Comments on: Mentally Ill, Criminals, Obama, Olivia, Guns

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 01:44:01 +0000

Future and, pretty much, present too, I’d say.

By: Kate Donovan

Kate Donovan — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 01:12:59 +0000

FYI, as one of the Teen *Skepchicks*, you have a bit of a typo.

We’re the Future of Skepticism: Teen Skepchicks.

By: Kate Donovan

Kate Donovan — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 01:12:59 +0000

FYI, as one of the Teen *Skepchicks*, you have a bit of a typo.

We’re the Future of Skepticism: Teen Skepchicks.

By: Corey

Corey — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 23:56:15 +0000

One thing I left out in the above post: it should have said “most-effective commonly used method” as opposed to “most-effective method.”

No doubt there are methods that are more effective than guns that are just not as common.

By: Corey

Corey — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 23:55:08 +0000

Greg,

Here’s another angle, not that I disagree overall with your well rounded analysis of the mentally ill and guns.

It’s well known that people who “attempt” suicide and fail may have not intended to succeed at all. It’s also pretty logical that many people who commit suicide are intelligent enough to know which method is more likely to be successful (statistically that is) and choose according to their level of commitment, whether consciously or not.

So the question I would raise (and which I feel was overlooked in your piece above) is: does restricting access to guns by the mentally ill actually have a significant deterrence effect on someone who is already highly motivated to die?

I am dubious of the tendency to lump all “attempted suicides” together as being equally motivated and then inferring that removing the most-effective means will reduce the suicide by X%.

Corey

By: DuWayne

DuWayne — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 21:40:24 +0000

Whether or not people who commit these mass murders are mentally ill is a contentious issue to say the least. One of the biggest problems is that the act of committing a mass murder of that sort is such a profoundly abnormal behavior that some argue it is enough to consider the perpetrator of such an act mentally ill. The reality is that some of them are and some of them aren’t. That is to say, some of them have a mental illness that might have been identified as such beforehand and possibly managed.

As far as preventing those who are mentally ill from committing such acts goes, we honestly don’t really do much on that front. The problem is that only a very tiny fraction of those of us who are mentally ill ever lash out violently against anyone except ourselves. People who commit acts of violence against others due to mental illness are rare and don’t tend to exhibit any particular characteristics that would differentiate them from anyone else with a similar mental illness. Of course a lot of them aren’t being treated and their mental illness is only identified after they commit a given act of violence, so there may well be an identifying characteristic that we just don’t have enough data to points to have noticed.

By: ron

ron — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 20:58:55 +0000

I’d defer to Jeff Snyder on this one: http://www.thefreemanonline.org/features/rights-without-exceptions-2/

Shall we deny the Right to free speech to the “mentally ill”? Freedom of assembly? Indeed, why should they be given a fair trial, due process and be spared cruel and unusual punishment?

Of course this is absurd, unless we’re speaking about the dreaded “firearms”!

Olivia is right to point to these statements as unjust.

By: The Nerd

The Nerd — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 19:39:45 +0000

On some level, I don’t think people want to believe that “sane” people (that is, “people like myself”) could be capable of terrible acts of violence. It’s too close for comfort to allow that a familiar person could do such a thing, so the tendency is strong to “other” the criminal. As though acts of violence themselves weren’t othering enough, we reach for a scapegoat.

The problem with this, as skeptics, is we’re not qualified to make such an assessment. Mental illness is a medical issue, and we are not that person’s medical provider. It is in poor skeptical form to make an armchair diagnosis, just as it is in poor humanist form to scapegoat.