Ann Althouse links to a fascinating essay by Clayton Cramer who seems to be a polymath of some sort and has done interesting work on the history of gun ownership in the U.S. as well as mental illness which he was spurred to research after his brother’s battle with schizophrenia.
Besides curtailing the free advertising that the media gives to mass murderers, blame for the shooting in Newtown, like the others, has been largely allocated to either guns or the mental illness of the shooters. If we want to decrease incidents of mass murder, someone’s freedoms will have to be curtailed, and we will either have to limit gun ownership in some way or identify lunatics and pull them off the street or force them, rather than give them the option, of taking their medications.
Since gun control is always the first thing mentioned and since the mass media will do plenty of work pushing that agenda, it’s worth reading up on some of the arguments critical of the deinstitutionalization of the mentally insane.
Though I’ve been a fan of work by people like Thomas Szasz who railed against the psychiatry racket and the therapeutic state which diminishes absolute human liberty, I have to admit that Cramer’s argument makes sense:
Do judges not want to lock up people in mental hospitals? I am beginning to fear that this is the problem. In the 1960s, psychiatrists like R. D. Laing and Thomas Szasz challenged the traditional view of mental illness, especially schizophrenia, one of the psychoses that causes so many of the problems we’re seeing. Dr. Laing argued that schizophrenics were, if anything, more sane than the rest of us. Dr. Szasz saw the mentally ill as victims as a plot by the government to oppress people — rather like the way the Soviet Union regularly declared political dissidents to be mentally ill. [3]
If these ideas had stayed in dusty journal articles, I don’t think we would be facing the problem we have today. This notion that mentally ill people aren’t really so different from the rest of us — perhaps even a bit more sane — showed up repeatedly in movies of the late 1960s and 1970s. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, They Might Be Giants, and King of Hearts are just a few of the movies that were popular as I was reaching adulthood, and I fear have profoundly shaped the thinking of a great many judges.
Normal guys
In an essay titled “Madness, Deinstitutionalization & Murder” Cramer wrote:
In the 1960s, the United States embarked on an innovative approach to caring for its mentally ill: deinstitutionalization. The intentions were quite humane: move patients from long-term commitment in state mental hospitals into community-based mental health treatment. Contrary to popular perception, California Governor Ronald Reagan’s signing of the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act of 196712 was only one small part of a broad-based movement, starting in the late 1950s.13 The Kennedy Administration optimistically described how the days of long-term treatment were now past; newly-developed drugs such as chlorpromazine meant that two-thirds of the mentally ill “could be treated and released within 6 months.”14
At about the same time, two different ideas came to the forefront of American progressive thinking: that there was a right to mental health treatment, and a right to a more substantive form of due process for those who were to be committed to a mental hospital. If there was a right to mental health treatment, then judges could use the threat of releasing patients as a way to force reluctant legislatures to increase funding for treatment.15
The notion of due process for the mentally ill was not radical. American courts have been wrestling with this question from the 1840s onward.16 While perhaps not up to the exacting standards of the American Civil Liberties Union, by the end of the nineteenth century, there was something recognizably like due process before the mentally ill were committed.17 What changed in the 1960s was the result of ACLU attorneys such as Bruce J. Ennis, who claimed that less than 5 percent of mental hospital patients “are dangerous to themselves or to others” and that the rest were improperly locked up “because they are useless, unproductive, ‘odd,’ or ‘different.’”18
Putting some numbers to the decrease in the number of psychiatric beds – a good proxy for deinstitionalization – is research by Glenn Currier, M.D.:
F1 shows the total number of inpatient psychiatric beds per 1,000 population in the seven countries over the past three decades. In the U.S. beds dropped by two-thirds, from four per 1,000 population in 1960 to 1.3 per 1,000 population in 1994. In Australia the reduction was more remarkable, with a tenfold decrease from 3.1 per 1,000 in 1960 to .3 per 1,000 in 1995. In Japan beds increased from one per 1,000 population in 1960 to 2.9 per 1,000 in 1995.
Currier points out that the mortality rate for mentally ill patients moved in the predictable direction – with Japan’s being the only mortality rate to decline.
According to the Kaiser Commission, 559,000 people were institutionalized in public hospitals in 1956. That number fell to 154,000 by 1980. As we know, the murder rate increased dramatically during this period, and the especially heinous crimes of random mass murder became a cultural phenomenon. As usual, caveats about correlation and causation, but interesting nonetheless.
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Guns don’t kill people, crazy people with guns kill people?
More old people having kids leads to more autism – leads to more kids like Lanza, Martin Bryant etc.
The early results of the experiment are coming in.
We have made a lot of fairly risky experiments in the west in the last 40 years – divorce, mass immigration, double-FT employee families etc
The results so far – not too good.
Great post Chuck. The dismantling of our mental health network of institutions was also a money saving move and a ‘blow to the patriarchy’ since women were locked up at far higher rates than men in MH institutions.
The main effect of de-institutionalisation in Sydney is the existence of cheap boarding houses in quite suburban areas full of crazy men, who are generally harmless but are worth keeping your eye on. I live pretty near to a couple of these. I have to say I haven’t had much trouble – though it causes one major deterioration in the neighbourhood – there is no way you would want your kids playing out on their own. Also I really have no idea about the squalid crazy hells the inside of these boarding houses might be. Social security is basically enough to keep most of these guys off the streets.
Not sure what could be done to pre-crime institutionalise these guys – not much I would have thought – the kids with middle class families who seem to do these murders are precisely the sort of kids who would not be put in an institution. At the very least there needs to be gun control around them. Lanza’s mother needs to take some heat on this one for keeping an arsenal.
Not sure what could be done to pre-crime institutionalise these guys
I don’t either; and it’s certain that proactive institutionalizaton of creepy middle class teenage boys would bring its own host of evils — essentially an open season to lock up and drug every quirky, odd, depressed, artistic, individualistic kid. If I’m gonna blame any environmental factor for that horrow, it will be two things:
- ubiquity of nihilistic torture-porn movies like Saw, Hostel, anything by Tarantino. In polluted waters, some fish stay healthy; many others develop grotesque qualities they otherwise would not have.
- absence of fathers. Show me any quirky, odd, depressed, artistic, individualistic kid, and give him an adult man — ideally his father — who takes him under his wing, and I will show you zero% probability of the boy becoming a mass murderer.
On top of that liberals demanded that private housing for people with low incomes, that is Skid Row, be torn down so that the mentally ill had no way of housing themselves while liberals grew rich on artificially inflated housing values.
“someones’ freedoms will have to be curtailed”
That’s the essence of it. no more old guys fathering autistics with old mutated sperm. no more schizoids and schizophrenics allowed free. no more gun owners. no more violent video game production. no more teasing or bullying. no more freedom for those with personality disorders. no more single moms raising sons alone.
Yup. You can see the divorce a few years before might have had a big effect.
This is pretty simple stuff. Humans are social animals. If you are excluded from society then you get a grudge up. Then you need a reason not to kill all the happy people around you. There are a number of factors in modern western society which militate against that..
1. The stigma around high levels of violence has been removed (I would like to wreak medieval violence on people like Tarantino and the pathetic Aussie nerds who made Saw).
2. The message that all we have is the here and now, and that social/popular success trumps moral ‘success’.
3. the social success of freaks and people who might generally be considered outcasts. The Lanza who fails socially can’t even console himself with the idea that society is punishing him in a consistent manner. He is left with the horrific reality that as Marilyn Manson gets to fuck hot chicks – Lanza’s own failure has to do with his intrinsic self.
Probably a lot of other stuff I have missed.
If you want to notice something interesting, just consider how many references there are to mental illness and institutionalization in classic cartoons like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. It was clear that this was in the culture. They’re constantly referencing the “funny farm” or “rubber rooms” and screw balls. Suddenly, guys would come in stretchers to drag off someone who’s “daffy.” If kids saw this today, they’d probably have no idea what they’re talking about.
The Acme Mental Asylum.
back to the topic of institutionalization. My grandmother, mother, and sister have schizophrenia, each onset in their mid-twenties after having children. They were/are really weird but never violent; the exception when my grandmother knocked over our Christmas tree in protest to being returned to the county hospital after an outpatient break. In the mass movement to deinstitutionalize, she was placed in a community home late in life. My mother was never violent but it was a relief when she was institutionalized and later placed in a community home. The family who kept her were motivated by the extra income from the state. She’s back in the county hospital, which I suspect she prefers. My sister has never been violent, but chose an ex-con to father her daughter who is now in jail for selling narcotics. Other than her jailed daughter, my sister is a long term employed net tax payer.
Even if they are not violent, schizophrenics create lots of social and family chaos.
Is there any evidence that violent media increases violence?
Also, while tragedies like this occur, in the big picture things are getting better. Violence has been decreasing in the long run, see Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature
The topic is definitely institutionalisation.
De-institutionalisation caused a lot more crazy behavior in public spaces. But even normal people behave in a fairly chaotic manner these days.
Imagine if a spectrum of ‘normal behaviours in public’ could be created. Then how do you think the index would have changed in the last 50 years ? I’m guessing – a lot more chaotic.
You see it more when you have kids. They are trying to make sense of what is going on around them – and I’m running out of good answers.
Chuck:
I want to give you like 5000 “thumbs up” for this post.
Clearly there needs to be a balance. Right now its often near impossible to get people locked up even just for observation . I have some horrid examples of people in my family being terrorized (including myself) when a family member had a psychotic break due to untreated schizophrenia. And this was the third time this had happened within a decade, so it’s not like this relative didn’t have a record. It took nearly 2 days of terror and threats and damage to the outside of the home I was staying in before something could be done. And to be fair, when people are like that, they are paranoid and a danger to themselves as well
I’d say for short observation periods (24 hours or less) it should be rather easy to get a person committed with the testimony of two other adults, only one of whom has to have some relationship to them. Of course this should be stored in a sealed record and kept for say five years and not used (because of ease of abuse) to have anything to do with firearms registration etc, if the observation period is not extended by finding signs of actual mental illness.
Longer commitments of course the person should have the right to a lawyer and a civil court as well as there should be an independent observation body (at the local levels) to check in and see if someone still needs to be confined.
I think that would help keep everyone’s rights protected. It’s certainly better than our current system which is to save money and drug indiscriminately, when any treatment is given at all.
Is there any evidence that violent media increases violence?
None at all in my opinion. How can there be ? What would a convincing study look like ?
Violence has been decreasing in the long run, see Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature
Sure. But no point comparing the middle ages to now. No common factors. Compare now to say the 50s. What do we have ? Spike after the 50s and then reduction recently to a fairly similar level. How did that happen ? Lot of people got locked up.
No-one wants to ban a lot of stuff. But it is past time to see these horrific mass murders as surprising. It’s reasonable to look at cause and effect.
De-institutionalization, another gift given to us largely by the chosen people. Any time you find a movement that points a gun right at the heart of the American civilization, you can take a guess who is largely behind it. In this case on both the psychological and legal fronts, Jewish thinking was at the thin end of the wedge, splitting open another rift in our society. What Chesterton called “the modern and morbid habit of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal.”
There was a mass stabbing in China the other day. 22 stabbed. Curious the MSM didn’t cover that. Where were the calls for knife control?
Confiscate all knives. Only police and military should have knives. Registering knives would save lives. If police knew which houses had knives in them, it would be safer. Most police chiefs say that increaseing thier budgets to enforce registration of knives would help. Ok, we could keep the little knives but ban the big scary ones.
Ryu
The other day or the other year ? How many died ?
Are you suggesting that the MSM is covering up Chinese knife attacks for the purpose of what exactly ?
If knives are so comparable with guns then why doesn’t the US military equip the Marines only with bayonets – it would certainly cut the deficit.
No-one here is going to advocate gun control. But seriously…….
Ryu said:
There was a mass stabbing in China the other day. 22 stabbed. Curious the MSM didn’t cover that. Where were the calls for knife control?
In the debates on gun control in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, gun control advocates have made a point of bringing up the Chengping school massacre as a comparison because nobody died in it.
Chengping school massacre
Should’ve been Chengping school attack. It obviously isn’t massacre if nobody died in it.
As seems to always be the case, you can get more information about the Connecticut events from the UK Mail then from any U.S. media source.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2248941/Sandy-school-shooting-Veteran-medical-examiner-moved-tears-pictures-emerge-tiny-victims.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2248782/Adam-Lanza-How-classmates-remember-genius-turned-heartless-killer.html
So, is there a racial difference in teh crazy?
“Is there any evidence that violent media increases violence?
None at all in my opinion. ”
Your opinion is worthless: Medical Xpress.
Ah, this whole thing is a set up. Once, I might have believe it was random. Every story on Yahoo is about guns? A new bomb threat at the Newport church? Shootings at a hotel in Vegas? Man found with 60 guns and threatens a school? etc etc etc?
http://news.yahoo.com/connecticut-church-near-shooting-evacuated-bomb-threat-180742511.html
Someone’s making a move. There is no coicidence in human affairs. There is design, purpose, the same reliance on fear that the beast always uses.
Time travel?? The black-coated guy in the background of that “Cuckoo’s Nest” still is taking a picture with his cell phone!
” If we want to decrease incidents of mass murder, someone’s freedoms will have to be curtailed, and we will either have to limit gun ownership in some way or identify lunatics and pull them off the street”
False dilemma/strawman along with an incorrect premse, and hence, worthless blog post. And hence, worthless ensuing discussion.
The us murder rate has been falling precipitously, with BOTH more guns ans (presumably) more crazy out there, for the past 15-20 years. Its smarter to find out what is ALREADY going right and replicate/ promote it, than to obsess over outliers. Especially at the expense of rights.
School/mass shootings are a classic case of moral panic. Like the USS Maine, gulf of tonkin, 9/11 and its subsequent wars, satanic music, subliminal advertising, etc, the impulsive actions taken when in their grip are always-ALWAYS-regretted.
Stop and think, people. Nothing will bring the kids back.
Fiasco
So you googled a report – good for you.
As my comment up the thread indicated – I believe violent media does cause violence. What I don’t believe is that any studies have shown this. Your drive-by comment hasn’t made me think any different.
Oh, and one more thing….for all the “game” losers out there…..this current gun issue is a perfect example of what “framing” is, on a national scale……and all you guys who fell for it are weak minded “betas”….Ha Ha Ha…Changing your facts to suit someone else’s opinion….actually, thats “omega,” lol.
@hossman,
what’s going right is effective trauma care. Less people die of penetrating trauma because they are more aggressively resuscitated. More penetrating trauma, but less death. Prehospital and trauma systems are unlikely to improve on this.
google: “wsj.com, Maryland shock trauma, homicide rates.”
@jz: “penetrating” te he
Except that Japan and Australia, despite their deinstitutionalization, haven’t seen mass murders and a homicide rate on America’s scale. The major difference is gun proliferation. Mental illness and it’s lack of treatment certainly play a part but the difference is guns.
Podsnap, hundreds of studies have been done on the relationship between exposure to violent media and aggression. The results are conclusive. Violent media increases violent behavior, just like watching prosocial acts increases prosocial behavior.
http://www.unc.edu/~stwolf/courses/33fall06/readings/BushmanPhillips2001.pdf
Figure 1 of this article gives you a rough overview. And the most recent research can also be found if you peruse the Iowa State Psych department. The research now is getting into moderators, fMRIs, and different types of media (video games, music, and such seem to have the same effect).
I also highly recomend Defining Deviancy Down by the late Patrick Moynihan. Here is a summary from an internet site. I think you will see it is similar to the issues many commenters are broaching.
Moynihan (1993) offers a simple typology with three “categories of redefinition.” The first is “altruistic” redefinition by “good people who try to do good,” however unavailing in the end. He illustrates this tendency by recounting the deinstitutionalization of mental patients, who now roam the streets and don’t get the care they need. The second type, “opportunistic” redefinition, Moynihan identifies as allowing deviancy to grow in order to justify a transfer of resources, including prestige, to those who control the deviant population. Interest groups develop strategies to redefine the behavior in question as “not all that deviant, really.” To illustrate this type of “defining deviancy down,” Moynihan raises the issue with which he has long been identified, the increase in the percentage of children born in the United States to families headed by an unmarried mother. The third, and most relevant to criminologists and criminal justice practitioners, is the “normalizing” redefinition which Moynihan likens to psychological denial. He draws on the work of sociologist Kai Erikson (who applied Emile Durkheim’s insights about deviancy) to derive the proposition that “the number of deviant offenders a community can afford to recognize is likely to remain stable over time.”
Modern society is quite safe considering the amount of broken people and families out there.
Given how rare these things are doing anything is frankly a waste of time, money and political capital
Also there are sound reasons we rarely institutionalize people anymore. Not only is it costly but its almost invariably abused for political purposes. We don’t live in and can’t create a society that is objective enough to have this kind of authority on any wide scale.
Yeah, at the rate it is falling we’ll reach 19th century levels of crime related violence in another 1000 years.
The Pinker book and data includes deaths from wars.
That’s the whole precipitous decrease in “violence”. Violent crimes are thousands of percent higher than they have ever been basically but there hasn’t been a war to turn a continent into a charnel house for a while, which is how Pinker arrives at this epidemic of “violence” in the 19th and 20th century which we have ‘overcome’.
If you are talking about some other civilian coming out of nowhere to ruin or end your life, which is the only kind of violence that matters, then now is worse than it has ever been excluding the peak of the last few decades prior.
@podsnap- when a man can’t support a man at 20 making eight bucks an hour, don’t be surprised that he waits until he is 35-40 to have his first kid. IIRC, France or GB had an incentive program for middle class people to have more children. Such couples were given x amount of dollars multiplied by each child up until the fifth child.
Now of course we wouldn’t do that her because it’s welfare aka income redistribution aka *said in angry talk radio voice* “those commie bastards are taking all of my money”.
Which reminds me, where is Whiskey these days?
P.S. as unfair as it may seem, if you want to live in a country where being kidnapped is a common occurrence, you have got to throw a few pennies at the bottom feeders to keep them off your back.
@pa good call on those two points but I would add that having a good dad vs just the man who had his way with my mother makes a difference.
Movies, music and a good portion of art is pure trash. Being sensational and “edgy” for the same of it with no real cultural contribution. If anything they quite poisionious both to young and fragile minds as well as curtailing cultural discourse, pushing lower class Americans with the help of stagnant and falling wages & poor public schools onto a race to the bottom.
Right chic. In Sydney – where I live property is so expensive the SWPL parents look like grandparents. Not trying to demonise the older dads (was later than average myself) but as a society we are juggling a lot of different ‘experimental’ balls in the air.
Kyle – what I know as a a fact that times are more violent where I am than they were in the 70s. I don’t give a damn what studies or ‘experts’ say – stats are juked, experts are biased, etc There is just no meaningful way to compare violence over long periods of time, no matter what the pointy heads say.
@hossman- I think the real question is, have the number of mass shootings increase during the past 15 years.
Also could the murder rate of those injured in shootings and stabings be falling because of advances in technology and healthcare?
@Podsnap- Exactly, raising a child today is very different versus raising a kid in the 1950′s.
@average man- Where I grew up, the thugs didn’t listen to Louis Armstrong and Sinatra when they were getting themselves pumped up for some fuckery. Some people are just too weak.
Well President Fake-a-tear made some ominous rumblings today about “we can do better than this” and “we can’t tolerate this anymore,” while the Left is going bat-shit ballistic about “more gun laws!” even though Goth-boy broke at least three Connecticut gun law. It’s the fourth one that’ll make all the difference!
And I, for one, am pretty tired of people saying we need to ban “automatic weapons” when they’ve been banned since 1934. Most of the twerps screaming for more gun laws have never actually held a gun in their little bubble lives.
Oh well. Obama Round Two is sure setting up to be some interesting stuff. We can be pretty certain that this is yet another “crisis” that won’t go to waste.
IIRC, homicides (on a per capita basis) have dramatically decreased over time (long term), with spikes in the 60′s and 80′s. I don’t know what the future holds, but our time is one of the most peaceful in recorded history.
Kyle, can you cite something for:
In the US homicide rates were about equal in 1900 and 2000 (~7 per 100,000 people) with spikes and valleys in between.
pinker is a retard and his book sucks and doesn’t prove anything except that if you re-define violence such that modern violence is not counted as violence, we’re less violent. cool story bro.
the reason the US has so many gun murders than anywhere else is because we have so many more blacks. end of discussion. it’s not the guns, it’s the africans.
0.7 in 1900, not 7.0 (and IIRC it is about 5 right now, not 7 anyway which is the same as it was in 1960 for an ‘all time low’). I don’t have the time to dig them up right now but sources I’ve read from the 19th century and earlier report even lower rates for individual cities which are implausibly low. The murder rate in the infamous ‘Wild West’ was 1 per 100,000, which there are countless article on that you can search for yourself.
I also said violent crimes, not just murder, but aggravated assault, attempted murder, rape, et cetera. This is even further complicated by attempted murder basically not existing as a charge, attempted murder being charged as aggravated assault, aggravated assault being a simple assault and a simple assault being a ‘welp, youths will be youths’.
Whatever the justice system can do to keep habitually violent criminals from having a violent crime on their jacket, they will do, which wasn’t the case in the 90s. The downclassing of charges was a reaction to the outrageously high violent crime rate in the 90s, and this downclassing is a huge reason why violent crime in general is down.
Also the murder rate from the 90s was only about 40% higher than either the 60s or today, and a huge portion of that is due to more efficient medical care, and probably the popularization of smaller caliber pistols as the weapon of choice among likely shooters.
There is also the issue of the legal culture from the Edwardian period (your 1900 roughly) to today in which crime was very likely to be both overreported then compared to now, that law enforcement took it more seriously then than now, that more minor crimes were likely to result in more serious charges (they upclassed instead of downclassed crimes including non-violent property crimes being classed as violent crimes).
So the rebuttal that people just got away with everything back in the olden times isn’t true. There was a moral panic over crime in the Anglophone world which is why they probably thought that a ~1 per 100,000 murder rate was horrific.
As it stands if you apply the legal standards of today to 1900 the jails would be empty, and if you applied the legal standards of 1900 to today then practically everyone would be in jail. So there was a way higher standard for what qualified as law abidance and yet crime was much, much, much lower than it is today.
The idea that we are living in a time of universally high peace in the streets and goodwill towards our fellow man anywhere in what could be a part of western civilization is a mind virus.
“Should’ve been Chengping school attack. It obviously isn’t massacre if nobody died in it.”
Here ya go:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7442327.stm
“the reason the US has so many gun murders than anywhere else is because we have so many more blacks. end of discussion. it’s not the guns, it’s the africans.”
Sad, but true. Chicago is gunfire central. I’m not worried about lunatics who show up with lots of rounds and multiple firearms at a school. I’m worried about the black lingering about on my street or the one in hanging about in the subway. That’s where the real danger is, the blacks.
Kyle,
See page 92 of Pinker’s book (you can search inside of it on Amazon) for one graph of homicide rate in the US from 1900-2000 which gives roughly equal rates for 1900 and 2000. He cites his sources as well.
Are you channeling Moldbug btw?
“Except that Japan and Australia, despite their deinstitutionalization, haven’t seen mass murders and a homicide rate on America’s scale. The major difference is gun proliferation. Mental illness and it’s lack of treatment certainly play a part but the difference is guns.”
There are some significant cultural differences, but this is correct. Semi-automatics and other fast loading and firing weapons should be banned from civilian purchase. That would make street crime less deadly and make it harder for crazies to mow a bunch of random people down.
Regarding the mass stabbing in China comment, it took place just last week. Almost coincident with the Newtown shooting. No deaths reported (but there have been a number of deaths in similar attacks that have taken place in the last couple years).
Need details?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2248054/China-stabbing-22-children-elderly-woman-stabbed-outside-primary-school-Chinese-knifeman.html
I can tell you from fist hand experience that there are a great number of Individuals with mental problems that have an extensive criminal history who “slip through the cracks” trust me they aren’t “slipping” through anything. The problem is well known to anyone involved. what makes it so frustrating is that you can clearly see over time an escalation in the level of criminal offenses and violent behavior. In most cases the courts sentencing is almost a joke. What it comes down to is money, politics, and political correctness. In the past money and resources were allocated towards Mental health facilities that were for long term treatment. (they were confined for treatment). But when it came time to cut the budget those were almost the very first to go. They were not something that a politician would look good fighting for… and then the political correctness that crushes all rational thinking moved in. Think about it, these are the same people who think that its wrong to execute a brutal murderer simply because that murderer is Mentally handicapped.
Trust me its only going to get worse, and if the freedom-for-safety crowd have their way NONE of us will be free OR safe!
““the reason the US has so many gun murders than anywhere else is because we have so many more blacks. end of discussion. it’s not the guns, it’s the africans.””
Except that other Western countries do have black populations now. They are involved in all sorts of crime and mischief. But they have a murder rate lower than the White American rate. If they had guns it would be higher but they don’t so it’s not.
Once you have a black underclass in your country, gun ownership is necessary to deter them from outright preying on isolated whites. England has an epidemic of home invasions. Those are much more rare in the US, especially in regions with strong gun culture. You don’t even need to own a gun; as long as punks think you might, they stay away.
In concealed-carry states, punks think twice before they fuck with you on the street. You don’t even need to have one in you, as long as they think you might.
When women want to ban guns, they’re just being women, scared of the big bad gun. When men do this, they’re either womanish wimps, or they hate average white families and wish their death. G Manifesto, you’re not a womanish wimp. So then do you hate average white families and wish them death?
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Amazing stats comparing London crime,in the 19th Century vs. 21st Century:
http://ukcommentators.blogspot.com/2008/07/garotting-panic-of-1862.html
Have you guys stopped for a second to consider the facts here? These rampages are not perpetrated by psychotics. None of them would have been institutionalized at the time of the shooting, except maybe Jared Loughner, unless you’re willing to start institutionalizing every marginalized, depressed, maladjusted, socially awkward teenager with repressed anger issues. The fact that there are so many adolescents in that state these days points to something seriously wrong with things, but it has a lot more to do with the social and cultural environment than with weakened mental institutions.
I don’t have Pinker’s book on hand anymore, I gave it away. But like I posted upthread Pinker’s stats include ALL DEATHS AT ANOTHER HUMAN’S HAND.
In Pinker’s stats for 1900 he includes all military deaths for all of western civilizations, on both sides, and he counts all executions, et cetera, which I already linked from Pinker’s own website.
IIRC he also does not count most modern wars or embargos that cause death because they happen in proximity to Israel or are good for the Jews so don’t count or some shit.
This article (http://www.haciendapub.com/medicalsentinel/homicide-and-suicide-america-1900-1998) which cites its’ sources (NHCSS) shows the homicide rate in 1900 in the US to be 1.2. Even that seems high to me, but it sure as hell isn’t 7, which you only get by including deaths in Africa from British colonialism, the Chinese Boxer Rebellion, et cetera (which is exactly what Pinker does).
They also very likely wouldn’t have come from broken homes, or have been given tens of thousands of dollars in research grants as unaccomplished 20 somethings with which to isolate oneself and go insane.
It’s also very possible that yes Holmes and Lanza might have both been institutionalized because it was basically normal back then to call for the butterfly nets if you were just a little too off-kilter. Maybe they would have avoided being committed, I don’t know. Not just ‘psychotics’ were committed though.
There are too many variables to say. The mother knew there was a problem, but it was too little, too late, and she obviously didn’t go far enough. James Holmes parents effectively weren’t in his life, and in our culture it’s totally normal for your 20-something son to just fucking disappear from family life for years on end.
A lot of things could have and probably would have happened in the recent past to keep these people’s feet on the ground.
Yeah, basically you can have Switzerland, with it’s wealth, liberalization, high gun ownership rates and no crime; or you can have niggers and a police state like in the UK where even steak knives require a background check to purchase.
Thanks for spelling that out, but I think everyone already knows this.
A lot of things could have and probably would have happened in the recent past to keep these people’s feet on the ground.
Right, which is why this is a cultural, societal problem. Locking up the “creepy” or maladjusted and throwing away the key isn’t the solution. These people need to be taken out of the public school circus, which they are obviously maladapted to thrive in and put in an environment where whatever strengths or talents they do have can be developed towards productive purposes and their social difficulties can be worked through, or at least alleviated somehow. In the past the community and families would have had more of a hand in that, but since the disintegration of both, I suppose a bloated tax funded government scheme is the only other option. But hey, at least women are enjoying their divorce prizes and alpha harems.
I’m wary of giving the government powers to decide who is sane and who isn’t and therefore who gets to be locked up. A balance must be struck, but the government has a history of badly abusing this power.
Gorbachev,
I agree. If the Southern Poverty Law Center is any indication, anyone who opposes feminism would be locked up or worse.
In the case of Lanza here I’ll note that his mother had him at a moderate age. 32 is not post fertility for a healthy woman and not especially liable to throw bad offspring.
Its not as good as say 25 or 22 but its fine.
And as for mental health, even if we could trust the government we don’t want to spend the money for full service care and can’t afford it anyway. The US has way too much crazy.
Also baring locking him up it wouldn’t have helped here, he already failed a background check to buy a guy He just stole one.
Kyle,
Pinker does discuss homicides and war deaths separately at times in the book. The graph on page 92 is about homicide deaths, not total war deaths. I’ll read the article you posted if you take two minutes and search on amazon for the word “homicide” in Pinker’s book and look on page 92.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/0143122010/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1355837836&sr=8-1&keywords=pinker
All right TFH, the jig is up, you can now quit posting as “Nikos.” Don’t get me wrong though, please keep visiting this comments section. I mean this most sincerely when I say that I am amused by your critiques.
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Get your tin-foil hats out folks.
One interesting connection to the tragedy that took place at the Sandy Hook school is that the father of Adam Lanza has a connection to the theater shootings that took place in Aurora earlier this year by James Holmes. Both fathers of the shooters were allegedly expected to testify in the Libor scandal that rocked the banking world in June.
http://www.examiner.com/article/libor-scandal-grows-as-the-fathers-of-two-mass-murderers-were-to-testify
modernguy: “None of them would have been institutionalized at the time of the shooting, except maybe Jared Loughner, unless you’re willing to start institutionalizing every marginalized, depressed, maladjusted, socially awkward teenager with repressed anger issues.”
The latest guy, too – apparently his mother was trying to have him committed, which may have caused him to snap.
The guy who killed his ex-classmates at that Christian nursing school in Oakland, same thing – they’d expelled him because he was visibly disturbed with a potential for violence. The guy a couple of weeks ago in Colorado? People said he was nutso, too. Maybe not committable, but perceptive observers are noticing that these guys really are fucked up.
I’m not sure that can be turned into a workable legal standard for easier mental-health committment, because the devil is in the details, but if you see someone who is kind of “off” who used to have a connection to your facility, *don’t let him in*.
CR – Clayton Cramer is an amateur historian and professional programmer who is a *serious* social conservative. He did some very important research for gun rights, including being the prime mover behind the definitive takedown of Michael Bellesiles’ fraudulent “Arming America”, and providing material for the legal teams supporting gun rights in Heller and MacDonald. After dealing with his schizophrenic brother, he did the same level of thorough research into the history of mental health in the U.S., and wrote another book about it.
Despite being an amateur historian and not a lawyer, he was invited to participate in the law blog “Volokh Conspiracy” (mostly law professors), but uninvited after too many people complained him being wayyy too anti-homosexual.
I would consider the following before promoting any kind of reinstitutionalizing campaign.
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2012-08-21/are-people-being-thrown-psychiatric-wards-their-political-views
Government can be described as a legal monopoly of the use of force. Given its size and nature, I think it rational to fear government more than any number of lone “nut” gunmen. I remain adamently opposed to any return to instutionalization.