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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.