of fucked up stuff. There's a reason why a lot of vets either kill themselves or become addicts after returning home, they're discarded like garbage used by the government. It can take people multiple months or years to get the free treatment from the VA that they were promised, a lot of them never get it in time. He wasn't a psychopath (or now as it is more broken down into, Antisocial Personality Disorder) that enjoyed hurting people like many convicted mass murders, he was just fucked in the head. This could have been prevented, it was known that he was having paranoia delusions, our country just loves to be reactive and not proactive. Psych wards are absolute shit, my friend was in a "trauma unit" for a 72 hour hold and it's essentially prison where they throw meds at you to keep you sedated. Putting him in there for 2 weeks possibly made him worse off.
I'm not arguing that it couldn't have been prevented. I'm not trying to advocate for thought crimes or anything wild like that. I'm just saying that he killed 18 people, and there is a very real chance that if he was still alive he would try to do it again, even with treatment. Now, that chance is 0%, and I think that we owe it to the 18 people who died to agree that maybe this is a fine way for things to have ended. I'm sure potential targets 19, 20, etc. agree.
It's terrible. It shouldn't happen. We should be able to help out every person in the world who is in pain. BUT WE CAN'T. Everyone loves to kick the can down the road and let the blame fall to the VA or Mental Hospitals, or whothefuckever, but no one wants to do anything about it. If you don't like it, then you need to do something about it, because not enough people are, but the minute you talk about, "I don't have the time," but hop on Lemmy to argue with strangers, or "I can't afford to take time off of work," but buy a new phone or whatthefuckever that you don't need, then realize that you are part of the problem. If you think the people of the Armed Forces need better help, then what are you doing right now? Because it sure as shit isn't helping them.
I'm just saying that he killed 18 people, and there is a very real chance that if he was still alive he would try to do it again, even with treatment.
And where are you getting this from? There's no way you could know that.
I can't necessarily do anything about it myself, and groups of people have been trying to usher in healthcare reform for decades but we're always blocked by lobbying groups, insurance companies that are worth billions, and people who simply don't think it's a useful way to spend money.
If you think banning guns will solve the problem, what are you doing about it? It sure as hell looks like you're doing the same thing as me, aren't you?
Where am I getting it from? History. It's rare for people with mental health problems to suddenly cure themselves after a few rounds at the bowling alley. There is a very real chance he would do it again.
And when did I say anything about banning guns? When did I say I was trying to help? I'm just here to argue with strangers.
What a coward... I regret not being able to give him his day in court and hold him in a concrete box for the rest of his long life.
This is a bad take, the dude was fucked in the head from the war and other stuff. It's not necessarily his fault, he didn't get the help he needed.
When something like this happens people always blame the guns or the guy, but this guy clearly had issues that everyone was like 🤷♂️. He then goes out and kills 18 people then himself, and people demonize him as if there were no other warnings. He was fucked from the beginning.
This isn't someone that was like "I wanna kill all gays/muslims/Democrats/etc..." he was just fucked in the head.
Edit: it seems the Reddit downvoting hive mind has followed us here. I wrote pretty much the exact same comment elsewhere in here and it gets 20 up votes, yet this has is at -14
Yet it's still the guns, be it in the hands of an officially mentally ill person or someone who's undiagnosed but can't descern reality from fiction none the less.
Assault weapon ban goes into effect, mass shootings drop drastically.
Assault weapons ban is allowed to expire, it goes up north of 200%.
Assault weapons are revered like Jesus himself and mass murder scenarios suddenly happen every goddamn week.
The prevalence of weapons and free availability of them to virtually anyone, be they mentally ill or fundamentalist radicals, is the direct cause of this getting so out of hand.
Not mental illness or healthcare.
Mental illness exists everywhere.
Mass shootings (and probably any shootings) on the scale and regularity like in the US do not exist anywhere else.
So the crazy people with the guns aren't the problem, it's just their access to guns that are the problem.
Tell that to Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kazinski, or the Tsarnaiev (or however you spell it) Brothers that committed the Boston Marathon bombing, Ted Bundy, or Jeffrey Dahmer (I could keep listing names if you would like). Not one of them used a single gun to actually commit the murders, but they killed or maimed a shitload of people. But yeah, it's the guns that are clearly the problem, not the bat shit crazy people. I agree that there should be stricter gun laws federally, but saying "crazy people don't kill people, crazy people with guns kill people!" is just ignoring the root cause, which is they're fucking crazy.
Mass shootings go down, mass truckings go up. If they want to kill they will find a way. Mass shootings are EXTREMELY rare, statistically, compared to other firms of murder and there is no way in hell that you can implement "assault weapon" bans federally... Hell, band are getting overturned as unconstitutional As We Speak!
Yeah, but getting a truck is harder than getting a gun.
How 'bout not doing that?
Getting a truck is definitely not harder than getting a gun in a lot of states. NJ has a mandatory 2 week waiting period. I could rent a truck in a half hour or less and run into a crowd of people I don't like very easily. You can't even buy a BB gun in NJ!
Dogshit take. "Can't stop all murders, so don't try!"
Please tell us about all of the mass truckings that happen daily in the UK and Australia.
Australia and England also have a lot less people than the US. Australia has under a 10th of the population of the US.
The UK and Australia also have socialized healthcare so you don't need money to get help, it may take a while though from what I've heard.
Can you show demonstrate that bombing deaths in the UK are proportional to the shooting deaths in the US?
Terrorist attacks are terrorist attacks, regardless of the weapons used. That's a lot of attacks for a country with 1/6th the population of the US.
Can you demonstrate that 'terrorist attacks' in the UK are proportional to mass shootings in the US? Evidence please. You have provided none so far.
You mean trucks, as in those heavily regulated vehicles that are hard to be licensed to use precisely because they can be used as killing machines? Those trucks?
What the hell are you talking about with "vehicles that are hard to be licensed to use precisely because they can be used as killing machines"? Are you trying to say that laws keep people from killing people with motor vehicles? Have you never seen a case of "road rage", or what happened a few years back when someone drove a car into a group of protestors in Charlotte, North Carolina (I think that's where it happened).
Pretty much anyone can get a car, you just gotta have money to get one, the only thing stopping you from going all GTA and driving on the sidewalks mowing down people as you go is because you're not messed up in the head. There was literally nothing stopping this guy from using a truck rather than a gun, it's just that a gun was cheaper and more effective.
From what war? He was never deployed nor did he ever serve in combat
Won't you think of the poor mass murderers??!
He was in the Army Reserve it said, I don't expect it to go into his back story. He could have been in combat previously. My buddy spent 3 years in the Army and he's been in the Reserve for like 5 years now because he gets good benefits from it.
Regardless of that, this dude has mental issues that were treatable but he clearly didn't get the help he needed.
No pity for fucking murderers. I'm fucked in the head and I know plenty of people with mental illness, none of us have murdered anyone.
Yeah... That's because they got the help that they needed. You don't really want a person with paranoid delusions walking around unmedicated. Also you just said "mental illness" which could be a wide range of things, there's very few disorders that bring you to the point of killing someone else and this dude apparently had one of them.
You're a big fan of his?
That poster is showing empathy and you are not. MORE violence is clearly not the answer to this problem. I know it's hard and emotions are high but these people are some of the ones most desperately in need of help.
That poster is showing empathy and you are not.
Correct.
MORE violence is clearly not the answer to this problem.
Also correct.
but these people are some of the ones most desperately in need of help.
At least from me, they have given up any eligibility for empaty or help when they decide to murser innocent people.
There's a big difference between "the voices are telling me that if I eliminate these people other people will be happy and thank me for what I'm doing" and "I fucking hate all you left-wing, socialist loving, rainbow wearing pussies! You need to die to make this world a better place!"
One is someone with severe mental illness, the other is just a piece of shit human being.
There's a big difference between "the voices are telling me that if I eliminate these people other people will be happy and thank me for what I'm doing" and "I fucking hate all you left-wing, socialist loving, rainbow wearing pussies! You need to die to make this world a better place!"
Not from the viewpoint of the people getting eliminated and their loved ones there isn't.
I'd rather have empathy with them than the killers, no matter their motivation.
Every time
Every single time
Every time, when the media posts pictures and names of murderers, they help create more copy cats.
I feel like this was an exception to the rule, since he was still at large for a while and it was imperative to the public safety that people knew who he was and what he looked like.
That said, yes, the media does need to pull back on publishing details about the killers in these situations.
At the time, maybe, but he's dead, no reason to keep parading the name and picture around anymore.
Fair
🤔 uhh ... Should I remove his name from the title of the post?
Yes honestly
I am 2 days late, but I did it
That's ok, I read it as Report Card anyway
What they need to do is start showing the bodies. Graphic photos. Everywhere we look we should see them.
Therefore we shall have the state enact limits on speech to help suppress it
Better if individuals smash their windows or harass their editors when they try to pee
Quit naming them in the titles! Just let their legacy evaporate.
There's definitely a lot of truth to what you're saying, but it seems like this overall effort is an attempt to shift attention away from gun control and focus on individual culpability.
You give meaning to your username
And nothing of value was lost.
I mean, sure would have been nice to have a living suspect for the criminologists or psychologists.
I bet we can figure out his motives and mental state through good ol' fashioned detective work. I'll take the first step for them, and tell them to look at his social media history. Freud would shit himself if he were alive today and could scroll a facebook feed.
He was an America-First conservative, what else do you need to know?
We’ve learnt all we can from these psychopaths, to be honest.
I’m just angry he got off so easy. He should have had to face what he did.
I disagree. More data points are useful to show the future how batshit insane our policy choices are.
What policy choices? He should have had his weapons confiscated after his recent issues under Maine's yellow flag laws, but the police did nothing once again.
You answered it yourself. Police policy.
I wouldn’t want to be the guy responsible for taking away the guns of a mentally ill person. No thank you, let some other sucker handle that.
Don’t we already have ample data to support that? Like, what could we learn that would make a difference? I’m not being facetious, I’m honestly asking.
in an ideal world, what would move the needle?
Data is data. A guy being interviewed about how he came to his plan, the setbacks he had, what his goals were, etc.
Like, are the victims just dumb luck because he originally intended a different plan that could have had higher casualties?
A deader body is also easier to sweep under the rug, can’t happen again cause we caught him, etc etc. No worries about further court dates, or him talking about his love for guns…
Sure, I get that. My career was like 80% data.
You also have to know when to stop wasting time collecting data and start spending that energy on solutions, because the data becomes redundant.
We’ve got soooooo much data on what motivates people; we’ve got excruciatingly intricate data on exactly how and why they do these things. We know which solutions are likely to work and which definitely don’t.
We need to stop endlessly analysing and start fixing this shit. We know what’s broken, so let’s stop talking about what and why and how, and start implementing solutions, like now.
The problem is there’s little public will to fix things – little ability to see these as preventable tragedies – and too much looking and hoping and denying.
Don’t worry though – there are another couple of hundred people waking up today who will be dead next month and over whose corpses we can continue this debate. I really hope nobody reading this comment will be one of them.
(Sorry for the snark; I’m beyond exhausted with this.)
You didn't get down 👇 voted so probably no one's offended. I totally agree with You btw. And I just wanted to add this; I think our government and corporations should fix this shit ASAP. But I don't think 🤔 "We the people" can do much about it if politicians don't listen to our outcry for better gun control policies
I’m just on edge, so I’m preemptively apologising for my snark.
‘We the people’ elect those politicians, so yes, ‘we the people’ can do something about it.
And that’s the least we can do. There’s very rarely an actual public outcry over these things. This one was weird because he evaded capture for a while. They usually either shoot themselves on the scene or are captured within hours.
I believe majority of Americans want stricter gun laws. So why are the politicians that the people voted in not doing anything about it (then)?
Same way I believe that majority of Americans want affordable education, housing, medical care, ETC...
Why doesn't the government (whether Republican or Democrat run government) do much about it, or why are they never able to fix the issues?
That, detective, is the right question.
NRA?
Fear is profitable.
What makes you believe this?
I’m very interested in abnormal psychology and have read many studies, watched tons of hours of police interviews, read loads of psychiatric notes and court transcripts, prisoners’ diaries, etc – it’s all out there and freely available if you’re interested.
This issue is decades old. There’s a ridiculous amount of information available. I developed morbid curiosity after Columbine, and have seen and read things I probably shouldn’t have for my own mental health, but I feel it’s important to know things like this.
It’s not my belief – just look at the raw data and what psychologists say. We don’t know everything, obviously, but we know quite enough.
e: I’m not talking about what psychologists can learn, I’m talking about us, the public.
What psychologists say that we know enough? I've never heard this claimed by a professional in the field before.
It's not up to the public to learn the intricacies of psychopathy. You and I aren't the ones who need or can make use of that data.
It looks like I worded my comment poorly.
I meant we, as in regular people, not psychologists or the FBI, or other professionals.
We already know more than enough to enact laws and policies to fix this shit. We don’t need more data. These aren’t lone wolves, and they haven’t been for ages. They have very similar beliefs. We know the who, what, and why they do these things, and we have for a long time.
We don’t need to ponder these things anymore.
And yet, warning signs are still ignored by most people, and travesties like this continue to occur almost daily in this country.
I'd argue that we don't know as much as we'd like to think we do.
Obviously not enough for predictive analysis. Hunan behavior is predictable with enough data. Not that we should be collecting the amount of data necessary…….. right?
not sure what you’re suggesting.
Obviously the FBI and other authorities do predictive analysis.
I’m not talking about agencies – I’m talking about us. Regular people. We’re not doing predictive analysis. We’re not trained for it, and that would be a disaster.
I’m talking about regular people and the random nut jobs we elect to office. We have plenty of data to formulate and implement solutions, and discovering exactly which region of Norway the gods this loser thought he was listening to hailed from (or whatever, fake example obviously) won’t change that.
bunches of those in prisons already though.
It really disappoints me to see people say this when the dude clearly had mental issues, potentiated by the Army. It clearly says that the dude was hearing voices and wanted to shoot up a military base and everyone was like " 🤷♂️ let's throw him in a psych ward for two weeks, that will fix the issue".
Dude didn't get the help he needed, that was someone's child too....
He got all the help anyone could give him. We simply can't cure "I'm hearing voices and want to kill people" in a couple of weeks.
What we can do is ensure that it's not cheaper, faster and easier to go on a killing spree instead of recovering.
But that might impact the profits of the gun lobby, so they insist we instead cure every single person of every single mental health problem before they kill people with their legal guns.
It's possible for both things to be valid. I'm not American so the whole owning guns thing is weird to me anyway but surely the bare minimum is banning weapons that are expressly made for killing humans, like hand guns and assault weapons.
But alongside that, it's a fact that this guy did not get the help he needed, certainly not all the help anyone could give him. Two weeks on a ward is nowhere near enough time to treat someone in acute psychosis.
Literally all guns are made for killing, that's their primary purpose. There are tons of gun owners that don't use it for that purpose though. IMO we should work on mental health reform (and reforming other things) so people don't want to go out and commit mass murders. Of course, there's always going to be the unhelpable people but you can at least get rid of about 75% of them.
As I understand it, the primary purpose of some guns is not for killing humans - hunting rifles etc - but for those that are, the bare minimum of a total ban seems proportionate.
Do people not think that these guys will choose another gun if they ban all assault rifles? Semi-auto handguns are a thing. Also Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK with a bolt-action rifle.
That's why I said 'bare minimum' - as I said elsewhere, I'm not American so the whole owning guns thing is fucking weird to me anyway, I think the US would be much better off totally banning all guns but as that's very unlikely to happen, banning all guns created with the express intent of shooting humans seems logical.
The thing is, some people need guns. The US is so vast that North Dakota is completely different from New Jersey. In North Dakota, you could be living on a 50 square mile cattle ranch, and you have to protect hundreds or thousands of cattle from predators. If a pack of wolves jumps your fences and starts to attack your cattle, what are you going to do without a gun to protect them? Yell at the wolves? Use a bow and arrow? Those predators are literally destroying your livelihood. The cops, game warden, or Department of Fish and Wildlife aren't going to come to your rescue. You're on your own.
What if you live in Alaska out in the wilderness and a 600 pound Kodiak bear shows up on your property looking for food? Are you going to let it destroy your car, food supply and possibly harm your family?
People in these areas "live off the land", they fish, they farm and they hunt wild game to stay alive. They don't go to supermarkets and pick up packaged food and bring it home, they slaughter and prepare it themselves or else they starve. Guns are a necessity for them, using anything else isn't efficient.
In New Jersey, even in the most rural places, you only 5-10 miles or so from civilization. In more populated areas people feel that they need guns for protection from other people because the police forces largely suck in this country. If someone breaks into your house, it could take the cops 10 minutes to get to you. Are you supposed to let them do what they want while you're waiting for the cops or do you draw down on them as soon as they break in and say "GTFO or die"?
My parents live in a larger city in South Jersey with a few acres of land (3 houses in a row), my dad owns a few guns and is known in the neighborhood to go outside at night if he hears something unusual with a pistol stating "come out and get shot or get the fuck out of here." A few years ago about 5 houses on our street were broken into, they hit houses on either side of my parents three houses, but didn't touch any of the three they own. I wonder why... 😉
These are real things people have to worry about here. Europeans (and others outside of the US) simply don't realize how gigantic and diverse the US is. Watch Yellowstone if you want a sense of what it's like living out in the rural Midwest, or Life Below Zero which is a reality TV show about people living in or below the Arctic Circle.
The problem is that you can't say "only people that live in the wilderness can have guns" because it's written into our constitution that we can own guns (well, technically, it says we have a right to form a militia, but I digress...) and that isn't easy to change. It's a big problem without an easy solution.
No, it's not nearly enough time. But it's also far more time than it takes to buy a semi-automatic weapon in America.
The help he received is the limit of what any healthcare system, anywhere in the world could have given him.
The only mental healthcare system that would make America's gun laws safe is one that involuntarily comitted people for the rest of their lives, purely because they weren't healthy enough to sell guns to.
If by 'limit' you mean 'bare minimum' then I agree. Because it definitely is not the amount of help he would've received in some other countries. Two weeks would barely be enough time for an assessment to take place in some countries, let alone treatment.
As for your other points, I agree. I don't see why American's think owning a gun is in any way a good or positive or useful thing (unless you're a farmer or similar). But, if a countries leading cause of child death is guns and that country still does nothing about guns I really don't know what it would take to make change happen.
There was only a few months between him receiving emergency mental healthcare because he'd been hearing voices and him killing as many people as he could with a legal firearm.
That is not enough time for any doctor, in any country, with any form of treatment and any known medication, to have made significant progress.
This was not the fault of doctors.
I don't know enough about how the medical system works in the US to say who's fault it was he wasn't treated appropriately and neither do I know what his exact mental state was upon release. All I'm saying is that two weeks on a ward is barely enough time to assess someone who's in the grip of acute psychosis, let alone begin treating them.
I don't know what your experience is with psychosis (I have schizophrenia) but it very often is not something that is ever going to be 'cured' in that you go to a ward, they give you a handful of meds and two weeks later boom you're safe (and by safe I mean no danger to yourself, the vast majority of people with psychosis are not violent). It can take years to get to a stage where you feel stable.
This guy should not have been discharged after two weeks. And that is not particular to him - I can't think of any situation where any person with acute psychosis should be discharged from a ward after only 2 weeks. It's simply not enough time to treat someone.
Is it the discharging clinician's fault? Or the fault of the mental health system (or lack thereof) in the US? Or inadequacies in both? I don't know, I don't know how the system works over there. But that guy should not have been discharged.
Guns aren't the problem, it's the people that are the problem. Guns just make it easier for them. I'm all for stricter gun control laws federally but there are so many other people that need mental help and focusing on gun control doesn't help them.
Also you can stop the "I'm hearing voices and want kill people" in a few weeks, we do it all the time with medication, the problem is administering said medication because you can't force someone to take it.
The number of people who support gun control but oppose socialised healthcare is virtually zero.
Voting Republican ensures they get no help before they decide to become domestic terrorists but the moment they decide to buy a gun and kill as many people as possible, Republicans have their back.
So were the 18 people that fucking died. I get it, all the bleeding hearts need to help every wounded animal they find, but for fucks sake, how many chances do we give murderers and rapists? How many people have to die so that one can get the help they need. As a world, as a species, we have to learn when it is OK to let the wounded animal die. Not every choice has a perfect answer, but letting this asshat off himself instead of hoping that we can fix him and he won't do it again is the better answer. There is now a 100% chance that he won't kill anyone, and that's a much better chance than we'd have if we sent him off to a shrink and locked him up in a broken prison system.
I think you misunderstood @pete_the_cat 's point. They weren't suggesting retroactive treatment had he been caught, they were suggesting that if he'd been properly treated he might never have committed the crimes he did.
At least someone understands me 😉
It's ridiculously difficult it is to get adequate mental health support here in the US. I finally got myself help about 2 years back and luckily it was easy for me to find therapists and psychiatrists since I was in NYC. They're a dime a dozen. My parents live 3 hours south in NJ, my dad's psychiatrist retired and there's apparently no one in the area that he can see (he says he doesn't want to talk with a female therapist for some reason and feels video chatting is impersonal, he's 73). The closest ones available are about a 45 minute drive away.
I left NYC and my shrink couldn't write scripts for me anymore since he wasn't licensed in NJ. He was prescribing me 1.5-2 pills of 10 mg Ambien every night because everything else that we tried wasn't effective (I had been taking Ambien for like 15-20 years previously but it tended to make me feel like shit in the morning, but we solved that issue), and the only other thing that works for me is smoking weed. I attempted to see another psychiatrist through the same company (it's a telehealth company) but that turned into an absolute shit show. The only one I could see before a 3 week waiting period was a new guy. He wanted to follow the rules exactly and refused to listen to me, I told him the hour long intake was worthless since he should have a year's worth of notes from the previous guy. He wanted me to take all these tests to see if I was on it or needed it. After arguing with him for an hour, he said he would see if his supervisor would authorize it, they did after a week... But it was only for one pill a night, so I went through it twice as quickly. I couldn't get any more after that because I was moving states again and didn't want to go through the same bullshit again. They were more than happy to throw ADHD meds (Stratera, not a stimulant like Adderall) at me though! So here I am writing up this comment at 2:30 AM after drinking two 6% ABV beers, walking 7 miles today, taking 40 mg of melatonin and 100 mg of Benadryl. If I had weed, I'd be asleep by now but it's only medically legal here and I haven't figured out how to apply for a medical card, also my tolerance is stupid high. This could all be solved if they would just give me my damn Ambien that I need.
My dad has the same problem with getting his Ambien as well, though a different insurance company and doctor.
You know how other countries have these weird things in place to get people treated before they go on killing sprees. How about that shit?
Just saying "Oh good, that asshole is dead, let's move on" is the American Way.
That's the most fucked up thing about the past decade or two. This shit keeps happening and people are like 🤷♂️ "let ban the guns so they can't commit mass murders easily! That'll fix the problem!" meanwhile completely ignoring the reason that causes all these people to go out and commit mass murders against people that they don't even know. All this does is incite more violence and rage by those that feel that the government is overstepping its boundaries (second amendment douches) and they feel that they need to fight back against a tyrannical government. This country sucks for a lot of reasons, it's better off than some other countries, but it's just getting worse since the rise of social media, smartphones and internet adoption in general by the masses.
This dude could have been treated, he was suffering from paranoid delusions and probably had PTSD. IDK if he actually fought in the wars in the Middle East or if he was just purely in the Army Reserve, but if he was in the wars, he probably saw a bunch of fucked up stuff. There's a reason why a lot of vets either kill themselves or become addicts after returning home, they're discarded like garbage used by the government. It can take people multiple months or years to get the free treatment from the VA that they were promised, a lot of them never get it in time. He wasn't a psychopath (or now as it is more broken down into, Antisocial Personality Disorder) that enjoyed hurting people like many convicted mass murders, he was just fucked in the head. This could have been prevented, it was known that he was having paranoia delusions, our country just loves to be reactive and not proactive. Psych wards are absolute shit, my friend was in a "trauma unit" for a 72 hour hold and it's essentially prison where they throw meds at you to keep you sedated. Putting him in there for 2 weeks possibly made him worse off.
I'm not arguing that it couldn't have been prevented. I'm not trying to advocate for thought crimes or anything wild like that. I'm just saying that he killed 18 people, and there is a very real chance that if he was still alive he would try to do it again, even with treatment. Now, that chance is 0%, and I think that we owe it to the 18 people who died to agree that maybe this is a fine way for things to have ended. I'm sure potential targets 19, 20, etc. agree.
It's terrible. It shouldn't happen. We should be able to help out every person in the world who is in pain. BUT WE CAN'T. Everyone loves to kick the can down the road and let the blame fall to the VA or Mental Hospitals, or whothefuckever, but no one wants to do anything about it. If you don't like it, then you need to do something about it, because not enough people are, but the minute you talk about, "I don't have the time," but hop on Lemmy to argue with strangers, or "I can't afford to take time off of work," but buy a new phone or whatthefuckever that you don't need, then realize that you are part of the problem. If you think the people of the Armed Forces need better help, then what are you doing right now? Because it sure as shit isn't helping them.
And where are you getting this from? There's no way you could know that.
I can't necessarily do anything about it myself, and groups of people have been trying to usher in healthcare reform for decades but we're always blocked by lobbying groups, insurance companies that are worth billions, and people who simply don't think it's a useful way to spend money.
If you think banning guns will solve the problem, what are you doing about it? It sure as hell looks like you're doing the same thing as me, aren't you?
Where am I getting it from? History. It's rare for people with mental health problems to suddenly cure themselves after a few rounds at the bowling alley. There is a very real chance he would do it again.
And when did I say anything about banning guns? When did I say I was trying to help? I'm just here to argue with strangers.
Except 18 innocent lives?
Please don't twist my words.
These maga-cult psychos should kill themselves first and go on the killing spree second. Ban guns.
Until next time. Stay safe out there guys.
Same time next week?
Same Bat channel?
Fucking called it.
glad to hear that he's not at large - but it's unfortunate he wont be forced to stand trial and brought to justice for his crimes.
I'm fine with taxpayers not having to pay to jail him for decades.
I’m all for archive links and all, but what the fuck is this:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/robert-card-found-dead-maine-mass-shooting-suspect-lewiston/
What a coward... I regret not being able to give him his day in court and hold him in a concrete box for the rest of his long life.
This is a bad take, the dude was fucked in the head from the war and other stuff. It's not necessarily his fault, he didn't get the help he needed.
When something like this happens people always blame the guns or the guy, but this guy clearly had issues that everyone was like 🤷♂️. He then goes out and kills 18 people then himself, and people demonize him as if there were no other warnings. He was fucked from the beginning.
This isn't someone that was like "I wanna kill all gays/muslims/Democrats/etc..." he was just fucked in the head.
Edit: it seems the Reddit downvoting hive mind has followed us here. I wrote pretty much the exact same comment elsewhere in here and it gets 20 up votes, yet this has is at -14
Yet it's still the guns, be it in the hands of an officially mentally ill person or someone who's undiagnosed but can't descern reality from fiction none the less.
Assault weapon ban goes into effect, mass shootings drop drastically.
Assault weapons ban is allowed to expire, it goes up north of 200%.
Assault weapons are revered like Jesus himself and mass murder scenarios suddenly happen every goddamn week.
The prevalence of weapons and free availability of them to virtually anyone, be they mentally ill or fundamentalist radicals, is the direct cause of this getting so out of hand.
Not mental illness or healthcare.
Mental illness exists everywhere.
Mass shootings (and probably any shootings) on the scale and regularity like in the US do not exist anywhere else.
So the crazy people with the guns aren't the problem, it's just their access to guns that are the problem.
Tell that to Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kazinski, or the Tsarnaiev (or however you spell it) Brothers that committed the Boston Marathon bombing, Ted Bundy, or Jeffrey Dahmer (I could keep listing names if you would like). Not one of them used a single gun to actually commit the murders, but they killed or maimed a shitload of people. But yeah, it's the guns that are clearly the problem, not the bat shit crazy people. I agree that there should be stricter gun laws federally, but saying "crazy people don't kill people, crazy people with guns kill people!" is just ignoring the root cause, which is they're fucking crazy.
Mass shootings go down, mass truckings go up. If they want to kill they will find a way. Mass shootings are EXTREMELY rare, statistically, compared to other firms of murder and there is no way in hell that you can implement "assault weapon" bans federally... Hell, band are getting overturned as unconstitutional As We Speak!
Yeah, but getting a truck is harder than getting a gun.
How 'bout not doing that?
Getting a truck is definitely not harder than getting a gun in a lot of states. NJ has a mandatory 2 week waiting period. I could rent a truck in a half hour or less and run into a crowd of people I don't like very easily. You can't even buy a BB gun in NJ!
Dogshit take. "Can't stop all murders, so don't try!"
Please tell us about all of the mass truckings that happen daily in the UK and Australia.
Australia and England also have a lot less people than the US. Australia has under a 10th of the population of the US.
This isn't specific to people getting killed by trucks, but here's a list of all the mass murders that have happened in the UK , if you read it you'll see that most of them were committed with bombs. You eliminated guns and people kept killing people en masse! What a shock!
The UK and Australia also have socialized healthcare so you don't need money to get help, it may take a while though from what I've heard.
Can you show demonstrate that bombing deaths in the UK are proportional to the shooting deaths in the US?
Terrorist attacks are terrorist attacks, regardless of the weapons used. That's a lot of attacks for a country with 1/6th the population of the US.
Can you demonstrate that 'terrorist attacks' in the UK are proportional to mass shootings in the US? Evidence please. You have provided none so far.
You mean trucks, as in those heavily regulated vehicles that are hard to be licensed to use precisely because they can be used as killing machines? Those trucks?
What the hell are you talking about with "vehicles that are hard to be licensed to use precisely because they can be used as killing machines"? Are you trying to say that laws keep people from killing people with motor vehicles? Have you never seen a case of "road rage", or what happened a few years back when someone drove a car into a group of protestors in Charlotte, North Carolina (I think that's where it happened).
Pretty much anyone can get a car, you just gotta have money to get one, the only thing stopping you from going all GTA and driving on the sidewalks mowing down people as you go is because you're not messed up in the head. There was literally nothing stopping this guy from using a truck rather than a gun, it's just that a gun was cheaper and more effective.
From what war? He was never deployed nor did he ever serve in combat
Won't you think of the poor mass murderers??!
He was in the Army Reserve it said, I don't expect it to go into his back story. He could have been in combat previously. My buddy spent 3 years in the Army and he's been in the Reserve for like 5 years now because he gets good benefits from it.
Regardless of that, this dude has mental issues that were treatable but he clearly didn't get the help he needed.
No pity for fucking murderers. I'm fucked in the head and I know plenty of people with mental illness, none of us have murdered anyone.
Yeah... That's because they got the help that they needed. You don't really want a person with paranoid delusions walking around unmedicated. Also you just said "mental illness" which could be a wide range of things, there's very few disorders that bring you to the point of killing someone else and this dude apparently had one of them.
You're a big fan of his?
That poster is showing empathy and you are not. MORE violence is clearly not the answer to this problem. I know it's hard and emotions are high but these people are some of the ones most desperately in need of help.
Correct.
Also correct.
At least from me, they have given up any eligibility for empaty or help when they decide to murser innocent people.
There's a big difference between "the voices are telling me that if I eliminate these people other people will be happy and thank me for what I'm doing" and "I fucking hate all you left-wing, socialist loving, rainbow wearing pussies! You need to die to make this world a better place!"
One is someone with severe mental illness, the other is just a piece of shit human being.
Not from the viewpoint of the people getting eliminated and their loved ones there isn't.
I'd rather have empathy with them than the killers, no matter their motivation.
Where is the article
Sorry, I just fixed it
Press Conference (Starts at 16:30) https://www.youtube.com/live/e1z-776Bo4U
Man, you'd think they would have better audio for something like this...
Maybe this one's a bit better; https://www.wmtw.com/article/live-updates-lewiston-maine-mass-shooting-robert-card-october-27/45662444
?
interesting spelling
Correct spelling.
oh wow TIL.
Still feels weird though.