Re: 2012 Presidential Election - The Day after the Aftermath...
I have a fix, get folks the mental health treatment they need, that's where the problem is
We have to do that pretty cautiously however, the Soviet government used "mental hospitals" to "treat" dissidents because by definition anyone who criticized the regime had to be insane.
It seems to me there is no one single "fix" that satisfies all of our conflicting desires. For example, when you do a background check on a potential gun-buyer, are there HIPPA restrictions on what can be disclosed?
Or if you have a person whose behavior is well-controlled while on medication, yet is not reliable in taking it as prescribed? Do we surgically implant dosage dispensers into their bodies?
My utopian solution is to raise our children better from infancy. It's fool-proof if you can afford to wait 70 years for it to come to fruition!
Next-best is to have more extensive and more in-depth interpersonal involvement with some sort of "community" that includes respect and decency as a minimum condition to join. When everyone in the small town all went to the same church, shame and ostracism were quite powerful tools to enforce a shared morality, a shared standard of behavior. That's gone forever perhaps yet we must develop something analogous. It takes hard work and will power; meanwhile, these days laziness is promoted as a civic virtue (look at how much money is made from people being on line, for example!).
We already have sufficient laws that, were they obeyed, would have prevented it. We've been a bit naive about how dangerous people on the "fringe" can be as your population grows larger (if you have 10 million people, three standard devations of crazy is 1,000 people, who are not publicized. If you have 300 million people, three standard deviations of crazy are 30,000 people, each of whom creates a big media storm when they go off.
How many people remember when Streaking at sporting events was a craze? One thing that helped stop it was when broadcasters refused to televise them and papers refused to run their pictures. They craved notoriety and were denied it. Suppose the identity of these nutjobs was kept secret, no one ran any explanation of his life story, no one ran interviews with his childhood friends or twice-removed neighbors asking questions in hushed breathless voices.
People used to "go postal"; no one does any more. What did
they do differently to stop it? What changes worked for
them? Can we learn and use them more broadly?
and there are five or six stories of a person who tried to commit a mass shooting and was stopped by someone with a legal carry permit. Why aren't they more publicized? Why aren't those citizens held up for widespread acclaim and praise? That would serve both to discourage other potential shooters somewhat (they are cowards! they only go to places where they know there are no guns), and it would also serve to inspire future potential rescuers (especially if we combine it with increased training and sensitivity on how to spot trouble before it starts; we certainly do NOT want hordes of vigilantes roving our streets either! )
I've lived in many different parts of this country, and I can say anecdotally that, in my personal experience, when people throughout the entire population learn how to use guns safely as children, there is very little gun-related crimes; while in places where only criminals and gang members learn how to use guns, NOT as children, but as adolescents, there is a lot of gun-related crime.
We require everyone to learn how to drive before we give them a drivers license, we can require everyone to learn how to use a gun safely before we give them a permit to buy and own. I'd much prefer that learning come as part of the mandatory education we require all children to attend to age 16, maybe in 3rd grade or so. The rec center in many cities in the west has a shooting range in the basement as a matter of course. Those guns rarely are used in the commission of a crime.
