Shooting at CT elementary school leaves at least 27 dead, 18 of them children

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Ghastly

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It is very much the elephant in the room in terms of acts of extreme violence in general, yes.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

and gloss over better mental health treatment

Do we even know if this latest spree killer was even within the system?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's worth pointing out, just as a hypothetical, that if certain types of guns were banned - genuinely banned - in the entire U.S, then you would eventually see a lot less of them as less would be manufactured due to the collapse of the domestic market for them.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yeah, there have certainly been cases in which the godawful state of mental health 'treatment' in the U.S has clearly contributed to a massacre (I dimly recall that being the case in the VA Tech thing anyway; though I might be remembering wrongly), but that's about as far as you can go. Most of the rest of the time we are generally talking of after the fact diagnoses, and often of the 'well, you'd have to be mentally ill to do a thing like this' variety. Which is about as useful as a chocolate blast furnace.

In any case, most people (and by 'most' I mean 'in excess of 99 per cent') people with mental health problems are no more dangerous than the rest of society. That includes the minority of cases that are things more obviously 'scary' than depression and the like. I don't see how increasing the stigma - something that is utterly ludicrious given how common mental health problems are - helps anyone. It certainly wouldn't help to prevent these regular little massacres; the violent punctuation marks of contemporary American society.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I'm actually pretty ignorant about this, so cite?

Literally just going off vague memory and haven't double-checked it, so don't entirely remember. I could easily be misremembering completely.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Hard to disagree...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

With regards to a point made earlier, it's worth noting that the big mental hospitals were shut down in more countries than just the U.S in the 80s and 90s ('care in the community' and so on) and that, whatever the merits or otherwise of this policy, no other Western country has this... problem.