California shooting...... (Page 2)

I am absolutely talking about profiling.  There is a common misconception that rpofiling is illegal.  It's not.  Racial Profiling is illegal, criminal profiling is not.  i.e. - I can't stop you because you are black, or hispanic, or whatever because I believe black or hispanic people commit certain crimes, so now I'll stop you to see if you are a criminal just because you are black.

I can, however, stop you on reasonable suspicion that you are planning or in the act of commiting a crime......and part of my reasonable suspicion can absolutely be based on my prior experience of the actions of people commiting those criimes.  So......profiling these killers is perfectly reasonable and legal.

Your last sentence..........yes, I'm afraid I would be OK with that until such time as she could prove that they were locked in a manner that he did not have access to them.  I have a lot of guns.......nobody has access to them in my household except me.  Nobody.

There really is no choice.

Absolutely, but too bad.  HIPPA has been ridiculous anyway.....and has never protected anyone as intended.  All it has really done is protect people who are dangerous to others for one reason or another.

Crime is down.  That can't be argued. 

 I remain troubled by the idea that you can be killed at school, or a movie theatre,  or at work, just minding your own business. That's wrong.

 I investigate homicides, among other part 1 crimes.  Overwhelmingly I can look at a murder and find a motive for why someone was killed.  It's the primary investigative tool to solving them.  When you can be killed with no motive that can be connected to you in any way.....you just  happened to be "there"...that's a problem for society.  It whittles away at our general feeling of well being....it attacks the idea that if we aren't hurting anyone, we have nothing to worry about.  It's bad for us as human beings.

I have no problem with requiring people to be more responsible with their guns.....but some won't.  I have no problem with horrendous penalties for crimes involving firearms.  But I don't believe guns are the problem.  Elliot Rodgers killed with a knife and a gun, and tried to kill more with his vehicle.  A simple object can never be the problem.....I can make an instrument of death out of almost anything.

We have to identify and get help for dangerous people.....people who are headed down a road that we are starting to get a map of. I don't yet have a handle on what that mechanism may be.....but I bet we get there.  These acts are intolerable.

Just to address your point of taking guns out of certain households...

That would have done absolutely nothing in this case. For one he did not purchase a gun until he was living in his own apartment. Now the counterargument would be that if he had been adjudicated mentally ill at some point before he would not have been able to buy the gun at the gun store.

But even then I don't believe it would have stopped him. I read the entire 140 page manifesto over the last couple of days. He planned this "Day of Retribution" over a year in advance. He also had access to plenty of cash, he talks multiple times about a savings account he would not allow to go below $5,000 so he would have the cash he needed for his day of retribution. 

No gun law in the world would have stopped him from getting his hands on a weapon. There are plenty of places in SoCal to buy a weapon on the street for far less than $5k. Just the same as no drug law has ever stopped anyone who was intent on buying drugs. He specifically talks about "those damnable cops" he has no respect or fear of authority. And as LB pointed out, he used a knife on the first 3 people, then the gun, then his car. His original plan was to drive to his father's house to borrow his Mercedes SUV because it would do more damage, he fantasized about crushing people under the wheels of the SUV.

IMO, after reading the manifesto, the only thing that could have prevented this would have been intense mental health care. This "rampage" was a result of thinking errors that were coupled with severe isolation, to the point where he was too far down the rabbit hole to be saved by anything other than intense therapy to rewire his thinking patterns. 

The problem at the end of the day is how do you legislate someone getting that kind of treatment? How do you identify and then force someone into treatment? He never talks about therapy until the very end, but supposedly he is in treatment from the age of 8 (obviously had little affect on him). He does talk about being prescribed medication, but no other mention of his psychiatrist. 

The manifesto is an interesting read. You can see the progression from socially awkward, to isolated, to severe isolation where the ideas start to form that eventually lead to the "rampage". I put the blame squarely on him, but to a certain degree he is a product of the environment that he, his family, and his peers created.

What cases would those be? Links? Evidence? 

I am saying that often times legislation is a knee jerk reaction in an effort to "Do something to save the children"! 

I think you are proposing legislation that addresses a very, very small  issue while having a huge risk of abuse. Perhaps you have cases of a diagnosed mentally ill person taking guns from other's in their house. Sandy Hook is one, but again a law taking the mom's guns does not guarantee prevention of the shooting. If nothing else these shootings have taught us that the shooter plans for months, even years, in great detail, how they want to carry out the attack. Given a year and access to cash, anyone can buy a gun and ammo without any law stopping them. Heck they don't even have to buy it, wasn't it last year that a kid stole a gun from a house he did not live in and used that to kill 2-3 people?

People who are intent on harming others will find a way (Rodger's used a knife on half of his victims). Legislation such as you propose would do nothing to stop someone intent on doing harm, IMO. On the other hand, it would contribute to the stigma of seeking help for mental issues. If someone knows that the police are going to come and raid their family's home to eradicate all the guns and ammo and whatever else (kitchen knives?) if they seek help for depression, they are much less likely to seek help.

We need to encourage people to seek help, not create further laws to strip rights from them and their families if they seek help for a bout of depression.   

I will take them without blinking if I can get at them in a legal manner. We actually do, quite often, when we can articulate a threat.

Probably not.....but if I'm the guy making that call I take them.  Go kill someone with your car, or with a knife, or with your teeth.....whatever.  I'll do what I can and move on.

We take guns, arrest them, have people committed, blah,blah,blah.  They are usually out in a day or two....but we don't give the guns back without a court order.

I'm not a crusader, I'm just doing my job.  You'd be surprised how some folks smarten up when we start taking their property because they're idiots.  Want to keep your guns?  Don't threaten people. 

Let's try a different tact.  Are you o.k. with us committing the mentally ill and dangerous?  Seems that legally might be even easier than trying to fight their 2A rights.  And it is probably a better way to definitively decrease the amount of killing sprees.  Without guns they can still kill, but lock'em up and they can't.

See how something doesn't quite sound right with that.  Well taking peoples property when you don't really know if they are going to do anything is pretty wrong as well.  The problem is that there are very few people that can tell you a person is going to act in a certain way.  And a lot of mentally disturbed people don't even see therapists.  So the idea that we can just go find these people and take their guns is ludicrous.  And the idea that we should take away everyones guns is equally stupid.  

So we really don't have many choices.  I could go on about the lack of institutions and the integration of all people, well and non-well, into society and the changes that have occurred since the mid 70's, but I don't think anyone really cares.

No.

I don't have to know if they are going to do anything....and I don't care.  If they articulate a threat we take the guns. Simply, we believe them.  I'm not in the business of trying to figure out who is a serious moron and who is a pretend moron.  That's a doctor's job.

I'm disturbed by how ineffective therapy was for this young man.  From what I understand he had treatment for years.  Evidently, it didn't work. 

Also, Left Brain, I'm delighted to know that officers can remove guns (I hope this also includes, knives, cars, brickbats, nunchuks, slingshots etc.) from folks making threats.  This makes total sense to me.  We, of course, hear the stories of when police did not intervene soon enough but how often are these tragedies prevented by interference whether by police or by someone else.  Maybe we need to study successful interference.

Profiling also makes sense to me and I'm interested in typical characteristics of perpetrators.  Furthermore it seems there are distinctions between many of these mass killings.  Daniel listed one mass killing perpetrated by a woman that seemed more like a domestic violence incident in which many people were killed.  Then there is what we used to call "going postal"  where a shooter attacks his/her colleagues at the work place and finally the ones where someone goes after complete strangers.  Of course most of the perpetrators are men.  Is there any incident where a woman has killed multiple strangers?

Well to just jump in... I had a coworker that went through a very nasty divorce. I won't go into detail, but this guy was OUT THERE. I was absolutely dumbfounded how he still had a job. I am not one for sensational thinking.... but I regularly though when we make national news for a shooting spree... that the entire country would look at us like we were the biggest idiots around. The signs were everywhere... it was crazy. But the guy never did anything... well yet.  Because we just don't know right? He saw conspiracies every where of how his wife was out to get him, and management was involved, and the cops, and the phone company.... He would joke all the time about how his therapist says he is a ticking time bomb... and he would end a lot of discussions with.... and then there was a gun.... 

Seriously... the law and doctors were involved, and you would just take a glancing look and say my God, this guy needs to be locked up... but he didn't do anything... well yet. Things seems to have settled down... and maybe it is the "quiet ones" you really need to worry about. this guy talked about it all the time.... but we don't know do we? Because the guy didn't commit a crime to be locked up for. And if things go the way they are, he should not be locked up, because he didn't do anything bad. So what do you do?

I don't mean to hold this guy up as a DB, but it's the conversation we are having. If there was ever a workplace shooting here there would be a name that would come immediately to mind. And then everyone would look and say... just how much evidence did you need... yet, he is a law abiding citizen and has not cause anymore problems. So how many do you lock up because you think they "might" do something bad, and how many bad things will you ACTUALLY prevent by doing so?