Thinking the unthinkable | Hacker News Reader

Thinking the unthinkable

anarchistsoccermom.blogspot.com

963 pointsaaronbrethorst442 comments

Post like this terrify me. What if there isn't anything that can be done? It seems like there are some people that are just born broken or at some point they break.

Men who experience schizophrenia it often stars in their late teens or early 20s, and late 20s/early 30s for women [1]. I had a friend in high school who was completely normal in every way. During his first year in college he literally just went crazy. It wasn't a singular event but over 6 months he lost it and he's never been the same. He has access to mental health care and after several years his parents even had him committed for a few months. Nothing helps and even his parents have finally accepted that he will never be the same or even normal.

I don't know what we as a society are supposed to do in these cases and that's what terrifies me above all else.

[1] http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/healthlibrary/conditions/ment...

This may be politically incorrect to say right now, but I think the genes associated with mental illnesses that have a tendency to lead to violence will be phased out by a future generation sometime within this century and the next.

We'll soon enough try gun control. That won't stop mass killings. Then we'll try increased mental healthcare access. That won't do much because we'll struggle with the Constitutionality of locking people up in mental hospitals when they aren't yet a threat to anyone.

By this point in the future, genetic screening will be ubiquitous and affordable, possibly mandatory. Cultural attitudes will shift with this, and it will be expected for people to study their genome and compare openly when dating. People will pass on mates due to a high risk of major issues occurring should they have children together (this already happens in the Jewish community with Tay Sachs). Eventually people will be a lot more picky and aware of heredity and we could see a lot of hereditary mental illnesses removed from the population.

(I want to make clear I'm not expressing an opinion on or endorsing this, merely trying to make a prediction)

I don't think there is anything wrong with the idea that one day people will try to optimize their genes, even if it's only self-selecting.

Yet:

1) Hereditary factors can only explain a small part of the picture. Eliminating hereditary factors that predispose people to developing mental illnesses would only eliminate a fraction of the problem. Environmental factors play a huge role.

2) The point at which what you describe happens is a long way off (if it ever happens), at least a couple of decades away. In that time, we need a viable solution.

Part of that solution should be better access to mental health care. I don't think there will be any constitutional issues with institutionalized treatment of a child who has threatened to kill someone. AFAIK, a child's parent has considerable legal control over that child and the decision to institutionalize/otherwise treat.

EDIT (reply to below):

> wasn't known to have any violent tendencies >What were the environmental factors behind Lanza and Holmes (Aurora)? Both came from upper-middle class backgrounds. Both grew up in idyllic environments with "normal" parents with careers and health insurance.

I'm afraid it's simply to early to say these kinds of things. We still do not have a complete picture of Adam Lanza's life. I don't think any of us can say anything about his personality until more facts emerge. A middle class existence is not the end-all be-all of mental stability. There are tons of other factors - family situations, bullying, school environment, the list goes on. And obviously, hereditary factors may very well have played a role in his case.

>Meanwhile, someone without a mental illness has a moment of rage and threatens to kill a guy at a bar. Do we lock him up and drug him too?

This is a straw man. Firstly, I was only talking about the case of children/adolescents whose parents have legal powers over them. In the case of an adult (whose parents obviously have no legal control), the problem is that those adults (incl. the guy who threatens another in your case) will get sent to jail and there won't even be an attempt to diagnose/treat a mental illness even once they are in jail. The guy in your example would not get diagnosed with something he doesn't have. He'll just be in jail. Expansion of access to mental health care should include expanded access to inmates.

But the CT shooter was never in trouble with the law and wasn't known to have any violent tendencies. And most people are not like the OP blogger: they aren't going to turn in their child to the authorities.

A schizophrenic may not ever have violent tendencies. Then, one day a voice tells them to kill everyone.

Meanwhile, someone without a mental illness has a moment of rage and threatens to kill a guy at a bar. Do we lock him up and drug him too?

What were the environmental factors behind Lanza and Holmes (Aurora)? Both came from upper-middle class backgrounds. Both grew up in idyllic environments with "normal" parents with careers and health insurance.

>What were the environmental factors behind Lanza and Holmes (Aurora)? Both came from upper-middle class backgrounds. Both grew up in idyllic environments with "normal" parents with careers and health insurance.

This is, of course, the crux of the matter. Clearly there is something in America's environment that makes us far more prone to this sort of thing than other places, with or without gun control. Identifying what that is will be critical to preventing this from happening again. Gun control can reduce the body count, but even a body count of one (suicide) is not acceptable. The silver lining to this is that these events raise a dramatic warning to us that there is something deeply, seriously wrong with our culture.

Do we actually have statistics showing America to be worse about this than other places? It sounds like the kind of thing that people just assume after hearing about a sensational, attention-grabbing tragedy.

Remember when there were huge epidemics of suicide and Satanic ritual abuse in the 80s? Or rather, people said there were. In reality, suicide rates remained mostly flat, even declining slightly overall, and the evil Satanic cults were a myth. So, be careful about postulating something deeply wrong with our culture, when there may well be another explanation.

>15 of the 25 worst mass shootings in the last 50 years took place in the United States. In second place is Finland, with two entries.

That's a bit of a disparity.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/14/n...

The United States also has more than 50 times the population of Finland. Normalize!

Clearly you didn't take time to read the aforementioned article at all, or you would've seen the graph that puts the USA at roughly a bit more than triple the assault deaths per 100k vs an eyeball average of the other OECD nations (down from maybe 8-9 times as many in the 80s.)

I pulled the above statistic because of the specific context of mass shootings. But hey, at least you got a pithy retort out of it.

Here is the list http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/07/20/the-worst-mass-shootings...

It certainly looks like Scandinavia and the UK might have a problem. Europe as a whole still has fewer than the US for a similar population but it is high. None for China, India or Brazil. So it is not just about normalisation...

Apparently, Brazil had its first just last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_de_Janeiro_school_shooting

Please. 'it is high' in Europe'? Playing it fast and loose with the word 'high' if you ask me.

Of those mentioned in the list; 6 in the past 25 years are in Europe. 3 shootings, on this list alone, happened in the US in the past 6 months! Most European countries probably haven't had any of this type of thing happen in the past 25+ years.

Well, its not very statistically significant anyway, but the number outside the US and Europe at all is very small. There are too many in Europe to say they are non existent... sure nothing like the US. Most European countries are very small which was what this thread was about.

no. just a "honor" murder each week. usually knives though, so does not count.

You are right, knives don't count in comparing the amount of shootings. Also, Europe is not a Turkish mountain village.

The UK did take some action after theirs; after Hungerford, all semi-automatic rifles (centre-ammunition) and shotguns taking four or more rounds were banned, and after Dunblane all cartridge ammunition handguns were banned within Great Britain (except .22 single-shot, which were then banned about 5 years later).

The most recent UK shooting of note, Derrick Bird, used a double-barrelled sawn-off shotgun and a .22 (bolt-action) rifle. Would it have been worse if he'd had handguns and semi-automatic rifles? We'll never know, but he did try to acquire another firearm mid-rampage so he clearly felt like he needed more firepower.

From that list, I count 16 events in the US and 4 in the EU. Populations are 501M (EU) and 316M (US) (Wikipedia). So 4:1 incidence rate, 6:1 adjusted for population. Very similar to the overall homicide and gun death rates.

I'd agree that Scandinavia has a bigger problem (EU would be at 2 without Finland). (Norway is not part of the EU, and I also didn't count the US soldier going on a rampage in Afghanistan).

Norway is culturally part of Europe, joining the EU does not really change much.

Gladly!

Firearm related death rate, per 100K of population.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-re...

US: 9.0 Switzerland: 6.4 Finland: 3.64 Germany: 1.1 UK: 0.25

...

Why are we limiting to firearm-related deaths? Within hours of the event in CT, there was another mass attack at a school in China - that one by knife, wounding twenty or so.

While guns may have increased the severity of the damage, the lack of a gun did little to stop a similar event from taking place. People that want to do harm to others will find a way, and while there's something to be said for trying to lessen how much damage they can do, that seems to be a poor attempt at treating the symptom rather than the disease.

Put another way: let's look at the overall violent crime rates by country instead. Here we go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... US ranks at 4.2/100k

I'd also like to point out your selective data pull is very misleading (whether it was intentional or not I don't know; I'll give you the benefit of the doubt). Of those 9 deaths per 100k, 5.75 are suicides and 0.27 are unintentional; only 2.98 were murders (so we have nearly 75% of our murders by gun, but overall a quite low murder rate compared to over a dozen countries at 30+/100k and four over 50). Also from missing from your quote - the US is #12 in terms of firearm deaths per capita, not #1 as your data implies.

The only data that is really relevant to gun control arguments are murders that would not have been possible without a gun and (probably more relevant) accidental gun deaths. Anyone sufficiently determined to kill themselves will find any number of ways, so that's almost completely irrelevant to the discussion.

Precisely: the attack in china wounded twenty. As of this writing none were killed. The "severity of the damage" is a highly relevant measure, not something to dismiss.

"...poor attempt at treating the symptom rather than the disease". Sorry, the symptoms (i.e. lots of people dead) are the problem here.

My data pull was primarily for the countries mentioned earlier, I added some others I find relevant because I have experience living there (never been to Finland). I did not imply the US was #1, the extract was obviously a very short one.

The Wikipedia page you cite tells essentially the same story as the Washington Post article: of the OECD countries, the US is by far the most violent, more than 4x more than Germany, for example. Take a look at the countries surrounding the US in the statistic! If you're not embarrassed, you're not paying attention.

The "would not have been possible without a gun" argument is specious, as is "anyone sufficiently determined" argument for suicides: you are assuming that anyone with a suicide attempt is sufficiently determined, as is someone wanting to kill someone. This is a fallacy, both logically and from what the data show.

Not being able to stop everyone is no excuse for not even trying to stop those that can be stopped (or reducing the damage...heck if no-one gut hurt, would the "rampage" even be a problem??)

In 2010 a similar attack occurred in China, and over twenty were killed.

Do you mean this series of attacks? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_attacks_in_China_(2010–2...

If Wikipedia is correct, this was a whole series of attacks, sometimes with multiple assailants, with each attack having far fewer fatalities, so the point about reducing the damage stands.

Still awful.

Yes- point taken. Also here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/world/asia/14china.html

I believe we were ignoring the severity of the damage because we were attempting to investigate what mental factors went into making people decide to go on killing sprees. How much damage they did ultimately doesn't affect the factors that led them to decided to make the attempt.

It seems that that data gives statistics for a single year, and not the same year for each country. While the annual gun-related death rate may be somewhat stable for the U.S., I would guess it varies a lot from year to year in smaller countries depending on whether there was a major incident that year or not. I'd want to look across a similar-size population (e.g. all of EU) and (say) a 10 year span, and then calculate #deaths/year/1,000 population

The Wapo article links to a graph that has the "deaths due to assault" (not limited to guns) for OECD countries: http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2012/07/20/america-...

Luxembourg (total population 1/2 million) has the higher variance you mention, the rest of are pretty stable.

Have you considered that this might be a purely statistical phenomena? What I mean is, isn't it possible that such things occur in the US only because there are so many people in the US, and once the population gets large enough, the number of outliers get large enough, in absolute terms, to become noticeable? It's often forgotten that US has the 3rd largest population, after China and India (although admittedly far behind either one)

I'd certainly be curious to see statistics that adjust for population. The stat quoted by 'slyn above is that the next country for gun violence over the last 25 years would be Finland with 2 incidents, but Finland has 1/30th the population of the U.S. It would be more appropriate to look at the EU overall for comparison. Last year there was a shooting in Norway with 70+ dead and I believe one in southern France in a school.

It is interesting to see of the Norway shooting falls in the same statistical category of "mad shooter" or in something like "homeland terrorism". But yes. There seems to be a rise of similar incidents all over the developed world, although access to guns is in the USA a lot easier than elsewhere and that reflects on these excesses. For example, knivings (is that a word?) seem to be more common than shootings around here.

The most common term is "stabbing", e.g. "stabbings are up 25% this year."

That makes sense: with a gun we shoot -> shooting; with a knife we stab -> stabbing. Although it could also be a slicing or dicing then, I suppose :-)

In my opinion, this is the correct way to think about the problem, but you should go deeper, and keep in mind that cultural traits aren't solely good or solely bad - they might be both good and bad, like a prescription medication with side-effects.

Elsewhere in this thread I wondered if American dynamism and individualism produces individuals both great and vile - and that America tempered the 'vile' segment with moral education and community ties that's since gone on the decline. That's my culturally-based theory, but I'm sure we can find other plausible ones as well.

I'm betting on that you are completely wrong about that. That the signs were completely obvious to everyone around these guys. People knew that they were some deeply fucked up kids with huge mental problems long before they went on their killing sprees.

But mental illness is something incredibly shameful around the world and maybe even moreso in the US. Almost no parent will ever be able to admit that there might be something wrong with their children. And for the people around them, the most convenient path is to ignore the problem and say it's "a phase" they are going through.

There are plenty of deeply fucked up people with huge mental problems who do not go on to kill anyone.

Should we lock up those people to prevent the small number who might go on to commit violent crime?

There's a huge number of possible ways to offer help to people. A million things can be done, but what everyone does is pretending the problem doesn't exist.

You haven't thought it through. Try to visualize how such a program would be implemented. You run into intractable problems. One: who defines what traits are undesirable? (Do you imagine this would ever be uncontroversial? Aggression, for example, is needed -- sometimes.) Two: who determines how future behavior is linked to genes; and how is it ever proved that future behavior is only and certainly genetically-based and in no part linked to upbringing? Three: what if a genetic pattern associated with unwanted behavior turns out to be linked with another trait that is desirable (e.g. the subject of this story is both violent and highly intelligent; what if both traits come from the same genes?). Four: by what means do you coerce parents into not breeding? Is deliberate breeding a crime? Punishable by what? Five: what do you do about accidental children? Execute them? And so on. No democracy would ever install such a scheme.

You're not understanding me correctly. I'm not saying it will be a government mandate or coercion of any kind. I'm saying cultural attitudes will change on their own as "genetic awareness" becomes more mainstream.

I'm making predictions about the future here and you are looking through modern day eyes. Twenty years ago people would be appalled to see the kind of things we openly share on Facebook with our friends today. In the future people may have no qualms about sharing their genetic profiles. There very well may be an eHarmony type service that matches based on potential offspring rather than answers to a questionnaire.

The problem with what you're saying here is that many people TODAY, myself included, are appalled and what people naively share on Facebook today, and most probably this too will change in time.

I think this is more of a boyish fantasy or the landscape of a sci-fi novel, which by the end people will inevitably reject. It's not like this is some thing that will be instituted in a vacuum.

This is a very confused comment. Parents make these kinds of choices all the time, albeit on much coarser grounds (bring the down syndrome baby to term, or not?). If we started doing finer-grained genetic screening, clearly the choice would be the parents, and the question of "accidental children" doesn't even make sense: by default, the kids we make will be 'accidental' just more thoroughly, optionally, screened.

I think this relies on an overestimation of the planning and foresight that goes into most pregnancies. About half of US pregnancies are unplanned, and it certainly seems like there are large segments of the population for whom even relatively short-term risks, like the propensity of the father to cheat--or never be involved at all--are basically ignored when choosing a mate.

The truth is that humans, like all other animals, have been selective breeding all the time, it's called evolution. We select our mates based on their phenotypes (like aggression, intelligence etc). It was more so in the past than now. People used to abandon infants that are born "defective" (we now have abortions). Parents selected the mates for their children because they are believed to be better judges of "good" phenotypes. It was customary to ensure that the family of the respective mate has no members with mental illness. Yet, after millennia of selective breeding, we still have all the crazies among us. The fact that those "bad" genes still exist must mean that they confer some benefits to the carrier.

The interplay between genes, RNA, proteins and other macromolecules is so complex that I doubt we can pin down a mental illness to a single gene or safely remove a mutation that causes mental illness from the gene pool without reducing other collateral beneficial traits.

The benefits that natural selection causes to propagate are those which improve the organism's reproductive opportunities. Those "benefits" aren't necessarily all that great when you've got a civilization. To take it to a ridiculous extreme, if a gene exists which makes you kill all the other men in your village, then impregnate all the women, that gene will be pretty popular in the next generation.

That ridiculous extreme must be quite a popular gene, because it still exists: It's called war and mass war rape. Yet, we are not all warmongers and rapists (I hope). So civilisation is already putting its slow but steady evolutionary pressure onto our genes. Let's hope that it's putting our gene pool onto the right track.

I simply don't share joonix' optimism that genetic screening can eradicate "unbeneficial" traits within next centuries without wrongly removing "beneficial" ones, before we have a better and complete understanding of our biological makeup.

More dangerous than ignorance is half-knowledge.

This is also a bit simplistic I think. I don't think most abortions are because of a physical defect or deformity, or at least, many abortions are not. As well, in many cultures that selected mates for their children, it usually did not exactly involve phenotype checking, but usually other kinds of economic and cultural reasons. Also, the fact that "bad" genes still exist does not mean they confer some benefit, that's a very panglossian view.

I think gene therapy and possibly selective abortion would be common as well. People won't leave someone they love because of some simple genetic tests when there are other alternatives.

Talk this over with a molecular biologist. Its never gonna happen. Some pathologies are (or have components that are) hereditary. Of those things, a handful are specific gene mutations or groups of mutations. These mental illnesses are so poorly understood... None (to my knowledge) have been shown to be genetic. And its not just that we haven't found the underlying genetic reason. There probably isn't an underlying genetic cause! These systems are so complex, and DNA is only one piece of the puzzle. Epigenetics is a field that isn't getting enough public attention. Its probably responsible for much of the more nuanced hereditary pathologies and patterns that people observe.

Mental illnesses are not understood at all, I'll agree with that.

I would be hesitant to assume that they're not genetic, though - I've personally decided not to have children entirely due to the fact that mental illness is so prevalent in my partner's family (about 50% of the current < 30 year olds in the family have either been hospitalized or tried to kill themselves, and I'm not willing to subject a child of mine to those odds). I frankly don't believe that this family has just been randomly unlucky, it seems far more likely that there's something genetic behind it, especially since even the "sane" people in the family tend to be so unhappy that they probably should have been treated for the same things that the "crazy" people have been hospitalized for.

DNA may only be one piece of the puzzle, but I think it's a big enough piece of that puzzle that we need to look into it a bit more. I can't recall the last truly "crazy" person I've interacted with that didn't have something messed up in their family history...

That said, epigenetics definitely could be the issue here, my partner is of Irish stock and that's one of the classic cases of epigenetic poisoning (the famines caused all sorts of epigenetic nastiness, a lot of which has been shown to persist for generations). I totally believe that some lineages have seriously detrimental baggage associated with them, and I believe that hers could be one of them.

In the end though, I don't know that there's much difference - a person's heritage, one way or another, ends up determining their children's susceptibility to mental illness, and if that susceptibility is high, a responsible "parent" should perhaps choose not to have the child.

Just my opinion. And to be fair, if everyone followed it and was a "responsible parent" (i.e. not having kids if your family history is fucking nutters), the woman I love would not have been born, so I don't hold it that dear...

Families have other ways of passing on psychological problems besides genes. Just wanted to mention that. Not saying that genes never play a part, I don't know.

Mmm...I'd hedge my bets a bit. I think a better generalization is that many psychiatric disorders are caused by genetic abnormalities (or clusters of abnormalities, or complemented with epigenetics), but that the potential pool of candidates is vast. It only takes a few rotten eggs in the whole batch to ruin things.

It's like a rocket. You need all the parts of a rocket to work or you won't get off the ground. If you are really unlucky, it may even explode

With psychiatric disorders, it's similar. Break a few choice genes and the whole system goes to shit. But unlike a rocket, it keeps working, just not in the fashion that other brains works. So you get some kind of disorder like schizophrenia or bipolar.

I was involved in a few projects where they were mapping schizophrenia with SNPs. Looking at the data, it's clear that some individuals cluster around certain SNPs...but most of them are scattered everywhere. Lots of things can cause schizophrenia, because it really isn't a single disease but a set of common symptoms.

Right... I agree that psych problems could be based in genetics, its just not my field. But these things can also be environmental, developmental, epigenetic. They can also be mixtures of all of them. I was just saying that we're probably not going to have a genetic test for psych conditions and be able to eliminate them. Sure, maybe one or two combinations of mutations could be screened for, but never most, no matter how far genetics research goes.

Is "wanting to kill people" really so far from the norm as to have a gene associated with it? What would the gene be responsible for, "Propensity to give a fuck about other living beings"? Because in my mind, the line between being "sane" and killing everyone in sight is pretty fine.

One's logic could go like this, "Man, everything sucks, and those kids down at the preschool are always so damn happy. Fuck Them. If I'm not happy no ones gets to be happy. Lock and load assholes." Suddenly you've got another tragedy. I would imagine people that are suicidal sometimes feel like this. Maybe it depends on how introverted or extroverted they are. The introverts disappear quietly in the dead of night, and the extroverts start mowing down pedestrians in the town square and then blow their brains out standing on the Mayor's statue.

If a gene could be isolated for "suicidal tendencies" and also for intro/extro we might be able to reduce future events like this. But just because someone is a suicidal extrovert that hates everyone it doesn't necessarily mean they're going to start killing people. Maybe the ones that don't are just pussies and the gene for "guts" or "courage" would also have to be isolated?

I don't know I'm just rambling. I ask myself why I don't kill my neighbors. Is it because I'm "sane"? Well I guess so, if "liking others" and not wanting them to be sad is a characteristic of sane people. But I firmly believe that there's a tiny slice of murderer in all sane people, and I like to think of people like Adam Lanza as having just a bigger slice, because putting them in a different category of "mentally ill" sort of feels like I'm denying a part of my own nature.

Having occasional thought about killing isn't unusual - but the article describes having these thoughts far more often than is normal, and acting on them with much less provocation.

An analogy: Any computer will crash when running buggy software - but a computer with a bad stick of RAM will crash much more often. The symptoms of both those problems will be fairly similar.

Likewise, most humans think about killing from time to time - but some mentally ill people think about it much more often. Unfortunately with humans one can't run memtest86+ or swap the ram out and see if the problem goes away.

I don't think it's so simple as to written off as some genetic issue certainly and, to be honest with no malice intended, the idea there will be no mental illness at some point in this center is the dumbest thing I've heard in awhile, but I also don't think the "line" between being "sane" and "killing everyone in sight" is fine; why would that be the case? It seems if it really were as precarious as you say, we would have a lot more violence. Only a very small percentage of people become these sorts of rampage shooters.

Hmmm maybe fine isn't the right word.

Wasn't there a time not too long ago when tribes of people would go around raping, pillaging, and slaughtering others just for the hell of it? Because it was fun for them? If our world had respawn, I think life would turn into a sort of valhalla-ish existence for a not small percentage of people, and I bet many would learn about a part of themselves they did not know existed, or had supressed.

Maybe rampage shooters are just people born in to the wrong time period, where in another they would fit in perfectly. The line isn't fine, but they aren't as different as we make them out to be.

There is almost no mental illness with data that links it to genes. Schizophrenia, for instance, has no data showing a genetic cause and plenty data linking it to environment. Oliver James is lovely to read on this, if you fancy.

That's not true. There are dozens of candidate genes for Schizophrenia. None have been linked conclusively, probably because none of them are entirely responsible.

I think the general agreement in the field is that genetic abnormalities are necessary but not sufficient to cause Schizophrenia. If you are going to crack, it's usually because you are genetically predisposed to it and in the right environment to trigger the disorder.

Using Schizophrenia as an example, there are plenty of mid-20's males that are in stressful environments...but don't become schizophrenic. A minority of those males will have a genetic abnormality that predisposes them, and they start hearing voices.

A few randomish thoughts:

The U.S. (and Australia, which was a penal colony) likely has a higher than average (at least for Europe) incidence of what I will call "maverick" traits -- gene based traits that make people less able to go along to get along, for some reason. They aren't necessarily bad traits, they just aren't very conducive to "domestication". The tend to be some of the same traits necessary for activities like exploration and other risky behaviors -- including founding a start up. One of the things YC asks about on its application is rule breaking behaviors. Folks who are too compliant are not well suited for doing groundbreaking work. So I don't personally think that breeding these traits out is necesarily a good thing.

The reason America has higher rates is because a lot of our ancestors left Europe (or other countries) when they just could not fit in. Many left to seek the right to worship as they saw fit -- in other words to think and believe as they wished. So it looks to me like Europe already tried to get rid of these genes and, instead of extinguishing them, mostly exported them, thereby concentrating them in a couple of countries. People with these genes tend to not "go quietly into the night". They tend to go kicking and screaming. So I do not think criminalizing people for having such traits is a good policy. It is better to find ways to help them live constructively with certain traits and to carefully distinguish between traits, which are value neutral, and outcomes or behaviors, which are not value neutral.

I usually do not say this publically, but if Joan of Arc were alive today, she would likely be in a psych ward having her meds adjusted, trying to make the voices stop, instead of playing midwife to the bloody birth of modern Fance. I have also read that Alexander the Great was likely bipolar. Again: I am not so sure that our desire to rid ourselves of people who aren't "normal"/adequately compliant or "cure" them of their differences is such a good thing. I think there are better ways to deal with peope like that than simply trying to break them. I think the goal of breaking them is likely a loss for both the individual being broken and for society. Take that too far and we lose important human traits, like adaptability.

I have a genetic disorder. It is more common in populations which historically were subjected to high death rates from a particular infectious disease (though I don't recall which disease). In other words, carrying at least one gene was likely protective against dying from this infection. Thus this deadly genetic disorder became more common in cases where it helped you survive in the face of worse things. The same is true of Sickle Cell disease, which is protective against malaria. Viewing genetic variations of that sort solely as defects and not as adaptations misses the big picture. If they weren't adaptive in some situations, they wouldn't be selected for by evolutionary pressure.

Do you really believe that though? It seems like a nice just-so story that has a nice sociological tie-in with "frontier ism." I don't think that's genetic at all; I think it's just hand-wavy. Somewhere around half of people in this country believe the world is about 6,000 years old, think people can live to be 900 years and so on; I don't know if that is "mavericky." I think the race to find genes for every kind of behavior is a bit misguided and simplistic. I don't think Europe was trying to get rid of any genes during the times of pilgrims and so forth. The pilgrims were a dreadful lot that many were happy to see go but I don't think it was as you describe; it may fit in nicely with this explanation, but I think it is too simplistic.

I have a genetic disorder, as does my oldest son. It is homozygous recessive, which means my youngest son and ex husband are carriers. Both my kids were extremely challenging to raise and I ended up homeschooling them both, in part to not have my family wind up being "the next Columbine" in the headlines. I have a long list of ornery relatives and have a fair degree of familiarity with physical traits with known psychological tie-ins, such as red hair being associated with high pain tolerance and also high risk tolerance.

So, yes, I believe that. Europe may not have been explicitly trying to get rid of genes per se, but they did essentially ship literally boatloads of undesirables to both America and Australia, countries which have some things in common in terms of having maverick social norms, more so than a lot of older cultures.

I can't prove it in a few comments in a public forum, but it isn't just some idea I dreamed up earlier this afternoon. It is rooted in many years of reading and discussing the connection between inborn traits and characteristics like tolerance for risk. I am not someone who likes risk. But my genetic disorder has made me unable to go along to get along, even though my default personality makes me wish I could. So, yes, I see clear connections between socially difficult behaviors and genes.

Taking the US as an example, how many Americans share a lineage that can be traced back to the pilgrims? I would venture that the majority of the population comes from immigrants outside of the parameters that you provide. Does this higher incidence of 'maverick behaviour' come from a minority of the population?

You don't really need to be descended from a pilgrim. Most people who immigrate have a higher tolerance for risk than those who stay behind. Going to a strange land, with new rules, is very risky and challenging. Some people find ways to mitigate that risk, like marrying an American and then coming here. But it is still a huge life changing thing where you don't really know the outcome.

You realize the US will likely be waging wars for the foreseeable future, and that being a soldier will likely pay more than minimum wage, certainly up to past the age of procreation (I like to think of this as the event horizon for evolution; evolution only "sees" up your youngest child; if you then die, you gave still made the right evolutinary choices).

The military will have need of sociopaths and killers.

I don't think the military is exactly enamored by the thought of sociopathic killers, they tend to not follow orders very well. Come on, that's a bit much!

Story time!

My brother (3 years younger) suffers from pretty much the same global disorder as described in the blog; the main difference is that we're in France (well, my family still is; I moved a few years ago).

Throughout childhood, he presented a mix of pretty much every single psychological disorder possible- bipolar, paranoia, kleptomania, depression, etc. He was extremely manipulative, and knew how to be perfectly sweet like the author describes. I always saw it as a very contrived act on his part, one in perhaps in lost himself at times- but I believe that when he presents this adorable facade, he is mostly in control of it. He has definitely threatened my parents or myself with a knife, and I'm glad we have decent gun control in France. I believe that if he hadn't grown up in a wealthy privileged environment, he'd be dead or roaming the streets today.

IQ tests put him in the ~120-130 range, and psychologists recommended a wide array of solutions, ranging from the behavioral (for example one determined that it was because he didn't feel secure and had enough privacy, and suggested that he should get locks for his room etc.- that led to an entire different set of complications, and that psychologist was abandoned promptly.) to the medical (although he was never subjected to the wide variety of antidepressants cited in the article- France in the 90s-early 00s seemed to avoid those sort of things).

Ultimately, nothing worked. Things got much, much worse with adolescence; he went to 4 schools, all very different (one public school, one catholic private school, one boarding school in the countryside, etc.), and got kicked out of all of them but one. My parents did find a few things that mitigated his conditions: for example, he was in the boy scouts for a few years, which helped.

Today he's 20, barely graduated high school; he now lives somewhere in the French mountains with his girlfriend, chopping wood and harvesting grapes. We haven't talked (other than "hey what's up" at family meals once a year) in 7 years or so.

I could probably write an entire book on the topic, but would rather avoid to do so for the moment; but if anyone has questions, I'll gladly answer them.

I'm adding this to my list of counter examples, for when some tries to tell me I have to get my life together before I'll find a girlfriend.

It's something that we hear a lot. My naive non-american mind believes that it's not about finding a girlfriend, but finding the right person. It's preferable to have your life together for the former, but I'm not sure it makes much of a difference for the latter.

> My naive non-american mind

Does this sentiment not exist where you are from?

My mother's family traveled all over Europe while she was growing up, and she picked a new boyfriend in each new school. She told me, she just never really considered not having a boyfriend, even if everyone involved knew it was pretty temporary. So it's not a purely US thing.

Well, the romantic relationships you have in middle/high school are quite different from the ones you cultivate in college and later in life; my point referred more to the latter.

Definitely not as much.

In my experience, people in the US in their 20s (both during and post university) tend to be more in the mindset "I want a relationship" (and they're actively looking for one, using dating sites, personal networks, etc.) or "I don't want a relationship" (in which case they actively avoid it); whereas in France and European countries, people tend to be more neutral by default and then hop into a relationship when the right person comes along.

Those are just my observations though- they could well be skewed.

That's really interesting.

Hi, thank you for sharing.

My question is, do you think your brother is better off now than he would have been had he been institutionalized?

That's a very hard question to answer, as I don't know what exactly would have happened if he had been institutionalized. French psychiatrists has a very different approach than US ones (although that might change) when it comes to diagnosis, so it's really hard to say.

A question could be - what would have been the goals of institutionalizing him? To make him more fit for life in our society with our standards; or to prevent him from harming others and himself?

Since you're asking specifically if he would have been better off, I'm assuming the former of the two- in which case no, I don't think he'd have been better off. I do think he's physiologically incapable of sitting at a desk, taking orders, living in an extremely codified manner where one has to respect certain hierarchies, hide certain feelings, etc. - and that perhaps he has now found a way to detach himself from it. I don't think that any institution could have addressed that.

But I'm sure that there are some people (former teachers, classmates, etc.) who think it'd have been better if he had been institutionalized.

In Australia the policy has been to essentially close institutions and make mental health a community care based solution. Once upon a time the methodology for dealing with schizophrenics and other more severe cases of mental illness was to sedate, blast neural connections with electricity, and if that didn't work, cut it out.

With more modern drug regimes, extreme behaviour by these poor souls is more 'manageable'. And in many cases I think, that's the best you can hope for.

The effects of this policy are varied. On one hand, it can make the polices' job more complex. There was a period some time back where the police were being confronted regularly by dangerous behaviour, which lead to deaths by police shootings. It spawned a rash of confrontations and corresponding shooting deaths, which appeared to be escalating. It soon became obvious that these mentally unstable people were getting a fast ticket to pain relief, assisted by police action.

This lead to improved education for the police, in respect of resolution and firearms training. The situation deescalated after that, and the cycle of depression, anger and suicide by proxy was broken.

Australia is a large country, only a little smaller than the United States, with a population of only 20 or so million. So there are regional areas separated by reasonable distances from the major capitals. Two regional cities near to Melbourne that I am aware of have become the nexus for individuals that are part of this community care attitude.

Like attracts like in this instance, and a natural clustering has occurred so that the proportion of the population with mental health issues is greater than the average.

To get an inkling of the degree of organisation involved as a result of these policies, just google 'bendigo mental health'.

Thats intriguing. It seems like he has somewhat adjusted over time. Did you witness a general improvement in his personality as he grew up? Did things especially improve in his late teens perhaps?

I definitely think things have improved (although they can always go south at a moment's notice- for example last year, he dropped and broke his phone, which triggered an "episode" that lasted pretty much the whole day.)

There are likely multiple factors at play- it's quite conceivable that puberty hormones make the matters worse, and that he's slowly exiting this phase, it's something less in the way.

But I also think that as he grows up, there are less "triggers" for his episodes. Episodes are almost always triggered when something or someone contradicts him (for example in the original linked article, when the mom tells the kid he can't wear the pants he wants to wear). Now that he lives by himself in a small village with no parents, no teachers, etc., (when you think about it, schools are terribly oppressive environments) the triggers are much less numerous.

From your perspective, when & how did it start? Was he always like that, or is there a specific event you remember as the start of this?

I've always remembered him being like that, and my parents corroborate this. Apparently when he was a newborn/toddler, he would throw huge tantrums, was very hot-tempered, impossible to manage when he was sick, etc.

This leads me to further believe that his case his mostly genetic/physiological in nature.

Glad to hear your brother could end up somewhere happy. My younger brother fits the same archetype but is only 17.

He is in the mountains chopping wood with his girlfrend?

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Humans vs Dolphins “For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

― Douglas Adams

The West tried institutions (poorhouses, asylums). But forced institutionalization just isn't compatible with basic human rights. It was also expensive and failed to provide a venue for effective treatments.

Starting in the 1970s the West deinstitutionalized[1]. But at least in the US we never sufficiently funded community care, which was supposed to replace mental institutions. So the severely mentally ill end up living on the street (where they're often the victims of violence[2]) or in jails and prisons (which if you squint sort of resemble mental institutions, though without the emphasis on medical care).

Whatever we as a society try next, we need to recognize that with our current medical knowledge there are no cures for mental illnesses, only management. So our approaches need to be both humane and long-term. Returning full-circle to institutionalization in jails and prisons utterly fails those tests, offering brutal conditions, short-term containment, and usually insufficient medical care. We can do better.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prognosis_of_schizophrenia#Viol...

Are mass murders compatible with basic human rights?

I mean, if at some point we identify a set of mental diseases that (a) can be accurately diagnosed; (b) can't be cured; (c) make the patient a violent threat to society - then wouldn't forced medical institutionalization be a better option then both current options of street-life or jails?

I share your feeling. We are at a loss what to do as a society, and what's more, we're most likely more at a loss than people were in very structured societies of the past (not that I wish to live back then).

My first guess (being diagnosed, not self, with some weird neurotransmitter problem and very lucky to have found a cure which makes my life normal again) is that the medical/pharma world is not giving a shit at the moment. It's like financing research for rare diseases : no money to be made here.

Second guess is that (oh yeah, you'll like that) most psychologists are charlatans (the biggest of all being Freud, then Lacan imo) and they got traction after WWII, for obvious reasons : western societies at large were scared shitless of the Reich's positions as to all problems having only to do with genetics (jews, mentally ill people,...). So we got 60 years of this "be nice, try to understand" bullshit.

Third, what we learned with Aspergers is that something as radical as autism can be a continuum. This is quite a revolutionary discovery, and does not seem to have sunk in yet. We all know as programmers the difference between discrete and continuous, we live in a world built upon bits after all. There might be thousands, hell maybe quintillions of such continuums which chained together lead to a unique pathology each and every time : it's also called personality.

Roughly speaking, we are still apes (alas not) trying (hard enough) to further our scientific knowledge of psychic disorders.

My feeling is that until the human being, the individual, is placed at the center of all the fabric of our societies, the fact that each case in unique and requires a specific attention, we will get nowhere. Money has no personality, money is the key to almost anything as comes to survival in this world. This is the thing that has to change... Someday. Because money likes not diversity.

There are schizophrenia genes in my family. I can't wait until I'm past the typical time of onset, because thinking of losing my mind like your friend did is one of my deepest and most terrible fears.

I was reading this and it made me sad. Not because of the obvious content but because of the diagnosis being thrown around and how when reading them my immediate thought was "I hope it isn't a personality disorder". I say this knowing full well that many insurance companies will NOT cover anything related to personality disorders because they feel that they aren't curable.

I still remember when I called my insurance company at my first job after college to see if they would cover an exam to diagnose an autism spectrum disorder for myself. Their response was as follows: they would cover it if I was found not to have autism and they would not cover it if I did have autism. I remember taking time in the private room I was in at work and just crying. It was just so backwards. In fact, I have been putting off going back for further testing solely because the official diagnosis won't benefit me but could only harm me. At least now if I go see a therapist, the individual symptoms would be listed as reason for the visit instead of possibly something that no insurance company would cover.

My heart really goes out to you. Can you imagine replacing "autism" with "type 1 diabetes" in your story and any health insurance company acting that way? Unthinkable. I hope our culture gets to the point where it stops regarding some illnesses as unworthy of care.

Thank you. I am just baffled that an insurance company would pay for an unnecessary test instead of one that was deemed necessary. It seems completely contradictory to how they want to make money.

I am sorry about your situation but also curious as to how you think insurance companies work (if you don't mind me asking).

They negotiate a rate with providers in the network and pay out based on that. My point (and I don't think it was very clear) is that the system currently is set up (for at least that one company) so that if you don't have autism they will pay for the exam (which isn't cheap). Since there is no barrier to getting an exam, everybody could go and get the exam and for the majority of the people the insurance company would pay because they would (most likely) not be diagnosed with autism. The insurance company would pay out for all of these people for a useless test. Granted that this is only if a bunch of people wanted to waste their time and the time of the doctor(s), but it would still not be beneficial to the insurance company.

I am sorry, I don't really get what you think they do here. I worked for an insurance company for five years. The longer I worked there, the more policies I canceled. I am sure they won't go extinct just because I think what they do makes Darth Vader look warm and fuzzy, but their test policy is exactly in line with their goal: If you are diagnosed with autism, they don't want to cover treatment.

If you actually need treatment, they want to find a way to limit their liability. They want most people paying in to need little or nothing from them. They work like Las Vegas in that they design the game so the house wins much more often than it loses. It is the only way to pay the employees and keep the doors open. But at least Las Vegas has the redeeming value that you can view any small gambling losses as the cost of entertainment, as no different from buying, say, a movie ticket to be entertained for the evening.

Edit: But thank you for replying and have an upvote for indulging my curiosity.

Edit2: This is a criticism specifically of health and life insurance. Car insurance is another ball of wax and I think has more redeeming value.

"They want most people paying in to need little or nothing from them."

Exactly. I'm not conveying my thoughts very well. The way it is setup would allow people to treat the autism diagnosis exam as preventative care. If they know they don't have autism or suspect they don't, they can go get the exam done and insurance will cover it, even though there may have never been a valid reason for that person to take the exam. Granted, this isn't going to be something that many people (if anybody) would do for fun or to make the insurance company suffer, but it is an option the way they have it setup. I hope that makes more sense on my end.

The insurance company is well aware that few people will seek such an exam unless they have reason to suspect they have a problem. It is similar to the idea that you don't want to sell insurance specifically and only to cover pregnancy. Any woman looking to sign up for such coverage is extremely likely to be planning on getting pregnant.

Insurance is about risk management. In order to have "risk" there has to be chance. A lot of human behaviors are a choice, not a random roll of the dice. The insurance company is well acquainted with that fact.

I understand your framing, but, no, it doesn't really work that way. You just aren't going to have enough people who are sure they do not have autism decide to get tested for it for it to be a serious risk for the company. Their current policy covers their ass: if you get tested to confirm your diagnosis, you get to pay for the test and, apparently, volunteer to pay out of pocket for any further treatment related to your new diagnosis. They can merrily claim to cover the test if you do not need it because, in practice, the odds are really poor you won't get it if you do not need it.

I hope that is a little clearer from my end.

I always get rather nervous when I see posts like this. Things like this obviously happen. However - statistically - people with mental illness are no more likely to commit violence than anybody else.

See http://psychcentral.com/archives/violence.htm for example.

When people with mental illness are violent it's usually for the same reason everybody else is. It's usually aimed at family when it does occur - not the world in general.

The story that gets portrayed in the media of mentally ill people being a major danger to the general public is just that - a story. The facts don't back it up.

And those with mental illness have to deal with the bigotry and prejudice that results from this story.

Thank you.

There is a big difference between saying that people need better access to diagnosis and treatment, and saying that people need to be locked away before they've done anything.

The author clearly fears for her safety and her other children's safety due to her 13-year-old's violent behavior. Her story isn't making blanket claims about all mental illnesses, only about her son's particular violent condition.

I feel for the parent who has written the article, and whereas I agree we must do more to address the needs of kids with mental illness, I disagree with the stated premise of the article, that it's easy to talk about guns. It's actually not easy to talk about guns in this country, which has led to a lack of any serious gun control regulation. It borders on insanity when we look at the type of weaponry we allow our citizens to purchase, all in the name of an amendment written in a long gone era, where the survival of a fledgling democracy was still uncertain. Just as islamic extremists have hijacked the interpretation of their Koran to serve their purpose, so has the NRA hijacked our constitution to serve its own purpose. And so it's time to come and call out the NRA for exactly what it is - a terrorist organization. Despite whatever mental illness may be afflicting these young unfortunate individuals - the answer to preventing what happened in Connecticut from happening again is extremely strong gun control regulation. To the point where even those few who are allowed access cannot keep weapons at home. I know this does not make the lives of families of people with mental illness any easier - but at least it prevents tragedies of this sort from occurring.

I don't live in the States, I live in Europe. The blog post touched me deeply. However I grew up in a society where owning a gun is the exception. Almost nobody does. Reading the comments to the post, from people who have family experiencing same mental health problems, my heart goes out to them. But stating that guns isn't the problem, only the mental health system needs fixing, to me, sounds absurd. It reminds me of this comedy sketch by Eddie Izzard: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsN0FCXw914

Agreed. Mental health problems are not limited to the United States. But widespread, poorly regulated, gun ownership is.

It's strange to watch the debates around gun control unfold in USA time and again. Here in Australia we did the same thing after the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, one of the deadliest spree shootings in world history. After that, the government basically outlawed semi-automatic weapons and did a compulsory buyback.

In the 12 years since we've only had one incident. In 2002, a member of a sport shooting club (one of the few categories of people allowed to own handguns) opened fire in a Monash classroom. He killed two people and wounded five others, but since he could only manage to acquire handguns he had to switch weapons and was tackled to the ground. No doubt things would have been a lot worse if he'd had access to something with a larger magazine. We tightened laws on handguns after that as well.

I find myself surprised that an otherwise relatively pragmatic people get so blind to the consequences of readily available firearms. I don't have any ideological opposition to guns - in fact, I quite like them - but if someone told me that yoga was involved in every killing spree in the last decade it would be pretty silly not to take a serious look at whether ready access to yoga is worth the cost.

What worries me about a compulsory buyback here in the United States is the massive number of firearms for which the government would have to provide compensation. If the owners of each of the 300 million guns in the United States were compensated USD $750 -- which is probably pretty reasonable given current prices -- it comes to USD $225 billion, excluding the cost of administrative overheard. That's a staggering sum of money, even for the US government, and not something I think we're able to pay.

However infeasible, it's probably the only way that new gun control laws would be effective. Historically, gun bans in the US have applied only to newly manufactured guns, while older guns have been grandfathered in through various means. In fact, assault rifles like the Bushmaster used in the Connecticut shooting have already been banned in that state, which leads me to speculate that it was purchased before the ban and grandfathered in. Without addressing the vast supply of existing guns, it's hard to see how laws regulating new guns will achieve the impact their supporters desire.

I think foreigners routinely miss the fact that the U.S. still has wolves, wildcats, bears, 2000 lb moose, etc. I know that Australia has some of the most venomous spiders in the world but you aren't likely to defend yourself from them with a gun. Off the top of my head, I cannot think of any really sizable predators in Australia. Europe also lacks any remaining really large, dangerous wild animals, having hunted them to extinction long ago.

I did insist my ex husband get rid of his stupid hand gun or I would leave him over it, but I do not think gun control is as simple a question in the U.S. as it is in more "civilized" countries whose only remaining serious predator is humankind because the rest have essentially been hunted to extinction (which is not necessarily the most virtuous and wise thing to do since predators play an important role in the ecosystem).

"It borders on insanity when we look at the type of weaponry we allow our citizens to purchase..."

"The nra is a terrorist organization."

Wow. Just plain wow. It's probably pointless to respond to your post, considering the emotions you are displaying regarding this topic, you probably won't even listen to a single thing, no matter, at least others who see this reply might understand just how perturbed you really are.

It is a founding principal of america for individuals to maintain and own weapons. Let's just start right there. Since there are many countries with the kind of gun laws you apparently want, I'd suggest moving to them. Reason being, is owning your own weapon isn't a passing fad, it's a mentality that will not be broken by you or anybody else. The best course of action for you, might be to leave america for other countries that place safety above an individuals freedom.

" the answer to preventing what happened in Connecticut from happening again is extremely strong gun control regulation."

Well then I'm sure are glad you are here to tell us the answer. I really would like to hear this, because Connecticut has some of the strictest gun control regulation in the country. The guns the kid used in the shooting were stolen from his mother. Exactly what sort of legislation on the books, beside from a complete ban altogether, would have helped?

I'm personally insulted by your insinuations that the nra is a terrorist organization, and I'm insulted by your blanket statements regarding gun ownership.

"but at least it prevents tragedies of this sort from occurring."

Yes, lets impede on the freedom of a majority, because a minority are unable to handle something. That is possibly the worst logic a person could use. That somehow everybody should be punished because a statistical fraction of users are unstable.

You sir, are part of the problem.

>> I really would like to hear this, because Connecticut has some of the strictest gun control regulation in the country

How about this from op: >> >> To the point where even those few who are allowed access >> >> cannot keep weapons at home

> It is a founding principal of america for individuals to maintain and own weapons.

Are you referring to the second amendment? Because as far as I can tell, that is about state militia as opposed to a standing federal army - and after the Canadians burned down the white house that whole concept got scrapped in favour of a federal army.

Much as I sympathize with the idea of a People on the same footing as the government - you would have to be hopelessly naive to think that the right to own a semiautomatic hand gun will significantly help your fight against the current US Army -.should that be needed.

Have you read the Supreme Court's interpretation of what the 2nd amendment means and it's historical context, as laid out in the Heller and McDonald decisions?

It's reasonably accessible reading (if long) but complete debunks your statement.

I hadn't. But I notice that in the most recent (2008) decision four out of nine justices seem to agree with my interpretation; so "completely debunks" seem a bit strong.

You are of course right that in light of the ruling; personal defence is part of the current constitution - I was referring to the original intent - of which we may only speculate - and I'd say it's not entirely clear that the current law is not based on twisting the words of the constitution to be in line with the gun lobby. I was making more of a moral/theoretical argument; not a direct legislative one wrt the US of today.

Since there are many countries with the kind of gun laws you apparently want, I'd suggest moving to them.

There are also many countries that are representative democracies where we, the people, work together to change laws when we feel that they can be better. The "if you don't like it here, then move!" argument is both cliche and vapid. You do the rest of your compelling argument a dis-service by bringing it out.

This woman is saying she both doesn't have the ability to handle her son, and is afraid of him. He's repeatedly threatened to kill her, and is old enough to be a credible threat.

I'm all for individual rights, families taking care of their own members, etc., but it sounds like society would be better if there were a way for her to give him to the state or some specialized institution, rather than just waiting for him to be the next spree killer (or just run of the mill killer, or even just suicide).

This clearly falls in the "public health" category of expenses even most libertarians would be fine with taxes and the state covering.

Her kid is also extremely intelligent and seems to have mastered sweetness as a way to get his way still. I wouldn't be surprised if he could behave "normally" for a long stretch of time to get out of whatever institution they put him in. Unless these diagnoses are for life and these institutions are basically a hotel Calofornia.

But it would leave a paper trail, just like the social worker said, and this would prevent them later on from getting a firearm legally, which is the way most of the weapons used in mass murders are obtained.

Ah, there are some regulations with respect to getting a firearm then? But given the enormous amount of firearms around, would it be hard to get one illegally? I suppose everyone knows someone with a healthy mental outlook and with a serious gun. It does not seem as if you have to go to some heavy criminals to get one.

But it is good to hear that there is at least some sort of barrière to obtain a dangerous weapon.

> Then another tortured soul shoots up a fast food restaurant. A mall. A kindergarten classroom.

There are crazy people in every country on earth, many (most) of which have worse "health care" systems than the US; yet only in the US do kids shoot other kids with automatic weapons.

I very much doubt it has anything to do with mental health (nowhere else in the world are young children medicated for being kids to such an extent as in the US, BTW).

I think there are two main reasons why there are so many shootings in the US 1/ it's a behavior that has ceased to be "unthinkable" (and every reporting of every new incident adds to the problem) 2/ guns are everywhere

I know HN frowns upon any kind of "political" discussion, so I'll won't elaborate too much, but can someone please explain why a school teacher would have three guns in her house, one of them a Glock semi-automatic pistol??

- - -

Also, if I had had a "soccer mom" that told me I couldn't wear a this or that color of trousers when I was 13 (13!!), I would have called her names, too. I have three kids of my own. They can dress any way they please.

"Also, if I had had a "soccer mom" that told me I couldn't wear a this or that color of trousers when I was 13 (13!!), I would have called her names, too."

Just an fyi, many countries have different levels of school uniforms. When I studied in England, I was wearing a full school uniform - button shirt, tie, trouses, sweater, etc. This from the first day of school, basically.

Here in Israel, some schools have a "school shirt" policy, some don't have anything.

Adding to this. Many secondary (high) schools in England have a strict uniform policy. Dark blue trousers when black is the rule would get you sent home.

I went to a boarding school in Ireland for a year, and they had a uniform -- but it was a uniform, not a "policy". There was one pair of trousers, one shirt and one pullover allowed, and they were provided by the school.

This was fine with me; it was a very clear rule with only one interpretation possible, and it was completely external to my relation with my parents or in fact authority in general. You had to wear a uniform, you wore a uniform. I was quite rebellious but I never had a problem with that.

My guess is the OP's kid resents arbitrary rules and the way they are enforced. At what point does "dark blue" cease to be dark? And why does this woman feel the need to enforce the school's rules? Why doesn't she let him see for himself what happens when you go to that school with a red pair of pants? Does she fear it will reflect poorly on her?

I feel everything is about her, not him, and that's why he's so upset.

> I feel everything is about her, not him, and that's why he's so upset.

Indeed. It seems that the son has an exemption from the uniform policy ("They told me I could wear these" he insisted), the mother has this desire to make the child conform, and is insufficiently introspective to examine her own motivations ("my 13-year old son ... missed his bus because he was wearing the wrong color pants"). Hey, he missed the bus because you made him wear your favorite set of trousers.

You think the kid who thought threatening his mom with a knife was acceptable wouldn't tell a petty lie?

It's possible. But look at this: "Several weeks into his new junior high school, Michael began exhibiting increasingly odd and threatening behaviors at school. We decided to transfer him to the district’s most restrictive behavioral program"

Something changed with the new school, something that set her son off with regularity. The answer is the district's most restrictive behavioral program. The child may be an asshole and a violent psychopath, but the mother doesn't ask if there's perhaps anything wrong at the new school. There may well be, and the fact that she does not mention that possibility raises a red flag for me.

What is not clear about "black or khaki pants only"?

I'm quite surprised that you've chosen to identify with the petulant, knife-wielding child in this article.

Sure feels like you're bringing some personal baggage to the equation... this article is too short on details to draw the conclusions that you have.

I for one always identify myself with a sad kid. Why should not I? I was a kid and I was sad too and I could become mad if told what pants to wear.

This is not just a sad kid and this is not just about pants. Did you ever grab a knife and threaten to kill your mom in front of your 7 and 9 year old siblings?

You're avoiding discussing action by discussing reaction.

Of course grabbing a knife is not good, but that if all his bizzare reactions are due to kinds of nonsense?

This woman is insane and belongs in a mental institution, not her kids. This article articulates exactly what I think

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/12/17/i_am_adam_la...

"(nowhere else in the world are young children medicated for being kids to such an extent as in the US, BTW)."

Virtually every single school shooter has been on SSRIs, and many people think these drugs have been the cause of the shootings. Already WaPo has reported that the CT shooter was on psychiatric medication, so we'll know for sure in a couple weeks when we get the tox screen back.

http://www.ssristories.com/index.php?p=school

It's perhaps also worth noting that these sorts of mass school shootings were non-existent until after 1988, the year that Prozac came out.

Gun laws are getting more strict in the US; violent assault in general (and gun violence in particular) are at their lowest levels in about 40 years or so. Yet mass shootings are on the rise, and on average getting more deadly.

This article has a graph of mass shootings, offenders and victims from 1980 to 2010.

http://boston.com/community/blogs/crime_punishment/2012/08/n...

> Based on data extracted from official police reports to the FBI, the figure below shows annual incident, offender and victim tallies for gun homicides in which at least four people were murdered. Over the thirty-year time frame, an average of about 20 mass murders have occurred annually in the United States with an average death toll of about 100 per year.

As you can see in the graph and statistics, there has not been a rise in the number of shootings, perpetrators or victims.

Here is an article from yesterday also noting this.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/15/mass-shootings-not-...

"Mass Shootings Not On The Rise, But Their Impact Is Huge"

Interesting, this page from the Washington Post says that of the worst 11 shootings, 5 of them happened since 2007, and that doesn't even include Sandy Hook. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/14/n...

11 is a fairly odd point to pick a cut off. That article's referenced source (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/nation/deadlies...) also has errors. It purports to list all 10 and above gun involved murder sprees, including cases back as far as 1949 (ignoring bombings, but whatever).

It doesn't list Starkweather and Fugate's 10 person killing spree in 1957, or James Edward Pough's 1990 rampage in Jacksonville that killed 11 and injured 6, or Mark Barton's 1999 rampage that killed 12 and injured 13, or Leung Ying's 1928 California spree that killed 11 injured 4, or Nidal Hassan's 2009 Fort Hood spree killing 13, injuring 30, or Patrick Sherill's 1986 Oklahoma spree killing 14 injuring 6, or Ronald Simmons 1987 Arkansas rampage killing 16 injuring 4, or George Banks 1982 Pennsylvania killing of 13 injuring 1.

Since the article leaves out so many well known cases it can not be considered reliable regarding its comprehensiveness. The other article which actually did complete counts of all known cases should be considered far more authoritative.

> yet only in the US do kids shoot other kids with automatic weapons.

I guess you don't count child soldiers in Africa.

I hope you're not trying to argue in favor of the US with something like this. It's not a very favorable comparison!

I hear that a lot, that most countries in the world have worse health care than the US. This is a highly contentious claim, and I think you might need to justify that, with reference to mental health in particular.

In a comment above, where I discuss the policy of the states in Australia, I suggested googling 'bendigo mental health'. If you do that you will see a degree of specialisation that far exceeds your presumptive normalcy.

Events such as these do appear to occur in clusters, and this leads to complicated questions. And of course it has to do with mental health, unless you honestly believe that such acts can be carried out by well balanced, psychologically stable individuals.

Inurement by familiarity I would agree is a factor, but it cuts both ways. There was a mass killing in Australia which followed only one month after a mass killing event in the UK, where I live. Isolated individuals also require social connections, and the strange self esteem accessible through active association with like minded others, even if unknown personally to them, seems to play a part. It's never a wise move to allow mentally damaged people to join a nervous uprising against the incumbent ideology, that often is seen as part of the reason for their repressed state. Though it might seem tortured logic on these actors parts, I think one of the reasons these shooting incidents are somewhat peculiar to the United States is because these actors see it as a right to bear arms against their oppressors.

On the other hand, the response of the rest of society is critical to developing ways to resolving ways to avoid these events. Either you exert enough pressure to put the uprisings back in their box, to be modified by planned action in due course, or you eek them out into a system of redress that has the capacity to control.

Either way it is indeed a mental health issue from a public health perspective. And their right to bear arms is guaranteed in defence of their freedom, through logic that is strange and barely comprehensible to most of us.

When you comment on something as serious as this you should have your facts straight. Automatic weapons are highly regulated in the US, and no automatic weapon has ever been used in a school shooting to my knowledge.

You're right: automatic weapons are regulated in the US (but I did not claim otherwise) and they have indeed never been used in a school shooting (I misspoke; I meant semi-automatic weapons, not machine-guns).

But my point is that if you make weapons difficult to buy and difficult to own, then they are less likely to be used by crazy people to do harm. The situation about machine-guns verifies this.

What's more

- school shootings, including this last one, most often use "semi-automatic" weapons (because that's the most efficient weapon that's easily available)

- the number of fatalities is a direct consequence of the efficiency of the weapons used

See this Slate article "The faster the weapon, the higher the body count." http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/human_nature...

There is a real reason that the right to bear arms is enshrined in the constitution. You can't handwave away the reason it was included in the constitution and then say "See, it's that simple."

There is real disagreement over the reason the right to bear arms was enshrined in the constitution. You can't handwave away that detail. :)

Some think it recognizes a pre-existing human right and cannot be taken away. Some think it's there to deter/overcome tyrannical government. Some think it's a right of self-defense. Still others think it's there to accommodate the forming of militias, which arguably with the National Guard and a standing army has become an obsolete reason.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASjfzG4mpyU

If you watch that video, you will understand how scary the situation is. If someone could easily get hold of such things, I'm not sure how they react on a moment of anger...

Mass murder is pretty cheap it seems.

I understand what you're saying but I think you're being a little too pedantic. Automatic, semi-automatic, whatever. Within a minute, one can fire many, many rounds with only a few pounds of pressure.

That is also true of a revolver, or a bolt, lever, or pump action gun. The point is that the above poster has no idea what he is talking about, and as such his opinion on the matter isn't as relevant as it would be if he actually educated himself on the subject.

No, it is not true of a revolver or a bolt, lever, or pump action rifle. I don't want to be mean about it but do you not know what you're talking about? You take a revolver and a box of ammo and I'll take an AR-15 and let's see who can fire more rounds. That's completely ridiculous.

Did you read the parent? >Within a minute, one can fire many, many rounds with only a few pounds of pressure.

I didn't say it was faster than an AR. I know exactly what I'm talking about. A revolver could have accomplished the same thing at that school. Yes, this idiot shot some of these kids 11+ times and the revolver wouldn't have done that, but guess what, you don't need to shoot someone 11 times. 1-2 is generally plenty.

There is something called a speedloader for revolvers, which is just slightly slower than a magazine to reload. This guy [1] while not really going too fast, reloaded three times and shot 24 well aimed bullets in 45 seconds (starting at the 1:15 mark). I'd say that qualifies as many many round in under a minute with only a few pounds of pressure.

The second video [2], while obviously a world class shooter, shot 12 rounds, all on target, with a reload in the middle in less than 3 seconds.

Now, are you going to claim that this somehow doesn't qualify as firing many rounds in under a minute? The parent was comparing automatic and semi automatic saying that don't matter. well, i'd agree and extend it to the guns i said, but if we want to go with your quote: >You take a revolver and a box of ammo and I'll take an AR-15 and let's see who can fire more rounds. That's completely ridiculous.

I'll take a fully auto AR and some ammo, you take a semi auto AR-15 and let's see who can fire more rounds. That's completely ridiculous.

[1] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EC9Lahi-TqQ [2] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-tFQ1H4Awg

Crazy people targeting kids are not, in general, «world class shooters», they are not world class anything except losers. That's the point. Those weapons help shooters that aren't good, shoot fast. We're not talking about SWAT teams here.

Besides, gun control would include all guns, revolvers, sigle-action, you name it.

The first video is decidedly not world class. also, no gun control in the US has talked about revolvers, bolt action, or lever action guns. Also, your comments around this whole thread have talked about how the semi-auto assault rifle was the problem and this couldn't be done with a revolver, but now that I point out it isn't in fact you say you want to get rid of revolvers too. Very handy.

> Also, your comments around this whole thread have talked about how the semi-auto assault rifle was the problem

No. I said "all guns are bad" (and you replied to that comment). I advocate banning all guns...

No, your orignal comment - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4928127 said that "only in the US do kids shoot other kids with automatic weapons" and "but can someone please explain why a school teacher would have three guns in her house, one of them a Glock semi-automatic pistol??"

Nothing about that said all guns are bad, part of it was completely false referring to the automatic. There is absolutely nothing exciting about a ... gasp ... "GLOCK" semi-automatic pistol. Glock is just the name of a brand. You could also have a Ruger, or Smith and Wesson, or Kimber, or any number of other brands that make pretty much identical guns.

Yes, that was my first comment. My second comment was this one:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4928822

She liked to go shooting? It's a lot of fun to do.

I cannot understand for the life of me why the focus here is on guns. Americans have had ready access to guns throughout America's history, but mass shootings are a comparatively new phenomena that are sadly becoming increasingly frequent, so 'ready access to guns' doesn't seem like a particularly compelling explanation. Neither does the influence of media reporting, since this reporting is worldwide but the mass shootings remain predominantly American.

As an immigrant to America, I wonder if the emphasis on individualism and dynamism that makes America so appealing also comes with costs. People here may be more likely to take bold action to solve their problems (or perceived problems), and this includes the segment of the population that's criminal, evil, or mentally ill.

Now if so, this is nothing new - America's been a dynamic culture of entrepreneurs and dreamers long before this outbreak of mass violence. However, America previously combined this dynamism with stronger forms of moral education and social control - primarily religious ones, but also bonds to local communities and extended families. The gradual weakening of these bonds has coincided with the rise of mass shootings.

To sum up, America's individualistic, energetic culture minus a strong moral foundation and community ties = very bad news.

Of course, this is just my own theory, and it's probably wrong. Societies are complicated things. But I do wish people would dig about a bit more under the cultural hood before reflexively pinning the blame on firearms.

> She liked to go shooting? It's a lot of fun to do.

She liked to go shooting with a Glock?? And she needed to keep the gun (and ammunition) in her home?

It isn't true that "Americans have had ready access to guns throughout America's history"; talking about the "Second Amendment" makes it seem that nothing has changed since the 18th century, but the truth is the current situation started no earlier than the 1960s.

And about media reporting:

1/ Media reporting abroad is nothing compared to the US -- as with most news, big events are talked about a lot in the country of origin, and are just a topic among others in all other nations; right now the five first articles on the front page of Slate is about this, for example, whereas here in France, it's hardly a topic of conversation (it did make the front page of Le Monde on paper, but not on the web where all news are in a section called "Americas")

2/ Where things happen matter a lot. If it happens in a distant country it will not influence you the same way as if it happens in your own neighborhood (or somewhere perceived as such).

> She liked to go shooting with a Glock??

Yes??? What do you think a glock is, just out of curiosity? It's a completely boring handgun.

Semi-automatic doesn't mean what you think it does. Basically all modern guns are semi-automatic. It's a broad classification.

It's a completely boring handgun

This illustrates an interesting cultural divide. Many people don't have any real experience or understanding of guns, and let half-truths from pop-culture drive their emotional response.

> It's a completely boring handgun

That's the point. "Boring" means failsafe: good for the shooter, not so good for the victims.

A gun that would threaten to explode in the face of the shooter every other round, or that would make it almost impossible to hit the target, would be completely non-boring. It would also make it a poor choice to carry on a mass-shooting.

The Glock is the Mercedes of guns.

Hm, I'm afraid I don't totally understand your point. Why shouldn't a recreational shooter want reliability?

I think it's quite simple: a bullet to the vital organs was just as deadly 200 years ago as it is today, but you could only shoot one at a time (for some non-negligible value of "a time"). Now, handguns and rifles with high rate of fire and replaceable magazines are plentiful and easy to get ahold of, and they just have a much higher potential for death on a large cape.

To be fair, bullets are much much better now and it's much easier to have accurate and much faster traveling bullets. That neither here nor there though.

We also had all this technology for the last hundred years and yet didn't have this problem for the most part until the last 10-20 years. (the 1911 semi auto handgun is still one of the best and most popular in the world, and it is over 100 years old). That tells me that the gun isn't the problem.

> yet only in the US do kids shoot other kids with automatic weapons.

I'm getting very tired of this. If you want to have an informed discussion about gun violence you need to acquire at least a modicum of information about firearms, especially but not limited to different actions, e.g., single-action, semi-automatic, and automatic.

Virginia Tech? 2 semi-automatic pistols. Sandy Hook? 1 semi-automatic rifle and 2 semi-automatic pistols. UT Austin? 1 semi-automatic shotgun, 2 bolt-action rifles, 1 pump-action rifle, 2 semi-automatic pistols, 1 revolver, 1 semi-automatic carbine Columbine? 1 pump-action shotgun, 1 break-action shotgun, 1 semi-automatic carbine, 1 semi-automatic pistol.

What do those have in common? No automatic weapons.

Almost no crimes are committed with legally owned automatic weapons. There are very few of them available and many are quite old, so those owned by non-LEAs are very expensive and largely collectors' items. And even with illegally owned automatic weapons, crimes committed with them barely even register. [1]

If you want to argue that semi-automatic weapons are "bad enough," fine. But please have some idea what you are talking about.

[1] http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcfullau.html

Wrote this before I saw InclinedPlane's comment.

This discussion about "semi-automatic" versus "automatic" weapons actually strengthens the case FOR regulation; automatic weapons are regulated => they're not used in mass-killings; semi-automatic weapons are not regulated => they are used in mass-killings.

How one can conclude from these facts that less regulation is better, I don't know.

All guns are bad, and the more automatic they are, the worse.

The NRA says "guns don't kill people, people do" but the truth is that guns help people who want to kill people, kill more people.

You couldn't even tell the difference between a semi automatic weapon and a fully automatic weapon.

Then you make a reply, glossing over the fact you haven't a clue what you are talking about, to then make another asinine post.

"automatic weapons are regulated => they're not used in mass-killings; semi-automatic weapons are not regulated => they are used in mass-killings."

Could you please extrapolate how semi-automatic weapons are apparently "not regulated". This I'd really love to hear, considering how difficult it is to obtain one. I understand this does indeed differ from state to state, but to make the blanket statement, "semi-automatics are not regulated" is so unbelievably wrong, it shout outs to the reader to not reply to your post because there is a level of understanding you clearly don't have.

"All guns are bad, and the more automatic they are, the worse." A statement like this could only come from someone who doesn't actually understand a damn thing about guns.

I think you have a lot of reading to do.

I think bambax's main point is summed up by - "The NRA says "guns don't kill people, people do" but the truth is that guns help people who want to kill people, kill more people."

Do you have any real points to counter that, rather than just pointing out irrelevant technicalities or calling him names? And no, it doesn't change bambax's real point at all whether its a automatic or a semi-automatic.

When a person makes a statement, "All guns are bad, and the more automatic they are, the worse." They've lost all credibility, and in my opinion aren't really deserving of a well thought out rebuttal due to their obvious lack of experience in this field.

Let's take this statement, "The NRA says "guns don't kill people, people do" but the truth is that guns help people who want to kill people, kill more people."

Right, guns help people who want to kill people, kill more people, hence it's a tool like any other. My guns that I have, have yet to jump themselves out of my house and shoot someone, they require an operator to use. So that statement you seem to have such a problem with, is 100% factually true, guns don't kill people by themselves, they make it easier for people to do so. I don't really see what sort of counter to that is even needed, when obviously it's the operator of the guns that are the problem, not the guns themselves.

OK. "Operator" runs amok with a nerf gun.

Slightly different outcome.

How again is the highly efficient killing tool not part of the problem?

Yes, guns also help people to defend themselves. For every mass shooting with a guns I can give you twenty articles about someone defending themselves and saving their lives and others with the use of a gun.

Not only incidents where they were successful in self-defence but the perception of the potential victim being armed is also highly relevant.

How much crime is deterred from happening in the first place, for example in states where its well-known that gun ownership is popular, is often difficult to track accurately. But there's a ton of statistics that show correlation in crime reduction.

Exactly. Compare gun crime in DC, which has tons of gun control, to lots of other places without gun control.

Indeed, new numbers come out all the time. This ones from 2011, from two states with some of the worst gun crime:

> Murder and violent crime rates were supposed to soar after the Supreme Court struck down gun control laws in Chicago and Washington, D.C. But Armageddon never happened. Newly released data for Chicago shows that, as in Washington, murder and gun crime rates didn’t rise after the bans were eliminated — they plummeted. They have fallen much more than the national crime rate.

http://winteryknight.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/crime-rates-in...

That's a valid point, especially in low population density parts of the US. But from a self-defense point of view, do you really need a semi-automatic? Wouldn't a normal revolver suffice?

Furthermore, for places where the population density is high, and the number of police per square mile is reasonable, and the law and order situation is generally good (most US cities would probably fit the above?), then is there any real need for normal civilians to have easy access to guns, at least anything that can be used for mass firing?

Do you know much about guns? (not trying to be an ass, honest question). The difference between a revolver and a semi-auto is very minimal. This guy could have easily committed exactly the same horrific tragedy with a revolver.

There is definitely a need for civilians to have guns. First off, this sounds cliche, but when you need a gun seconds count and police are minutes away. You aren't going to stop a home invasion, rape, mugging, etc with police. 0 chance. They might catch them, but they can't stop it from happening. If someone comes into my church and starts shooting people, me being there and armed can save lives. Calling 911 means you probably have at least 5-10 minutes before a response (in the case of this tragedy, I think I read it was 6 minutes before there was even a 911 call made. Wouldn't have been better if the principal or a security officer had a gun in a safe in the office?)

Finally, self defense is really only the practical day to day reason for keeping guns in the hands of civilians. Liberty and freedom are the bigger reasons. Saying it doesn't matter because the govt has bombs and jets is disingenuous. If the govt decides to drop atom bombs all over the country this discussion is irrelevant. It's much more likely a conflict would be with guns. I'll leave you with this quote from Hitler:

”The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subjected people to carry arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subjected peoples to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the underdog is a sine qua non ["something essential" lit. "without which not"] for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let’s not have any native militia or police.” ~Adolph Hitler

> This guy could have easily committed exactly the same horrific tragedy with a revolver

This is not true. The gun he used (a .223 Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle) allows for rapid fire and has magazines. The time it takes to reload a revolver would not have allowed the same number of casualties.

Every victim was hit by more than one bullet (up to eleven bullets for one of the victims). A revolver usually lets you shoot just 6 times before you need to reload.

Interesting animation http://www.bushmaster.com/anatomy_bushmaster.asp

You clearly have no intimate knowledge of guns and how they work, so why do you keep posting as if you do? That's a great animation, but I know how a .223 AR-15 works because I own one and have shot it many times. As it happens, I also know how a revolver works whereas you apparently haven't seen that animation.

The revolver would not have put 11 rounds in each kid, but it doesn't need to. 1-2 works just fine. The magazine for the AR-15 generally holds 10, 20, or 30 rounds and in this case it was almost certainly 30. If he did 11 per kid, lets round to 10, that's 3 kids per reload. 2 bullets is more than enough, so the 6 shot revolver can also do 3 per reload.

The second video [2], while obviously a world class shooter, shot 12 rounds, all on target, with a reload in the middle in less than 3 seconds.

This person could have very easily committed exactly the same horrific tragedy with the revolver. You just didn't know it until now. Unless having 10 bullets in a kid somehow makes it worse, this could have definitely happened with a revolver or 2 instead of an AR and a few semi-auto handguns.

[1] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EC9Lahi-TqQ [2] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-tFQ1H4Awg

1- While I'm certainly no expert in guns and «gun culture» (something I would take little pride in), I don't know nothing about guns. I can take apart a 1911 .45, in the dark, and put it back together (the top part with the barrel); my father in law use to own guns and took me shooting several times with his Magnum 357; my point is that I have used guns before (didn't enjoy it much though)

2- Much more importantly, the whole «expertise» debate and argument is very illegitimate. This is the same argument finance people use to claim they should not be regulated: «you don't understand! it's complicated!» It may be complicated but we're still the ones called to clean up your mess. That entitles us to have an opinion. My opinion is that guns actually kill people.

After a particularly gruesome mass shooting in the 90s, Australia passed vey tough gun control laws, with a buyback program. No further mass shooting happened since, and criminality didn't increase. Food for thought.

Let's replay this for a minute: You: get rid of automatic weapons Me: he didn't use an automatic weapon You: doesn't matter get rid of semi-automatic weapons then Me: He could do it with a revolver or bolt action gun just as easily You: No he couldn't Me: Yes he could, with proof You: Something about experts, it's complicated, let's get rid of all guns...

>It may be complicated but we're still the ones called to clean up your mess. That entitles us to have an opinion. My opinion is that guns actually kill people.

Sure, guns kill people. So do knives, and bombs, and trucks, and and and and... These things also have lots of legitimate uses.

top 10 school killings before last week - http://listverse.com/2008/01/01/top-10-worst-school-massacre...

Note that only 3 of these were in the US.

We have, a flamethrower, a lance, a mace, bolt action rifle, revolvers, knives, machettes, bombs, and cars in addition to the semi-auto guns that you think we should get rid of. This is a problem has been around for a long time, and it is something that has been done with lots and lots of different things. People kill people. This has been true since the beginning of time. If you actually have a solution to this problem let me know. Saying we should take away the guns and everyone will be fine is absurd.

Getting rid of the guns might make you feel better, but it doesn't solve anything. It does however take away my liberty, my freedom, and my rights.

> Let's replay this for a minute

I'm sorry but this replay is incorrect. I said from the start "all guns are bad". I don't think you should get rid of only "automatic" or only "semi-automatic" or only "rifles" or what have you. I think you (you being the US) should ban every single gun, no matter its mode of operation, where it's made, etc. Ban, buy-back, destroy.

I used "automatic" for emphasis in my first comment (a bad idea, I see this now ;-) and the pro-gun cohort jumped on this word to try to disqualify me and any further comment I could make: "he couldn't shoot himself out of a paper bag, don't listen to this guy".

If this is what you truly think, fine, but don't make me say I advocate (or advocated at any point in this discussion) the ban of specific guns. I advocate the ban of ALL guns, and even more importantly, I think you will not see the end of this until you change, or more to the point eradicate the whole "gun culture" and "shooting is fun" and "guns are cool" memes.

The only purpose of guns is to kill people (not "shoot pumpkins" -- but thanks for the invite). They are useful to people whose job it is to kill people (namely, the army; the police, I'm not so sure). Every other citizen should not have guns (ANY gun).

This is the policy implemented successfully in the UK and Australia, two English-speaking countries and the closest allies of the US (surely you can relate to the country of Churchill?)

See

http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2012/12/16/gun_control_afte...

and

http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2012/12/gun-control

But unfortunately I also think this sane policy will not happen, as does The Economist.

That's a shame but in the end it's your problem, not mine. Just make sure your gun cabinet is locked, and that one of your distant nephews who's been on Prozac for years without you noticing, doesn't get hold of the key.

2 things.

1. Australia isn't a reasonable comparison.

"At the heart of the push was a massive buyback of more than 600,000 semi-automatic shotguns and rifles, or about one-fifth of all firearms in circulation in Australia."

600k was 20% of all of their guns. 600k would be .2% of the legally owned guns in America.

2. England has a violent crime rate that is over 4 times higher than the US. Just because shootings drops, doesn't mean crime or murder drops. That has been my major point throughout all of this. Yes, banning guns lowers gun crime. No kidding. It doesn't however make you safer. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196941/The-violent-...

Also, regarding the «expertise» comment. I'm not saying you can't have an opinion, I'm just suggesting you can't fix the problem without more knowledge about the subject matter. You can say you want Wall Street regulated, but unless you have a huge amount of knowledge about the industry you have no idea what that entails or how to even go about it. Tell me, where would start and how exactly would that fix the problem?

It's the same with guns. You can say in few enough characters to fit in a tweet "get rid of automatic and semi-automatic guns", but it takes a deeper knowledge of the subject matter to know that that doesn't actually fix anything.

There are a lot more moving parts here. Just a few:

1.The WORST school massacre in US history did not use a gun. He used 3 bombs.

2. Mental health and it's treatments in the US. Many of the recent school shootings have been by people who were being medicated for mental health issues. Are these treatments helping? Are they actually hurting? Should we be doing more? Should some of them have been locked up?

3. School security. At this point, schools are target simply because of the other shootings. Different schools have different levels of security ranging from 0 to huge amounts. A few armed security officials sprinkled throughout schools could probably limit the damage somebody could do better than getting rid of semi-auto rifles.

There's no real difference between automatic and semi-auto in terms of how dangerous they are. An experience marksman will use both the same way (as spraying full auto greatly reduces accuracy). An inexperienced marksman with a fully automatic weapon will empty their magazine into the ceiling. Burst fire might be a bit better (it's what the US Army uses), but semi-auto is more lethal than fully auto in the hands of most people.

Overall, murder rates won't change a lot. Husbands and wives will still be able to murder each other. Gangsters will fight with knives, or illegal guns. But mass murders will be harder to pull off. It might also make the police more effective, as they will rarely be outgunned.

Except that police have been outgunned many many times in history, generally by guns that were/are illegal or nearly impossible to get. Tommy gun vs revolver ring a bell?

I do agree that full auto wouldn't help an inexperienced marksman, he'd likely just waste more ammo. However, an experienced marksman could also easily do just as much damage with a bolt action gun. The key is that it's really easy to kill people with guns if the other people don't have guns. If you outlaw guns, only the criminals will have them.

Fwiw, the military uses select fire guns, i.e. guns that can be both semi auto or full auto. Generally aimed semi is more effective as you waste less (running out of ammo is really really bad) but there are times when full out is good for things like providing cover.

What weapons do you think people will use once all of the guns are gone? Maybe something less deadly, maybe something far far more deadly.

The mass-killers are the issue, not the tools that they use. Effective mental health treatment is a necessary step in reducing the pool of potential mass-killers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh#Oklahoma_City_b...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings

There are plenty of mass killings with knives as well. If you completely got rid of semi-auto guns, people would use bolt action guns. If you get rid of those, people will use knives. People have been killing each other since the beginning of time.

You clearly have no knowledge of guns, how they work, how they are currently regulated. The reason automatic weapons aren't used in shootings, is that they cost > 10k.

Yes, it is easy to kill a lot of people with a semi auto handgun. It would also be really easy to kill a lot of people with a bolt action gun. Or a pump action shotgun, and yet no one talks about banning those. For some reason we've become fascinated with "scary assault rifles". You should come out to my farm and shoot a few watermelons and you'll see that it's a lot of fun.

The guns aren't the problem. The crazy guy shooting people is the problem. If the principal and the teachers that are sane had guns with them, or there were some security officers or police with guns, this wouldn't have happened. Would you like to take the guns away from the police too?

If you outlaw all guns, then only the outlaws will have guns. That is a worse option.

Sorry for the rant, I just get really frustrated when people who haven't done any research into the subject make assertions that are simply not accurate.

If we could go back in time 400 years and ban all guns that might be a good idea, at this point the cat is out of the bag though. Please don't take my guns, I'd like to be able to defend myself against the crazy people that already have them.

There are plenty of mass killings with knives as well

I don't want to be the "citation needed" guy, but this is an outrageous claim.

read your sibling comment, but here are a few to get you started: [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akihabara_massacre [2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_school_massacre [3] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_attacks_in_China_(2010%E...

from [1] - Related or similar events

Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, who visited the site a week after the massacre to offer prayer to the victims,[70] said that he "is worried that similar cases occur about 10 times a year in Japan."[32][71] According to the National Police Agency, 67 similar random attacks have taken place between 1998 and 2007.

People will undoubtably say that, well, this time 26 people died, but in this examples only 8 died. To that I'd say a few things:

1. Is that somehow acceptable? Most of our school shootings have had far less people die than the 26, closer to the 8 of these stabbings. It's still an outrage and a horrible tragedy, and I'd like to try to find a solution to the problem (though I suspect it's nearly impossible to prevent entirely).

2. Killing 26 5 year olds with a knife would not be that hard. It's likely that most of these others have been overpowered sooner by more able opponents, though I'll concede it's easier to overpower someone with a knife than a gun. On the other hand, it's also easier to overpower someone with a gun, if you have one as well...

Thanks for the reasonable response. I took exception to the word "plenty" for knife massacres, as they are exceedingly rare. The truth is, gun massacres are also exceedingly rare, so I guess there's nothing wrong with that parallel, other than the obvious:

1. It's logistically easier to kill more people with a tool that's better at killing a lot of people.

and the less obvious:

2. It may be psychologically easier to commit mass murder with a somewhat detached and abstracted weapon like a gun than something more primal and physical. The same way that many people would become vegetarians if they had to slaughter their own meat.

Regardless, the earlier comment of "please don't take my guns away" serves to create a false dichotomy. It's perfectly possible to create meaningful firearm safeguards without going out and confiscating your personal weapons of watermelon destruction.

Thanks, I try to be as reasonable as possible, though I have to admit when I came across this thread I had an "Oh noes, somebody is wrong on the internet I can't go to bed" moment.

Back on topic. I'll give you both points, but I'm not sure how they relate to my comment or the parent. I don't believe guns are inherently evil. The are just things. Clearly my parent believes that they are evil and nothing I say will change his mind but that's neither here nor there.

>Regardless, the earlier comment of "please don't take my guns away" serves to create a false dichotomy. It's perfectly possible to create meaningful firearm safeguards without going out and confiscating your personal weapons of watermelon destruction.

I don't think it is. As I said somewhere else in this thread, the cat is out of the bag. There are far too many readily available firearms for there to be any meaningful gun control in this country short of completely outlawing them AND confiscating them with a search.

There are already lots of firearms safeguards, including background checks, waiting periods, etc. Most people who post on boards like these and say we should have tighter gun control have no idea what that means, or what kind of gun control we in place now. Most of it is fine (in places like TN where I live) some of it is absurd and IMO unconstitutional (in places like DC and NYC). DC has some of the toughest gun control in the country and yet also has some of the highest gun crime rates in the country. Taking guns away from lawful citizens just means the criminals don't have anything to be afraid of.

To get my handgun carry permit I had to go to a class, pass a written test, pass a shooting test, pass a background check, get approval from my local sheriff, and all of this came with a waiting period. (Now, simply buying a gun is easier, but it still requires a background check unless you are purchasing from a private individual). What is it that you (or anyone else) would propose we add to this? You already can't legally buy or own a gun if you are a felon or have any history of mental illness. There are however plenty of guns available for them to buy from private individuals who don't know you are a felon, or alternately they could just steal them.

What I would add. Not perfect, but not terrible either.

Require education/tests/checks/mental health screens for all purchases, not just concealed carry.

Close gun show loophole. Regulate private sales. Hold private sellers responsible if they sell to felons.

As I said there are background checks and if you have any history of mental health issues you can't get one. I'm not sure what "test" we could or should give for buying them. Accuracy and knowledge of the law doesn't really come into play in this scenario. We'd prefer mass killers to be less accurate, and I suspect they already know it's against the law to kill 26 people.

>Close gun show loophole. There is no gun show loophole. It is just a private sale. but see below..

>Regulate private sales. This I might be ok with, but... how would you suggest we regulate private sales?

This doesn't sound like a very easy problem to solve. I'm certainly not ok with you saying I can't sell my personal property, but if you come up with a really good way of doing this I'd probably be ok with it. I'd love for the government to give us access to their background check information, but we've tried that and they haven't been willing thus far. Many people that I know who do sell their own guns from time to time require that the buyer have a HCP. If they know they have a handgun carry permit, they know they have passed a background check. However, since only a tiny percentage of people have this, I don't think it's a reasonable requirement.

>Hold private sellers responsible if they sell to felons. How could you possibly know this? If we somehow find a way to regulate it, then it wouldn't be possible legally. If we don't, or if they do it illegally once a system is place, there is simply no way of knowing it happened. There is also the problem of every felon having a first time. You could sell it to someone who never committed a crime and then they can use it to commit their first crime. Let's stop trying to find someone new to blame for everything. The guy who shot the person is the one to blame. Isn't that enough?

The easiest way to regulate private sales would require all sales from private parties to go to a licensed dealer or through a licensed intermediary. Either the dealer or the intermediary would be responsible for handling background checks and waiting periods. I can see local law enforcement being willing to act as intermediaries for private-to-private sales.

There are reasonable adjustments we can make that can absolutely have an impact. Reasonable people (of which you appear to be one) should work toward reasonable adjustments instead of spreading fear about the government taking away the property you already have.

I could be ok with this, but there is a significant cost associated with it. You can already do this through an FFL, but it generally ends up costing $25-$35 and most people don't want to do that.

If you offer this as a service by the police, then it cost all taxpayers. I'd personally be ok with it, but I suspect that many people will balk at it. They'd be happy to pay for the "gun control" that consists of not allowing guns to be sold or simply taken away from people, but not as excited about paying to allow us to sell our guns to other people more safely.

Maybe this is something that could be solved by private industry, but someone would have to find a way to charge less to do it. FWIW, this intermediary service could be useful for more than just guns. People get robbed buying things like laptops on Craigslist all the time. Maybe you can help (i wanted to say solve, but i'll be realistic and say improve) 2 different areas at once.

> There are plenty of mass killings with knives as well. If you completely got rid of semi-auto guns, people would use bolt action guns. If you get rid of those, people will use knives. People have been killing each other since the beginning of time.

Mass killings (and attempts) with knives happen. China School attacks 21 deaths in about 8 attacks (upto 8 deaths in a single attack), Alaska 2008 killed 4, Korea 2008 (5 dead from stabbing), Akiharbara 2008 killed 4. Osaka 2001 killed 8. Wolverhampton, UK 1996 - injuries but no deaths. The death toll will be far lower in most cases than a similar event with guns. You don't see 26 dead in a single knife attack.

> The guns aren't the problem. The crazy guy shooting people is the problem.

"Crazy people" is a nebulous concept which while sometimes perfectly normal at other times people switch between sane and crazy depending on body chemistry, legal medication, infection, illegal drugs, life events and sometimes we just don't know. Is it conceivable that lower availability of guns immediately available whether directly to the person concerned or in their home or workplace the less likely large numbers of people are to get hurt (including the person themselves)?

> Yes, it is easy to kill a lot of people with a semi auto handgun. It would also be really easy to kill a lot of people with a bolt action gun. Or a pump action shotgun, and yet no one talks about banning those. For some reason we've become fascinated with "scary assault rifles". You should come out to my farm and shoot a few watermelons and you'll see that it's a lot of fun.

Banned in the UK (if the shotgun holds more than 4 shells I think) so it is talked about in some places. I'm sure it is fun shooting the guns at targets, its also fun driving through the town centre at 70mph. Done properly in the right place by the right people it is also potentially safe but overall the risk is too high.

Note that in my view the UK law is probably too strict and I would be in favour of allowing more weapons securely stored at shooting ranges with security requirements based on the weapons kept there.

>You don't see 26 dead in a single knife attack.

I suspect you could if they attacked 5 year olds in a kindergarten class room.

>"Crazy people" is a nebulous concept which while sometimes perfectly normal at other times people switch between sane and crazy depending on body chemistry, legal medication, infection, illegal drugs, life events and sometimes we just don't know. Is it conceivable that lower availability of guns immediately available whether directly to the person concerned or in their home or workplace the less likely large numbers of people are to get hurt (including the person themselves)?

I'm not referring to this person as crazy beforehand, or as something we could have somehow prevented. I'm suggesting that the behavior of killing 26 5 year olds is indeed crazy, and there is little we could do to stop this from happening. I'd start though, with armed security / principals etc in the schools (i know of schools in my area (rich white suburbs) that have guns in the schools and I think it's a great idea.

That being said, I think this person's access to guns should have been limited, by his mother. She knew he had a problem, she should have at the very least had them in a safe that he didn't have the combination to. I have no idea why people think they should restrict my access to guns because of this incident. This is a personal responsibility problem. There simply no way we (we as in America) could keep him from having a gun without restricting my freedom and liberty. On the other hand, his mom easily could have, and that wouldn't have effected me at all.

>Banned in the UK (if the shotgun holds more than 4 shells I think) so it is talked about in some places. I'm sure it is fun shooting the guns at targets, its also fun driving through the town centre at 70mph. Done properly in the right place by the right people it is also potentially safe but overall the risk is too high.

4 shotgun shells in a crowded area is going to do huge amounts of damage, so I think that's a bit silly. They also aren't terribly difficult to reload. I don't think the town center comparison holds though. Driving 70 through the middle of town very clearly endangers other people, whereas my owning guns does not make you less safe, and very arguably makes you more safe if you happen to be near me while someone tries to harm you. This person having a gun made these people less safe obviously, but he didn't own a gun. He stole them from his mother. He could have also stolen them from someone else, though maybe that's at least a bit less likely. I assume if he's willing to kill 26 people though, he's also willing to break into his neighbors house or the local gun shop.

His mother should have tried harder to prevent him from having access, but there is virtually no law that could have fixed this.

Several of the cases I mentioned are exactly attacks of 5 or 6 year old school children. They resulted in between zero (Wolverhampton, UK) and 8 deaths (one of the Chinese attacks) it seems (with a greater number of injuries but still typically much less than 26).

Yes, YOU are perfectly safe with guns at the moment. But what if you are taking anti-malarial medicine or something else that throws you off balance? Having a gun might make the difference between you shootings somebody (possibly yourself) and breaking your legs jumping of the roof or wounding someone with a knife. And then we get onto the aggregate impact of those initially less stable than yourself.

4 shotgun shells might do a huge amount of damage in crowded area but in a crowded area someone can jump on you while you stop to reload. In a sparsely populated area with a car to keep mobile in you can still do a lot of damage (Cumbria, UK 2010) but I suspect less than with more capable weapons.

In the UK there isn't anywhere to steal such weapons from apart from the police, army and criminals (but even criminals very rarely use or carry guns because the punishments for getting caught with them are high). Also such theft would need planning and time in which he may have been caught or his state of mind may have changed.

There is no doubt in my mind that in the UK with our laws the death toll in an attack similar to the one last week in the US would have been lower due to the lack of availability of guns. Children and carers/teachers may still have died but not in such numbers. It is more arguable that there imposition of restrictions is too much of a burden on freedom for the benefit but saying there is no benefit is pure denial.

I find the self defence arguments unconvincing in general although it is hard to prove. Transitioning from the US situation to the UK one especially given the geography of the US would be challenging and complicated

Genuine questions

1) In the US is his mother criminally or civilly liable for not preventing his access to the weapons?

2) Do you think that she should be?

>It is more arguable that there imposition of restrictions is too much of a burden on freedom for the benefit but saying there is no benefit is pure denial.

I'm not saying it isn't possible that there is some benefit, I am saying that any benefit would be pretty small, and that the cons easily outweigh the pros in my opinion. Self-defense is an argument that is more easily understood so I tend towards that, but to me it's secondary to the freedom and liberty you mention.

Is it really that much of a benefit to "only" have 8 kids die in a classroom? I guess if you happen to be one of the 18 it is, but these are both really really awful occurrences and getting rid of guns only maybe makes it a bit harder with other cons we've already mentioned.

I'd like to point out, that this is an anomaly of anomalies. Columbine was the most famous of these school shootings, and "only" 13 died there. Most of the time these crazy people end up killing themselves sooner. I suspect this guy was just a bit more off his rocker, and if all he had was a knife he would have still killed more than 8.

to your questions: > 1) In the US is his mother criminally or civilly liable for not preventing his access to the weapons?

He killed her before this started, so no.

> 2) Do you think that she should be?

Much harder question. I think there is probably a case to be made civilly, but probably not criminally. I do think that she shoulders a lot of the blame as I mentioned elsewhere in the thread here - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4930678 - and in your parent I said:

"That being said, I think this person's access to guns should have been limited, by his mother. She knew he had a problem, she should have at the very least had them in a safe that he didn't have the combination to."

I don't it would be too hard to prosecute a civil case against her given his prior behavior.

I don't think taking guns away from everyone makes the country a better place though. I'd prefer more people to be armed than less, but that's just my opinion.

I think 8 deaths in a knife attack is an outlier as 26 in a gun attack may be. I'm sceptical of the claim that last week's assailant would have killed more than 8 with a knife without somebody stopping him or the vast majority of the children being evacuated. Running away just works better against a knife unless completely cornered and even then some of a cornered group may escape. Evidence (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/30883.stm) is that people will put themselves in the way to protect children in their care and with even a child's chair may be able to delay the attack for vital seconds. Against a gun even such a selfless act is unlikely to cause much delay.

Yes halving the number of deaths in each attack is a benefit but not one that necessarily overrides all other factors.

That's all reasonable. I think you have to consider that many of these knife attacks have wounded far more than 8, >20 just last week. If the person doing the wounding were using a knife more suited to the task, and was more competent at using it there could easily be a much higher death to wounded ratio. Now obviously this plays into the fact that a gun is easier to use, but it doesn't mean that it can't be done. If you can wound 20 with a knife, you can kill 20 with a knife. I suspect if they all ran when he came in to the room a few more would have been saved, shooting 20 running targets is non-trivial. The problem is they were probably all paralyzed with fear. I suspect hiding under a desk would be a more likely reaction, one that doesn't help at all.

>Against a gun even such a selfless act is unlikely to cause much delay.

Look at the attack on Rep. Giffords [1] "Loughner stopped to reload, but dropped the loaded magazine from his pocket to the sidewalk, from where bystander Patricia Maisch grabbed it. Another bystander clubbed the back of the assailant's head with a folding chair, injuring his elbow in the process, representing the 14th injury. The gunman was then tackled to the ground by 74-year-old retired US Army Colonel Bill Badger, who himself had been shot, and was further subdued by Maisch and bystanders Roger Sulzgeber and Joseph Zamudio. Zamudio was a CCW holder and had a weapon on his person, but arrived after the shooting had stopped and did not use the firearm to engage or threaten the gunman."

Gunmen get subdued all the time, but when it's a classroom of 5 year olds and you presumably start with the 1 adult teacher it becomes a lot harder.

>Yes halving the number of deaths in each attack is a benefit but not one that necessarily overrides all other factors.

I think this is key. I wouldn't consider it nearly enough of a benefit to outweigh the pros of gun ownership such as self defense, freedom, and liberty.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Tucson_shooting

> If you outlaw all guns, then only the outlaws will have guns. That is a worse option.

This is the option where I live (France). It's not perfect here (very far from it), but I think we have a lot less violence, a lot less people in jail, etc. "Outlaws" sometimes kill each other but they have yet to massacre kids in a school.

> If the principal and the teachers that are sane had guns with them, or there were some security officers or police with guns, this wouldn't have happened.

How do you identify "teachers that are sane"? (I would say, teachers that are sane are those that refuse to carry guns.)

And what happens when there are no adults around? Should 6-year-olds be required to carry guns?

This kind of comment makes me happy I don't live in the US. I have three kids (3-4-7); there is no "security officer" at their school, you can come in and out pretty much as you like. The school is small enough that the principal knows every student by name and every parent by sight.

Now, before someone says that I'm stupid because I just generalize from a single data point, and that I probably live in a privileged neighborhood... On weekends my kids go to an American School (so that they can learn some English).

The neighborhood is the same, but in the American school they have "security" officers, big doors, big talkies, and you have to wear a badge at all times.

The "threat" (or lack thereof) is the same, but the perceived threat, and the culture, is very very different.

> Please don't take my guns

It's just that I still can't see how guns aren't related to mass shootings.

But I'm not a US citizen, I don't visit the US often, I'm really not in a position to take anything from you. Do what you think is best.

This is a big cultural divide. It's a big divide within the U.S.; it's even bigger with people outside the U.S. who haven't experienced the gun culture first hand, much less grown up with it.

Just a factual side-note:

"Outlaws" sometimes kill each other but they have yet to massacre kids in a school.

_cough_

Just this past spring: A gunman has shot dead a teacher and three children at a Jewish school in the French city of Toulouse.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-17426313

He was neither an outlaw nor, stricly speaking «crazy». He was an ideologue, a fanatic and a terrorist. While it's good that there aren't too many guns around, the lack of weapons is not enough to deter terrorists. The only thing that works against terrorism is intelligence. This particular story was a big failure in this regard.

Ha! Guns are the problem for crazy people in the US, but in places without guns and lots of gun control, it's then a "terrorist" that finds a gun and kills people.

>This is the option where I live (France). Well if it wasn't for the Americans and our guns you would be ruled by Nazi Germany. It might be a long time ago and off topic, but it really wasn't that long ago and it's not that far off topic.

>It's just that I still can't see how guns aren't related to mass shootings.

That's obvious, they just aren't related to mass killings. This technology has been around for > 100 years. Look up the 1911, still one of the most popular semi-auto handguns on the market. These killings have only happened recently. That tells me something else is going on, it's not just that we have guns.

We've also had the mass knife rampages mentioned, as well as suicide bombers, etc. Almost all of these people end up killing themselves as well. Nothing is going to stop them from strapping a bomb to their chest and killing an entire classroom or gym full of people.

Even if it were true that France would be ruled by Nazi Germany were it not for «american guns» (more likely, soviet Russia), what does this have to do with mass shootings in contemporary US? (And how are your other wars going, BTW? Any General left still wearing his pants?)

Should we go down this road, I could say that I don't care if you guys shoot at each other until there is no one left standing; the incident involving Vice-president Dick Cheney shooting his friend in the face was entertaining indeed. But today it's more difficult to be indifferent to the massacre of children.

If it's so easy to perpetuate mass killings with any weapon, why are (semi!) automatic rifles still the weapon of choice amongst perpetrators?

See my other comment regarding weapon choice - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4934021

http://listverse.com/2008/01/01/top-10-worst-school-massacre...

fwiw - semi-auto rifles are actually only used in 3% of shootings. but lets not let facts get in the way of anything.

Actually I never understood what is the true problem kids/people in the US have? Really what is it?

There are nations on this earth where people consider themselves fortunate if they can just eat 2-3 times a day. Probably send their kids to their school(Where education is just for names'sake), have some clothes to wear, not fall ill and live with minimal dignity.

The situation is far better in US, people is US probably don't even have an idea how bad things are for people outside. Most US citizens aren't even remotely likely to face such situations.

I guess at the end its too much luxury, and law of diminishing utility kicking in.

I think people in US should face some real hardships in their lives, what people else where face. May be when they see for themselves how fortunate they were with what they had before. They will learn the importance of things the hard way.

" there are two main reasons why there are so many shootings in the US 1/ ... 2/ guns are everywhere"

Quite the contrary, there aren't enough guns. If the teachers were carrying, if the school had armed security guards, if the principal had a handgun, etc. then this "crazy" person would likely not have acted out. As Quannel X says, a person may be "crazy" but that doesn't mean they're crazy. That is, most persons who are classified as mentally ill don't act out in a situation where they will likely lose.

"...please explain why a school teacher would have three guns in her house, one of them a Glock semi-automatic pistol?"

Perhaps because it is allowed, because she enjoys target shooting, because she hunts and the .223 semi-auto AR-15 is one of the most popular hunting rifles in existence in the USA. Because the Glock is an OK and very popular handgun.

The question for the mother is not why she owned firearms but why she allowed her son unsupervised access to her firearms. She made a mistake and paid the price. Darwin rulez once again.

"Quite the contrary, there aren't enough guns"

I struggle to find an example of a country with more guns and lower murder rate. Care to help?

This is the standard NRA line. It's not about guns, its about mental illness. But in fact its about the intersection of easy access to guns and mental illness. It's terrifically hard to screen for mental illness. It's stupidly easy to restrict access to guns.

>It's stupidly easy to restrict access to guns.

Yeah, the founders of the United States wrote the 2nd Amendment for exactly that reason.

The view of Second Amendment advocates is that civilian access to firearms is a fundamental civil right that protects the people from their government. This makes it a fundamentally different question than the standard utilitarian arguments one could come up with. It's easy to imagine ways of making people safer by eliminating their civil rights. But we choose to maintain these civil rights despite the costs.

And the fourth amendment says that protection against unreasonable search and seizure is also a fundamental right that protects the people from their government. But that was gone in a flash.

No, it's not. You're being hyperbolic.

In any case, I think you and I would agree that it's worthwhile to resist violations of the fourth amendment even if you could make a case that they would save lives. I'm just suggesting we apply the same standard to other civil rights. American liberals are a little two-faced about this kind of thing.

> You're being hyperbolic.

I wish he was being a lot more hyperbolic.

The Supreme Court's recent decision in *District of Columbia v Heller" which found that the 2nd Amendment does give a fundamental right to own firearms might not be as expansive as you think: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller#...

There is probably a lot of room in between what the courts would allow as far as limiting just what type of firearms one can keep in their home for lawful purposes (read: self-defense) and who can own them. A right to bear firearms does not necessarily mean a right to own fully-automatic assault rifles.

Indeed. Which is why fully automatic assault rifles have been illegal for the better part of a century. (They were outlawed during Prohibition due to the notoriety of the Thompson submachine gun.)

To clarify, fully automatic guns can be owned, at least in some States. Current federal law prohibits automatics manufactured after 1984 (IIRC) being sold to civilians. You can buy one manufactured before that. This restriction of course makes the available guns extremely expensive. There is also a demanding series of signoffs, from the ATF down to your local sheriff, that you need to get through. But it can be done.

The rigamarole is enough that legally purchased fully automatic firearms are never actually used to commit crimes in the United States.

Correct.

Yeah, like with a locked cabinet. They shouldn't restrict gun rights they should hold people accountable who fail to reasonably secure their weapons as if they had committed the crime themselves. Kind of like the father in this post put all his knives in a container and kept them safe.

This is incredibly important.

Every time I talk to people from outside of the country about the US, the first thing that comes up is the difficulty of obtaining proper healthcare.

Is there any evidence that healthcare would help with this situation?

As somebody who has dealt with the mental health care system without and with mental health care... absolutely yes.

While I don't doubt your assertion, I think the parent was looking for more evidence than a simple "yes".

Do you think he wasn't getting mental health care? It was reported that he was on medication.

Just relating it back to the article, seeing that the mother changed jobs in order to obtain healthcare and fund the care of her child scared me. Not everybody is in the position of being able to obtain such a job, and forcing a parent to fund emergency room trips without insurance could be preventing access to adequate treatment.

> At least we have health insurance now. I recently accepted a position with a local college, giving up my freelance career because when you have a kid like this, you need benefits. You’ll do anything for benefits. No individual insurance plan will cover this kind of thing.

If nothing else, she probably liked her career (else why hadn't she gone to the college in the first place?)

It good to talk about mental illness, but the debate on guns is still relevant.

Here is a similar incident in a country with no easy access to gun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akihabara_massacre

With a truck and a knife, it's 7 deaths instead of 28.

Yes, and if there were no knives, maybe there would have been zero deaths. But for some reason a call to ban knives is never heard.

Calling for a ban on guns due to what is relatively a statistical anomaly, is kneejerk at best, and encroaching on individual rights at worst.

There is no call to blanket ban knives/blades because of their many basic and common uses.

However, many countries do have legislation knifes, sometimes outright banning certain blades. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knife_legislation

Surely its possible to kill more than 7 with a truck. Just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it can't. There've also been plenty of other knife rampages that killed more than 7.

I'm sorry. Im a parent. This lady needs to control her kid. Vote it down if you want, but when 'Michael' snaps and shoots up a school then everyone will say shouldve couldve woudldve. She is clearly ALLOWING this behavior. Funny, no mention of a father.

From experience, mothers are way more tolerant of out of control kids.

This is a tragedy waiting to happen.

Considering she explains in detail how she has had to take him to hospital multiple times with the assistance of police to restrain him, and further admits that pressing charges against him is perhaps the only last remaining option (which she indicates she is understandably reluctant to do), I'm having a hard time seeing what she isn't doing?

Could you perhaps elaborate as to what you would do to control a mentally ill child such as her own?

Press charges.

I kind of agree with you but on the father, issue ... We have no idea what the situation is. She seems to like the idea of having a mentally ill child, maybe that is too harsh. But some things strike me as a little weird. OK, so this kid is in a constant state of rage but yet he has an in-depth knowledge of quantum physics and so on and so forth, where does he find the time? I don't know, something doesn't seem right.

We do know what happened to the father according to previous blog posts: http://anarchistsoccermom.blogspot.com/2012/07/news-from-war... tl;dr; he left her for some woman he met online and married her six weeks after his divorce was complete. And now he doesn't pay the soccer mom child support and is engaging her in a grueling custody battle.

Funny, not much of a father to mention.

Mental health care isn't that easy to obtain north of the border either, here in Canada.

I had to wait nearly 1.5 years to get the help I needed. I've dealt with issues for over 25 years, and only recently have I identified them. I still struggle with them. During the last 1.5 years, I nearly failed out of my Master's program.

Here's hoping I can finish it.

I have two family members that were bipolar. One lived in the US and was diagnosed and treated for decades. She received free care due to Medicaid and Medicare. She was always poor.

Was it the best care? Perhaps not, but at least she could always get it when she acknowledged she needed it.

The other lived in the UK and went undiagnosed for decades. When he finally met his mom and realized he was also bipolar, he had to push the health service doctors hard to accept his diagnosis and finally treat him. He was successful engineer and even owned his own company.

It seems universal care sacrifices everybody's quality. Personally, I think 2 sensible people could sit down and design a better system than either approach.

Good luck with finishing your degree.

Thanks!

Yeah, I'm not sure where to place the blame on our system here. The great thing is that I don't have to pay for my care, which was definitely a concern for me at first. However, I had to go through 3 different avenues before I was finally allowed into a group CBT session. I even went through my university's counselling services, only to be put onto a several month waiting list and then forgotten about; they never put me on the list.

I only got help because I kept pushing for it. I'm sure many others would have given up sooner. Heck, I gave up a couple of times too.

Mental health issues can be difficult to diagnose. If you have "obvious" symptoms, you can typically get help fairly quickly.

In my case, the signs are not obvious at all. If you met me, you wouldn't suspect anything was wrong with me. I can mostly function in my daily life. I have a wonderful fiancee, and I've been fairly successful with a solid undergraduate engineering degree, and good in-roads in my business-related work.

You would never suspect that I was physically and mentally abused throughout my childhood and undergraduate. Or that I second-guess everything that I do, and that I worry about every mistake I've ever made. Or that I cannot take joy in any of my successes. Or that my father has his own mental health issues, and that my uncle/his brother lost his battle with alcoholism, and that their father was institutionalized several times in their home country.

I'm a relatively normal guy with great ambitions. But my mental health issues, while hidden, are there, and if left unchecked will contribute to my future failures.

As a society, we do need to pay more attention to mental health and start to have conversations about it.

(Actually, it's one area where I think a non-profit startup using web technologies could actually make a meaningful contribution.)

"It seems universal care sacrifices everybody's quality".

I don't think thats quite the case. I live in the UK and can't comment on the US system from personal experience, however what I hear most about over the pond is the many people who get screwed from not having health care or not actually having significant cover when the need arises. Its said that having a life threatening illness will pretty much bankrupt the majority of people.

Obviously if thats true, then all those people who aren't getting great service for whatever the reason would be better off with the UK system, but even with universal health care, I've had additional private health care for most of my working life, so theres nothing stopping you from getting the best care available despite the fact they'll send you to the same doctors and get you the same treatment in the vast majority of cases.

Personally I think our national health service is fantastic. The system isn't perfect and there are some advantages to private, like for non life threatening issues you can often get seen a lot sooner, and we should always be trying to strife to improve our situation. I'd never trade it for the American system though.

We also don't have a lot of massacres, but I'd wager thats a much more complicated discussion.

There may actually be a dearth of reports on "So and so got adequate care".

Thank god a post like this was brought up. This incident in CT has undoubtedly brought up a national debate about gun control, but I hope to God it sparks a debate about mental illness, the real cause behind all of these mass shootings.

Amen to that. Thanks for upvoting it (I assume), rather than flagging it. I had some doubts about posting this vis a vis the guidelines, but thought it was important, especially given the stridently political nature of all the discussion I've seen about the shooting in CT on here thus far.

Thanks for bringing this case which shows the complexity of the issue.

> “Then I’m going to kill myself,” he said.

I remember doing that.

> He’s been on a slew of antipsychotic and mood altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian novel of behavioral plans. Nothing seems to work.

I remember that.

> A few weeks ago, Michael..threatened to kill me

I did that too.

She forgot to mention the time(s) he threatened to run away. (I'd be surprised if he didn't.)

After a marathon of transfers, expulsions, and incidents, I was at the end of the line. My parents interrupted my electronic solipsism for a moment to tell me the truth. It was a long conversation, but it can be summed in a sentence.

"Son, you're out of options, if you want to have a future you need to play nice at this next school."

Maybe I'd been delivered that message in the past, if I was, I don't remember it. This time it clicked for me. I realized that I'd had my fun hurting the faculty of various schools, but if I wanted to see the day after tomorrow, I would need to stop hurting people.

Before I continue on with my story, I would like to share an anecdote about handwriting:

For the longest time my handwriting was awful. My whole life in fact. When I was learning, I had a mean, evil instructor. She would yell at me when I wrote the letters wrong, it really seemed to bother her. So I wrote the letters the wrong way on purpose, because making her mad was more important to me than drawing Latin runes. Eventually I had learned how to handwrite, entirely wrong, out of habit.

As the years passed by, the root of this badness became obscured in other peoples memory. My mom attributed it to mental illness, everyone else did too. But I knew better. I know better. A few months ago, I decided to improve my handwriting. I would pick a font and learn to write in it. There wouldn't be any tutorials of course, I'd just copy the symbols until they looked right.

At first it was just trial and error, I would try and write the symbol the way I saw it on my computer monitor. (The only one that eluded me is that weird 'a' that looks more like an '&'.) Then, once I figured out how to write the symbol, I would practice the motions over and over on paper. I eventually moved on to writing whole sentences, entirely in this new script. Then whole paragraphs. I stopped short of essays, because by then I had basically mastered the points where my current writing lacked.

Then at school I would apply it, even when it was slower than my normal note taking, I would slowly and methodically do my symbols the new way; the right way. Occasionally I would fall back into my old habits, but only for a moment. Slowly I got better, faster. Over the course of days it became a habit. Over the course of weeks it became second nature. Over the course of months it faded into the background.

Back to my story. I knew I couldn't do what I was doing anymore. So I sat myself down and listened to Linkin Park's Breaking the Habit, over and over, on repeat. The problem is that it's stupid easy to threaten to kill people. It's stupid easy to be a terrible person. I decided I didn't want to be that person anymore, partly because I couldn't be.

I got to school, and did the last overtly malicious thing I can think of. (At least, that can be characterized by my earlier behavior.) There was a boy, let's call him Jacob, Jacob had earned a reward for his good behavior. I knew this before he did, because I was in an introductory one on one with the instructor, to explain the rules. She told me to tell him she wanted to tell him something. But not to spoil it.

I went up to him and promptly relayed that he was in major trouble. He went into the head instructors office crying. I hadn't meant to do that. I figured when he heard that he had actually received an award it would lift his spirits even more. It was a pretty stupid idea.

He came out of her office drying his tears, but still sobbing a little. It hurt me to see this. He didn't deserve that, and it was all my fault. I'd ruined what should have been a happy moment in his life. Of course; the instructor had words for me, they were scalding as I remember them. But as I contemplated Jacob, they were just background noise. I cried.

And after that, things got better. I stopped lying, I stopped calling people names, or threatening to blow them up. Occasionally I would fall into my old habits, but I'd rebound. Eventually, I was so well behaved that they couldn't justify keeping me at a specialty school, I was filtered back into the public school system.

I often think about what my younger self would think of me now, I don't think he would like me very much; in fact he might even threaten to kill me. If he did, I'd probably laugh. I'd tell him the truth:

"You can kill me, but that won't solve your problems."

I like this story because it illustrates that there are lots of ranges for normal and that parents often make the difference but I do want to make it clear that many mental health situations can't just simply be snapped out of.

I know.

I figured you did, but there others who will read your story and think -- "That's just like that Aurora guy! He just needed that! He just needed somebody to come along and tell him "XYZ" and then straighten his shit out". I still thought the story was good for the reasons already outlined though.

Then why did you write a lengthy comment about your behavioural issues on a blog about mental illness?

Why is it not being downvoted? Evidence of mental health bias of "suck it up" re: HN culture?

Upvoted primarily because "parents often make the difference" alludes to the wider context, the systems context, which includes the parents and other individuals and groups and society in general.

Re handwriting:

If you are still into improving your handwriting, buy yourself a fountain pen. It makes it a lot of fun to experiment with new characters and drastically alter your handwriting.

I've always had meh handwriting. Not horrible, but not pretty either. I've been slowly converting my scratchy characters over to smoother, more flowy characters with embelleshments, since fountain pens make it so easy to play. The process was identical to what you described. Pick a character, play with alternatives until I found one I liked, then slowly retrain myself to use it.

Hand writing is a big thing here in India. And generally many super intelligent kids lose out to mug pots because of hand writing.

Coming to my case, I consider any one who boasts about great hand writing a loser.

The moment I stopped writing exams I started giving a damn about hand writing. Hand writing improvement initiatives were the biggest things I hated in school. It was a exercise in futility.

Looking back I feel like somebody was forcing a back end engineer into learning HTML.

Interesting. Here in the States (at least, where I grew up), handwriting is a real mixed bag.

When you are learning how to write as a small child, it's a big deal to write clearly (for obvious reason). Then you are forced to learn cursive, and its a big deal to write cursive clearly.

Then it doesn't matter anymore. Literally everyone stops caring as long as it is legible. It's a weird system. While you are learning to read and write, there is an emphasis on penmanship. But once you are literate...no one cares anymore. Most people (like myself) degenerate back to chicken scratch. Especially as typing became more prevalent. I would hazard a guess that children in the States have even worse handwriting nowadays.

I actually find it physically difficult to hand write more then a few words these days. It's pretty sad.

Ha! I'm the same way. It's so damn slow compared to how much I can put down in the same time if I were on my mechanical keyboard instead.

I always hated high school in class essays because all I could think was that I'd be able to write 3x better/more efficiently/produce more content if I were doing it on a keyboard. Plus, it always gave me handcramps. :(

I think some schools don't even teach cursive any more.

I wonder how those kids write their signatures.

They print them out.

'X'

  > big deal to write cursive clearly

The fact that cursive in US is considered some kind of special writing and is uncommon was one ot the biggest "This year I learned". This topic pops up on reddit from time to time, and usually there is a comment from non-US "we just call it writing". AFAIR I learned to write cursive from the very beginning. The first letters we wrote might have been capital ones, but I am pretty sure first words were in cursive.

Haha, so true. I wrote a couple of incoherent rants about this way back in the day:

http://shrik.theswamp.in/2004/03/presentation.html

and

http://shrik.theswamp.in/2004/03/presentation-2.html

>Coming to my case, I consider any one who boasts about great hand writing a loser.

I dedicated a lot during my school days trying to improve my handwriting without anyone's involvement. Naturally, I'm proud of how much my handwriting has improved. Thanks for the 'loser' tag.

I've very seldom used anything else than a fountain pen. It's so nice and pleasurable!

My older kid is 7 and learned to write last year with a fountain pen. His teacher said it prevents kids from pressing too hard on paper, and helps them develop a nicer writing.

And copying characters as they appear on your monitor probably isn't a great idea. You want to see the flow, fonts generally are not cursive, and the letter aren't really how you'd want to write them (less loops and too many serifs). The 'a' in pretty much every font looks completely different to the 'a' I was taught to write.

It's gonna be super weird when we get a generation which has terrible handwriting - it'll probably be soon.

FWIW I have terrible handwriting and have only used it when forced to in high school. For everything else, I type. That was certainly not true of most others in my age group (I'm 27 now), but I think you're correct. It will be soon.

> “Then I’m going to kill myself,” he said. I remember doing that. > He’s been on a slew of antipsychotic and mood altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian novel of behavioral plans. Nothing seems to work. I remember that. > A few weeks ago, Michael..threatened to kill me I did that too.

I wonder if a nice beating would have done you any good. I have one anecdotal story.

My older brother was uncontrollable at the age of 9. He threw a rock at my even older brother straight at his head. Nobody could tell him what to do. Once he run away from home on a bus heading to a big city. Had he not been spotted by some friends of the family we may never had seen him again.

When they returned him my grandfather advised my mom, who has a strong temper, not to scold him. So she did not. From there after he became even more uncontrollable. And now he would threaten my mother that he would run away if he didn't get his way.

Seeing the truth in his eyes my mom realized that one of this days he was going to run away and this time it might be for good. So this is what my mother decided to do as a last resort:

She tied him up from the feet to a branch of a tree. Basically he was hanging upside down. My mother told him that since he was going to run away she'd rather kill him so that at least that way she would know where he was. I believe at this moment my mom took out a belt, she might've hit him once or twice with it, and asked him if he was going to run away. My brother, as you can imagine, was terrified and crying and telling my mom that he would never do it again.

Outcome: The problem was fixed. He became more subdued and never threatened to run away.

Now my brother is a grown man, in his 40's. He has a family, a house and is a productive man of society. Overall he turned out pretty good.

Mind you that it wasn't like my mom would abuse her children with beatings every other day. But you could definitely expect a beating if you really misbehaved. Not once did I get a beating nor do I remember any of my sisters getting a beating. Just trying to establish that she was not an abusive mother.

All of this happened south of the USA border.

In Urdu we have a proverb it translates to English as - "Treat your teachers beating, as a garland you could receive in the future".

I agree corporal punishment is cruelty. But some minimal beating must be allowed to put things in order. My mom is a teacher, and back here in the past and to some extent now. Beating kids in school in India was the norm. She tells me many parents would come ask the teachers to not beat their kids, some would come and ask teachers to be ask strict as they can.

Its all in the ideology. But my mom says, on an average my mom says a kid who has been corrected by beating has gone to do a lot well than the ones that hasn't.

Haven't you heard of the proverb- "Spare the stick and spoil the child"

Some times you have to get strict.

As I have never raised children, I can't speak from experience. But I feel like the same thing occurs in nature. Occasionally the parent needs to establish dominance.

I am not advocating beating your kids, but if they are hell bent on testing the limits I think you have to show them that there is definitely a line that can not be crossed.

This is exactly how I (father of two) have used corporal punishment. It's largely there simply so I have "something worse" in store if you don't take your time-out. I think I've had to use it once every three years. Kids are awesome game players, if they know there is a limit on sanctions they'll play right to that limit.

But it is only a tool. You have to be consistent, and you have to be clear, and you have to be generally supportive. You can't expect of them things they can't do. All of that is probably more important than corporal punishment.

Yeah, where is Michael's dad in all of this? I would have had the living hell beaten out of me if I had ever called my mom a bitch.

where is Michael's dad in all of this?

Busy trying not to pay child support and fighting her in court for custody of the children.

http://anarchistsoccermom.blogspot.com/2012/07/news-from-war...

It's certainly not a very popular western attitude these days. Positive reinforcement and re-direction is used in place of discipline.

I'm not 100% sure how I feel about it but it does seem to me that different kids react to different kinds of treatment. Hitting one kid may really be unnecessary and even harm them mentally. Other kids seems like absolutely nothing works on them except physical spanking. Maybe that is due to the way their parents are raising them? I'm not sure.

I remember in school a few bullies who got their ass kicked by another student and that problem was instantly solved. So it does seem like it works sometimes. But I hate to think we're just perpetuating a violent nature .

"Spare the stick and spoil the child"

That proverb is misapplied. When you look at the original Hebrew in context the stick was a guiding stick not a beating stick. A guiding stick is one used for gentle nudges to keep someone on the right path. Basically the proverb is saying: An unguided child is a spoiled child.

Today is is often interpreted: An unbeaten child is a spoiled child. However, this is not the original intent of the passage at all!

I don't have a biblical commentary on me but if you want to check I suggest the Anchor Bible series which generally provide high quality modern scholarship with extensive bibliographies.

Thanks for this. I've heard this several times and always just assumed it was a throwback. I can definitely agree with "An unguided child is a spoiled child" though.

Interesting interpretation.

Apropo:

תהילים פרק כג' פסוק 4 גַּם כִּי-אֵלֵךְ בְּגֵיא צַלְמָוֶת לֹא-אִירָא רָע כִּי-אַתָּה עִמָּדִי שִׁבְטְךָ וּמִשְׁעַנְתֶּךָ הֵמָּה יְנַחֲמֻנִי

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me; {N} Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me.

I beg to differ. I think this is an interpretation adapted to meet the requirements of modern times . Because the commonly held interpretation of the proverb, is very simply, what it means, that you got to discipline the child, by spanking[1].

IMHO, this(revised definition) is a catchup which the clergy (of various religions) play every now and then. Sometimes to meet the new discovery in science, or other times to meet the current human right guidelines.

[1] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spare_the_rod_and_spoil_the_ch...

It is fine to have a different interpretation but I suggest before forming an opinion to look at modern scholarship on the matter. Biblical scholarship is fractal; the deeper you go the deeper there is to go.

Finally, KJV is simply not a very accurate interpretation of the texts it draws from. Nor does it take into account more ancient texts which are now available to interpreters and translators. Moreover, translation (while interpretation) does not provide context which is why I pointed you to a reliable commentary series which will provide up to date scholarship on the matter.

I am not saying my interpretation is right but I am saying you will need to do a bit better than just referencing a wiktionary article on the etymology.

Physical abuse does not solve mental health issues. Ever. Submission is a terrible goal in raising children.

But in some cases, these are just behavior issues, not mental health issues. Indeed, prescribing pharma and telling a kid he's mentally ill might be compounding the behavioral issue.

I never suggested medication, or telling a child that they are mentally ill.

"I wonder if a nice beating would have done you any good." This was a response to a description of severe acting out by a child. A child threatening to kill herself or her parents is not an indication of sound mental health. Hitting them will make it worse.

Sufficiently dysfunctional behavior defines what it means to have a psychological problem.

Why do you assume that submission is the goal of the beating? Or that you know the best way to raise children?

"Outcome: The problem was fixed. He became more subdued and never threatened to run away."

What other goal would there be? The idea of corporal punishment is that child fears getting hit enough that they will stop acting on the motives they have which conflict with those of the parents. In other words, they will submit to the motives of the parents.

Common sense aside, the fact that beating doesn't produce good outcomes for children is common knowledge in highly educated societies.

The American Academy of Pediatrics says:

"First, establish a positive, supporting and loving relationship with your child. Without this foundation, your child has no reason, other than fear, to demonstrate good behavior. [...] If you feel discipline is necessary, the AAP recommends that you do not spank or use other physical punishments. That only teaches aggressive behavior, and becomes ineffective if used often."

>>What other goal would there be?

The goal for the drastic measures my mom took was to not loose her child. That he stopped being such a big brat was a bonus. He was still strong tempered, but at least he would no longer test my mother. And the threat of a beating kept the rest of us in line. We knew not to test her. All of my brothers and sisters grew up to be decent human beings.

In case you are wondering, my brother never beats his kids, is enough for them to see him mad when they misbehave for them to fall in line.

I concede, had he had a mental disorder it would probably not have worked. In this case though, I'm not sure the OP really had a mental disorder which is why I suggested the beating. Some kids will go to great lengths to manipulate you as much as they can.

Anyway, this is just an anecdote so take it as such.

I'm not saying that beating your children will necessarily ruin their lives, or that children who are beaten can't grow up to be functional adults. But two things are true, to the best of my knowledge:

- Beating does a worse job of correcting behavioral problems than more humane methods

- Beating contributes negatively to how your children feel, in general

Again, this doesn't mean that beating makes you sick, or that it never corrects a specific behavior. Only that it's not a good idea, and, however mildly on a case-by-case basis, it probably means you're mistreating your kids.

I wouldn't suggest it to anyone regardless of whether or not you consider violently threatening to kill yourself and your parents, to the point that they are afraid for their lives, to be evidence of mental health issues.

But, how to act after people have tried everything they could think of to no avail? Is medication a better solution than some spanking (especially when it's unclear a mental problem exists)? I wouldn't be so sure about that.

Beating your children isn't to manipulate them into becoming little slaves, it's to punish them for going against society's expected behaviour (which one might argue is its own form of slavery).

Can you back up your claim that beatings produce poor outcomes for children in "highly educated societies?" Or that 'less educated societies" are inferior because they don't have qualms about spanking their kids when they misbehave?

See the quote from AAP I posted elsewhere. Corporal punishment has been shown to be less effective than alternatives, and probably harmful to children.

Corporal punishment is more common in less affluent/educated societies than it is in wealthy/well-educated ones. This is common knowledge. I never said anything about inferiority. It's not about judging anyone, it's about contradicting bad advice.

Less effective in what setting? If physical punishment is more common world-wide, that is rather telling evidence that our forebears found it to be the most effective way to bring children in line, and it has been done ever since; at least until western civilization decided it was improper or at the very least, sub-optimal.

My point is that who is the AAP to say how best to raise children? I seriously doubt the validity of any study that claims to be conclusive on how to raise children, and would make a bet that any research they did was localized to the US. Anecdotally, several of my friends were beaten as children and turned out fine. All this proves is that sometimes physical punishment works and sometimes it doesn't. But the same goes for "establishing a loving relationship with your child;" since you can hardly do that when they're threatening to stab you with a knife.

  > is rather telling evidence that our forebears
  > found it to be the most effective way to bring
  > children in line

Our forebears also felt that the best was to run a society included things like:

- Slavery / Indentured Service as a means of generating wealth.

- Punishing women for sexuality (because all women were temptresses, and a man couldn't be blamed for infidelity, rape, etc).

- Torture against criminals / political prisoners.

- Religious wars.

I don't think that "our forebears did it, so there must be something to it," is a generally effective argument.

You make a great point. I didn't think of the big picture when I made that claim.

>> " Corporal punishment has been shown to be less effective than alternatives,"

I've always figured that Corporal punishment is like banging rocks together to make fire. sure it _can_ be done, our ancestors used it effectively and it can be useful as a last resort; but a lighter or matchsticks are significantly more effective.

In my experience, those who argue strongly in favor of beating children do so not because they know better but because that technique is all they know. essentially: "but if i don't beat him how will I get him to behave??"

Living wirh my wife would also be easier when I could just beat her when she doesnt get my point. Thinking of it my coworkers are also stupid sometimes and I am certainly stronger than most. Good times ahead...

The AAP quote is not based on data, just a desire for the world to work a certain way. Do not attempt to cite data to the contrary; while you will find critical studies of corporal punishment you will not find any that supports their use of the polemical word, "only."

You're over-thinking this, and projecting motives onto an organization of pediatricians that you can't possibly prove.

Their audience here is a general one, especially parents. They are not using "only" to make some kind of absolute claim about human nature. The point is that it's commonly accepted (and supported by research) that hitting your children is unhelpful to them and doesn't work well.

The word only makes an explicitly absolute claim. Pediatricians have read the same studies you and I have read, so they know the data isn't absolute. Therefore, they are claiming an absolute where they know there isn't one. You are right that I can't prove why they do this, but I think I can safely say most people persuade using untrue absolutes in order to realize an ideological goal or to make money, and the AAP is a non-profit organization. The quote is not something that should carry weight in a room of scientists or parents. I don't think I am over-thinking something that you've posted, especially now that you've asked me not to think too much about it.

>>Common sense aside, the fact that beating doesn't produce good outcomes for children is common knowledge in highly educated societies.

Are these societies the same societies where shoot outs happen at schools? Because I wouldn't be surprised if that is the case.

Physical abuse is one thing. Disciplining is another.

'You won't get to play your video game' is not even a punishment. If you are thinking you can discipline your kid by these make believe tricks, All the best.

When we talk of beating a kid, we are not talking about smashing him/her to pulp. The idea to ensure the kid is stopped when he/she is at the beginning of doing something wrong[Like stopping him when he first steals from/bullies/hits other kids]. If you let your kid grow up, carry guns and fire at people something is seriously wrong with your upbringing. And frankly speaking you can't wash your hands off by putting it on mental disease.

These are not cases of mental disease, these are just unruly kids, who fear nothing[After all why should they, when their own parents can't do anything about their behavior who else will?].

These kids need to be taught how it is in the real world, and if they can't do it the easy way some minimal beating must be allowed. I would prefer that rather than watch some one grow and fire bullets at others.

I really am surprised by most of the (young) parents I have met so far in the US. My father used corporal punishment for even little things on us and left a (psychological) scar - I could never touch my kids - on the other hand, in our home (4 kids of my own) discipline is an extremely high (positive) value.

This has nothing to do with submission but with self-control - a rare quality which kids have to master. The so-called "timeouts" and disciplinary measures by our American friends don't work - resulting in children which cause so much more suffering for everybody - they don't work because the parents just do not establish a sense of authority and strict rules. Forget physical punishment for a moment but at home the parents and in school the teachers have to be able to establish their authority. I have seen so many parents, themselves using mental pharmaceutica who let their kids get away with things that were purely evil. At the same time I feel the sub-human stimulation (TV, games, etc.) many kids are flooded with over decades is considered less (negatively) habit forming than the application of simple repetitive acts of cultured manners, polite expressions and self-restraint.

I had the same thought at first, but reading the whole anecdote made me wonder. It's clear that the mother didn't do what she did just to indulge her own anger. She did, in fact, have her son's interests at heart. It was a last resort to get through to him. When you talk about submission as a goal, I think you have to ask, submission to what? If the goal is to get the child to submit to the parent's ego, as it so often is, then I agree with you. But parents have to set limits, and children have to submit to them.

Well, it depends on where you draw the line - I mean, in our society we have agreed that we will force everybody to submit to certain rules, no matter what they want or what it takes to make them submit.

As an example, if someone (for whatever reason) wants to kill his neighbour and take his goods/wife/house/whatever, then we'll force him not to do it, up to and including lethal force by lots of armed uniformed men.

Continuing with the example, if a "kid" realistically threatens to perform criminal acts - such as shooting someone, robbing someone, raping someone - then submission is not optional, it's mandatory and it SHOULD be an absolute goal. The only question is how to make that submission happen in a humane manner - if the expected result is violence and a long prison term or death, then many means of forcing submission, such as threatening physical punishment or forced medication may seem quite reasonable.

Why is submission a terrible goal in raising children? Isn't submission to authority absolutely required to achieve success and stay out of jail?

And once a person is an adult, physical abuse (police beatings, confinement with criminals, disgusting (http://www.npr.org/programs/wesat/features/2002/apr/loaf/)) is the normal way rebellion is treated. And it seems to work. Most people avoid harming their neighbors and pay their taxes.

Another word for "beating" is simply "consequence". Establishing that there are negative consequences for particular behaviours is what's important (and that they're consistently applied and adhered to), and clearly the mother knows that--she punished him effectively by yanking his electronics for a day. There's nothing particular about beating a child that's more effective than other punishments. Show me a child who doesn't respond to punishment, and I'll show you a parent who is inconsistent with consequences, and gives in rather than establishing that consequences happen.

That said, I'm fucking horrified by your story. If your brother is a productive man of society, then your mother got lucky. But for every productive man of society, we have a hundred fathers who beat their children senselessly because "that's how I was raised."

Violence begets violence. Abuse begets abuse. Nothing about proper, strict discipline requires behaviour that would, under other circumstances, get you locked up.

What this misses is that for many mental illnesses, is that the connection between actions and consequences is broken. My brother had EXTREME issues with oppositional defiance disorder and ADHD growing up. I can guarantee you my parents made sure there were consequences, but it doesn't matter. They simply can't connect the actions they're taking in that moment to the consequences they will receive afterwards.

A lot of parents (and employers) come up with consequences that are not really logically tied to behavior. Often, they just try to "punish", which fails with a lot of kids, or even backfires. My oldest son has (among other things) a high tolerance for physical pain (and, as an adult, a red beard, when red hair is a trait known to be tied to high pain threshold). He could be quite difficult as a child, both because he didn't much care when his risky behaviors hurt and spanking was pretty pointless. But when designed right, consequences did work. Punishment did not.

I don't know about you, but there was a limit to how how bad my parents could make me feel through non-abusive consequences. There was always an emotional weighing of the impulse to misbehave versus the punishment that would follow. As with most children, the deprivation of privileges my parents could inflict on me was generally severe enough to outweigh the emotions that drove me misbehave, but when a kid's impulses are too strong, I imagine his feelings of rage and defiance can outweigh any non-abusive punishment a his parents can inflict. These days such a kid is destined for an institution, even though a few beatings might make him a functional member of society.

That said, I think it's for the best that physical abuse is criminalized, because I don't think human beings can be trusted to use it judiciously. Like you pointed out, when accepted, it is used inappropriately and destructively much more often than it is used appropriately (hey, just like guns.) However, one consequence of giving up corporal punishment is that some (very small) subset of kids will be deprived of punishment that could have set them on a better course, and in the end society will resort to violence to control them, violence carried out lawfully via the justice system.

> Like you pointed out, when accepted, it is used inappropriately and destructively much more often than it is used appropriately (hey, just like guns.)

What? I beg to differ. Unless hunting, competition and self defense are inappropriate uses of guns; then guns are used (or non-used)appropriately and non-destructively far more than they are used inappropriately.

If a sudden moment of clarity would be a repeatable cure for mental illness, we would not need mental healthcare. Please read up on confirmation bias.

It's more basic than that. You can't get someone to improve their own situation in a sustainable way if they don't want to put in the work. I think most people when confronted with a hard choice would like to pick the choice that will make them healthier in the long run.

I was confronted with facing my own ADHD a few years ago, which helped me stop making choices that were more comfortable in the moment but had suboptimal long term consequences. An example would be impulsively buying something on credit to make myself feel better, one of many little things I did to dig myself into a financial hole and, if I remember correctly, a very common ADHD thing to do. By opening my mind to the possibility that I had to face my issues, it opened the door to slowly chipping away at the core issue.

One thing to keep in mind is that mental health is a hard thing to work on. It takes several weeks in the best of cases just to figure out what's going on inside your head when working with a good mental health professional, and that's assuming your trying to get better and don't have ant major hang ups about being treated. Ask a psychologist at Kaiser Permanente, an HMO based here in California, how many sessions they can spend with most mental health patients. It's a very low number, something like 6 or 8 sessions.

Agreed. I'm a little taken aback by the parent post's "I was like that, but fixed myself with Linkin Park" attitude. It came off to me as rather dismissive, although I don't believe that was the intention at all.

My mother-in-law has bipolar, and is in the hospital pretty much every spring. She has the benefit of being in Australia, where the health care system is leaps and bounds better than what we have in America, at least. I also have a friend who's worked in the mental ward of two hospitals.

Sure, when you're young, it's fun to go down the DSM and think about how some of the symptoms of schizoid personality disorder feel like they kind of apply to you, and there are so many self-diagnosed aspies on the internet, but this leads to anecdotal trivialization of serious mental illness.

Go volunteer in your local mental ward. Spend a few long months with diagnosed, treated (as well as they can be) mentally ill people. It'll change your perspective on so many things, from tragedies like this to views on trends in modern humor.

> I'm a little taken aback by the parent post's "I was like that, but fixed myself with Linkin Park" attitude. It came off to me as rather dismissive

Almost as dismissive as summing up his post as, "I was like that, but fixed myself with Linkin Park."

Right. Curing "being an asshole" is not curing mental illness.

You don't think it is at all possible that the kid from the story, while also having a serious mental illness, could also be cured of 'being an asshole', just like the commentator here?

I believe that "curing yourself" of negative personality traits becomes more difficult with the context of mental illness, yes. These conditions are not rational or logical.

I think it's possible there are some people who just need to "cut their shit" so to speak. But to try and say that's applicable to the majority of cases, on an anecdote, would be just plain irresponsible. I think it's pretty likely that I just matured the way most kids do, by growing up physically, which let me see that what I was doing wasn't alright.

I remember reading portions of a book on autism. (And before you ask, that was a real diagnosis from a real mental health professional.) Which had tons of statistics about people with autistic traits/on the spectrum. And I really wish I could source this, but the first chapter or such looked at what the chances of integration into society were without treatment. I think the number was either 1% or 10%. Either way the odds were stacked against you.

And so the thing that jumped out at me when I read that, was wondering what the difference is between someone who integrates, and someone who ends up in the institute. (I'm fairly sure the book was only covering HFA or Asperger's.) And the answer is: I've got no idea. "Wake up one day and 'cure yourself'." as the parent notes, probably isn't a repeatable strategy.

I think for most people there's a lot of reflection, conscious or subconscious, that leads up to a "sudden moment of clarity" and a great deal of consolidation work that follows. It's hard to tell the complete story of accepting a simple fact that you've been resisting for a long time. When I read something like this, I don't think, "Yeah, right," I think, "How would this have played out for me?" The story would have been long, boring, pathetic, off-putting, and embarrassing. Which may be why these things are always presented as sudden moments of clarity, though I'm open to the possibility that other people actually experience them that way.

The point I take away is not the instantaneous nature of his insight but _what_ he realized: that the consequences of his vices would become more and more serious, and that he didn't want to pay the price. (The discovery of empathy, I think, was a side effect. People are generally emotionally blind to the side effects of behaviors they have no intention of stopping.)

Yes and his message is dangerous and counter-productive to people with real mental illness that can't be cured with simply wanting to be better.

The stigma of mental illness often leaves people to think it's just something they have to want to overcome (or that they're not mentally ill at all but just need to overcome whatever problems they have) and there are plenty of people that will be happy to help them reinforce that terribly destructive belief.

No one claims that a sudden moment of clarity is all that most mentally-ill people need. But there are a lot of people who need, more than anything else, to take a good hard look in the proverbial mirror. The effects of this have been noted throughout history, predating psychology as we know it but continuing even after the discovery of that science: it does not work for everyone, but it is too powerful a tool to ignore. That seems to have happened to the grandparent. What fixed him was not Linkin Park, but seeing the consequences of his malicious act. The music may very well have helped him get into the mindset that allowed to see himself in the mirror, but it was not the mirror itself.

But are a couple of problems with the mirror. One is that if you truly need to change, then really SEEING yourself is a traumatic experience, and like any trauma, it requires further care to make sure that it doesn't raise issues of its own. There's no way around this: the traumatic aspect of the mirror is what makes it a powerful tool for personal change. Another problem is the nigh-infinite variety in human psychology: different people need different mirrors, and while it might be possible to classify them broadly, what works for one person still might not work for another.

Put these together, and a major problem emerges with using the mirror therapeutically: namely, doing it in a humane manner. I truly don't think it's always possible to do this humanely; the grandparent's case had him seeing the consequences of his own act of cruelty, which implies that there was collateral damage. Another such case would be the reverse: someone who, like a puppy, can learn that biting hurts only by being bitten. That's someone who needs to experience a moment of cruelty from the opposite perspective, but that requires being cruel to the person. Clearly these are not cases where the mirror is humane.

But there are still open questions. Knowing the trauma that the mirror causes, can bringing it about deliberately ever be humane, even when the subject is not committing or experiencing cruelty? In cases where it can't -which might be all cases- might it be worth doing anyway?

It's not so much that as recognizing you can control your mental illness if you're in the fortunate position of being able to do that, or that you never will and learning to live with it instead of fighting it all the time.

As soon as you make the choice to either wrestle it into submission or surrender to it, you'll probably have an easier time. In this case it seems like taking charge.

Other people have no choice but to surrender and learn to live with the consequences. Maybe for you that means not having any sharp knives, or medication you can abuse, or alcohol in the house. We all have our issues. If we can't control them, we've got to mitigate them to the best of our ability.

I'd love to see you change your handle from "unimpressive" to something like "awesomelikeyou".

This reads like something I'd expect to see on kuro5hin.org. I have no idea weather you're trolling or honest - and I have to admit I like that a lot; your comment should be (is) subject to interesting discussion.

The mental challenge of deciphering whether or not you're actually serious (thereby weighting if the reality you describe could be real; significantly your change of heart; also how anti/a-social you actually were before this) is in itself quite interesting.

Personally I did a few cruel things when I was younger, but at some point realized that trying to improve the world was much harder, and thereby ended up focusing on being nice. It is also much more rewarding. I still get some guilty pleasure from tearing down people that are acting cruel; knowing that it's not a very effective way of improving things - but it can be very satisfying at times.

I am 100% serious. Though I probably should have left out that aside about Linkin Park. It probably didn't give the right image. (I was already thinking about things, and it reminded me of the song, as I remember it.)

It's also posible that you simply got better for a natural reason, and then rationalized the outcome post-factum.

I wonder if the mirror neurons underlying empathy were poorly developed for you and you were lucky enough that they got stronger over time.

> He came out of her office ... still sobbing a little. It hurt me to see this. He didn't deserve that, and it was all my fault.

You feel remorse and thus aren't a psychopath.

> In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness.

I think it becomes all the more important to talk about weapons when you have a mentally inflicted person in your family.

> methodically collected all the sharp objects in the house into a single Tupperware container that now travels with me

This is exactly what i'm talking about.

> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9...

This is an article i just read after reading this post. According to it: Lanza's mother was a big fan of guns. And taught her son how to shoot. And they had lot of weaponry at home.

I do not know of mental history of Lanza. Assuming if there was a bad side to it, it is obviously very inconsiderate to have such a child being introduced or even be in periphery of any kind of weaponry.

> God help me. God help Michael. God help us all.

Amen. Also, in retrospect, it is really important to regulate access to weapons, especially in a case where there is a bad mental history.

Reading this nearly brought a tear to my eye. I can't imagine what it's like for a mother to fear her own barely-teenage son and worry about the implications of his condition for the remainder of her life. I agree it's important to discuss mental illness and how it should be handled, but what is she suggesting should be implemented to address situations like this?

I think this woman's blog post is interesting, for all the obvious reasons as well as the consideration that Aspergers and other forms of autism are associated with Silicon Valley children.

As someone from her sons perspective.

Unfortunately, she doesn't deal with her son the way he needs to be dealt with. Stick him in-front a computer, surround him with electronics(DO NOT TAKE THEM AWAY, USE THEM AS THERAPY) and feed him. Nothing else... This is how your autist/aspy child becomes a brilliant geek. If you even attempt to program them in the NORMAL way, they will do nothing but, reject, and yes, call you a "stupid bitch"(as I have done to my own mother, apologies.)

In public school, and even private institutions(outside of those full of computer-savvy aspy/autistic) the social-structure environment is completely inappropriate for someone such as her son, and he may(probably will) experience a "rejection" from the greater majority of peers.

Social interaction from a terminal is not the same as true in-real-life social interaction, but it can be used as a bridge to safely communicate remotely, and also develop social-interactivity concepts for when he is in the real world.

This mom seems to be (insanely)attempting to program a NOT-Normal-Child into a Normal-Child. She needs to be as proactive as possible to seek alternative programming methods for a child with Autism/Aspy.

One thing she mentioned was that she would strip the electronic devices from him to institute punishment(THAT WILL GET YOU KILLED). Instead, use the electronic devices as an incentive to contribute to good things and when instructing punishment, have him USE the electronic devices to CONSTRUCT or, meditate in the cyber-environment)

Maybe, he'll be the next Steve or Bill. Perhaps, he'll be the next Gary Mckinnon.

Its all about the programming.

You're WAY over-simplifying an intense situation. You think this mother hasn't tried everything by this point? You think you know the simple, magic solution that could possibly reveal this kid to be the next Steve or Bill?

A mother is the LAST person to give up hope. A mother is the LAST person to deny alternatives to a fucking insane asylum and police force.

It's not as simple as shoving an iPad in the kids face. Respect the gravity.

Instituting a mild punishment to a child "WILL GET YOU KILLED"? Really?

This parent is not "insane" for trying to help her own kid, even if that might mean an institution.

There was a book about people who will starve if not allowed to read. Little geeks work the same way. Is starvation a mild punishment?

This is a terrible idea. I'm sure it's an attractive idea, the childhood you wished you had, but really it sounds like a good way to let your child sink deeper into isolation.

Maybe, he'll be the next Steve or Bill. Perhaps, he'll be the next Gary Mckinnon.

Or the next Hans Reiser.

Or the next person you've never heard of, because he hasn't achieved noteworthy success in business, homicide, and/or the creation of filesystems. Normal outcomes do sometimes happen (hence the name), but they don't get as much publicity.

> "Maybe, he'll be the next Steve or Bill. Perhaps, he'll be the next Gary Mckinnon."

Or maybe something will trigger him at age 20 and he makes good on his threats.

> "This mom seems to be (insanely)attempting to program a NOT-Normal-Child into a Normal-Child."

Because the "not normal" side of the child is violent, cunningly manipulative, and possibly homicidal. There is a line at which we draw acceptable behavior - homicidal and violent intent seems pretty liberal.

This is not a typical aspie we're talking about. When a child has demonstrable, repeated, unpredictable, and extremely violent tendencies we can't just lock them in a room with a terminal and hope everything turns out ok.

"When a child has demonstrable, repeated, unpredictable..."

If its repeatable, its definitely predictable now.

Thank you for the person who posted this method(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivotal_response_therapy), it was unknown to me before, but it seems to be what could be attempted in a majority of these situations.

As far as anyone becoming more isolated...Why does a person have to be social in the first place, isolation is sometimes exactly what is needed even, wanted. In the mindset of certain autist/apsy, Tradition(s), family-concepts-dynamics, even self-preservation are completely worthless ideological fantasies.

The violent behavior is purely reactive, and just an escalation of the manipulation technique that he is employing. He's SO SMART his brain is brute-forcing social methods of manipulation in order to obtain/achieve a goal/objective. If he is rejected one way, he will just attempt another method to get what he wants, and so on. Violence is usually the last resort of the reactions unless, he knows it will usually work the first attempt.

Its intelligence that is both the savior & the enemy here.

You clearly have it figured out. You should call this woman have arrange to have the kid live with you for a few months. I'm sure he will be cured.

Your last two comments may be the stupidest things I have ever heard. I would love to know more about you and know why you think you can fix such a complex problem in < 200 words.

<<Your last two comments may be the stupidest things I have ever heard>> Damn! Do you guys even read the comments before typing out these pithy replies? The guy(LatterJohn) clearly said he is coming from the OPs son's perspective. That means he had the same issues OP's kid has. In my dictionary that means he has more knowledge about this stuff than you(unless you too are autistic). He is just telling what it's like being somebody with autism/aspy from his personal experience and you are calling it "stupid"? This is exactly what is wrong with "normal" people like you, who try to model "not-normal" people with your "normal" context of life!

No-one know what the OP son's perspective is, because there is not enough information in the article to tell what the diagnosis is.

Thus, the child might be Asperger's. But so what? Are you suggesting that all people with Asperger's are the same, will react the same way to situations?

There are other equally likely diagnoses, and the consequences of following LatterJohn's advice could be disastrous.

You ARE the parent.

Why are you responding to yourself using sock-puppet accounts?

:) Next you will say man never landed on moon. Move on!

I do see that JohnLatter/LatterJohn/<blah> has created multiple accounts to post. But that doesn't make me as a sock-puppet account. It actually makes me believe that he indeed has some issues. Just because he has a different POV(and that coming from living with something similar, at-least as per his post), it doesn't make it right for folks to simply deflect it as "stupid". Things like autism/aspy are something that needs a lot more to be studied upon and folks like us can not view those folks through the same lens of "common world" as we know it. They are different and unfortunate thing is most of the time they can't really explain to me and you what that "difference" is. We force them to be like us and when they rebel we call them stupid and what not and there by pushing those folks to a corner. One fine day they explode out of all that frustration and everyone jumps up and down. That is the sad part!

No, it's obvious. I won't disclose to you why it is obvious it is you, it's not the name. It's really sad; any intelligent person can see that it is you posting several times echoing your own position.

Unfortunately, its definitely separate entities except for me.

Something that stuck out at me is this was accepted exactly as I had hoped it would be. This micro-conversation has enlightened me to a variety of diverse social attitudes towards the subject.

> "He's SO SMART his brain is brute-forcing social methods of manipulation in order to obtain/achieve a goal/objective."

This seems like wild supposition to me. We know that the child has wild mood swings and alternates between "normal" and "manipulative and violent". I don't think it's clear at all that his behavior is due to raw intelligence. To be more blunt, this seems like armchair psychology with nothing in the blog post (or the other cases referenced in this thread) to support this perspective.

There needs to be substantial support if we are to believe that a child that experiences psychotically violent phases is doing so for logically sound reasons, because our current understanding of disorders such as this point in the opposite direction.

> "As far as anyone becoming more isolated...Why does a person have to be social in the first place"

I think you're conflating two issues. There is indeed no reason to force anyone to be social - but the reality is that even in the 21st century it is practically impossible to lead a life without social contact. Even the most ardent hermit must interact with the rest of the world at some point.

The question here, in the context of the tragedy that occurred this week, is not about the child. It is about whether or not, if left alone without interference, the child will eventually pose a substantial threat to society at large. It's about the state of mental health care in this country and whether or not people like this child need to be "fixed".

And when it comes to explosively violent people - particularly people who can be set off by unpredictable triggers (the child's mother, after caring for him for years still has no handle on his triggers, and there is no real reason to believe the mother is unbelievably daft) - I emphatically believe that it is correct to pathologize this behavior.

Just as I was/am, and probably just as he is.

We are cunningly manipulative from the get-go, any emotional response from that point is just part of the game, even the fits of rage are a last-ditch effort to assert some form of dominance over the situation after we have expelled every last conceivable option/variable to achieve a set/dynamic goal or objective.

It starts with the parent not parenting an autistic child as an autistic child. The article has a few points that threw red flags immediately, that would be regular triggers for me(such as her punishment strategies for just one) also, the way she attempts to have him CONFORM to school rules though, there had clearly been an exemption made for his clothing(he wants to be free to be free, and in this conformal society, that's ludicrous)...

I hope they make it.

How many poorly-disguised sockpuppet accounts do you have, JohnLatter/LatterJohn/RettalnhoJ? Really clever on that last one, Count Alucard.

[Parent's account was created four hours ago, and this sounds like a troll. "It's all about the programming." Ha ha, very funny. But this is HN so I will give him the benefit of the doubt.]

First, the kid isn't necessarily autistic just because he's a smart kid with behavioral problems. FTA: Autism spectrum, ADHD, Oppositional Defiant or Intermittent Explosive Disorder have all been tossed around.... You're pretty eager to jump to a diagnosis of autism without giving the other possibilities due consideration.

Second, even if he is autistic, is there a single best way to treat every autistic kid? Certainly not every autistic kid has exactly the same condition he does. Having the savvy and self-control to apologize to try to get privileges back just minutes after throwing a screaming fit is not something that every thirteen-year-old autistic kid could do. Grabbing a knife and threatening murder-suicide because you've been told to do something is also not a universal feature of autism. Even if you're right that he's autistic, and even if that's his only problem, he may need different treatment than other autistic kids.

Third, autistic kids are not naturally born to be wired to a computer the way worker bees are born to gather food and drone bees are born to breed. Temple Grandin wrote that she was very lucky to grow up in a time when children were forced to socialize and kids spent a lot of time making things with their hands instead of watching TV and playing video games. She wrote, "Even today I don't have a computer at home because it can have a hypnotic effect on me. I can get caught up watching certain screen savers for hours." You assume that he would use the computer to learn, explore, and connect, but that isn't a given. Autistic people don't naturally know what to do with a computer the way an infant knows what to do with a nipple. He might just play COD all day.

Fourth, it sounds like the mom is just fine with him being different and only wants him to learn not to be violent and destructive so he can live a life outside institutions. The way the kid is behaving, he's headed to jail or a mental hospital. It also sounds like she's taken an interest in his condition, sought a lot of advice, and tried a lot of different things. FTA: ... various meetings with probation officers and social workers and counselors and teachers and school administrators. He’s been on a slew of antipsychotic and mood altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian novel of behavioral plans. This is not a kid whose mom refuses to accept his difference. This is a kid whose mom taught his younger brothers a safety drill to execute when he picks up a weapon. She isn't aiming at "normal." She's aiming at "not a killer."

And that leads to the final and most important point: being a brilliant geek won't necessarily stop him from killing someone someday.

Unfortunately, she doesn't deal with her son the way he needs to be dealt with

I understand the urge to sympathize with her son's perspective, but it's very possible that a parent, who has worked with this kid every day of his life, might know a thing or two more about how to be a parent than you do.

I'm not sure how I feel about this post but it does make some good points. As someone who grew up with 2 mentally unstable brothers, a bi-polar single mom, and a con-artist dad I feel like I have seen a wide variation of mental conditions that range from genetic, to environment, to choice. I have never once seen a person "fixed" of their mental condition besides depression. One of my brothers went on to be a convicted rapist serving time in prison. My other brother was forced into a mental facility and is constantly sedated due to his considerable talent at making threats. My mother died of a sudden brain aneurism, which may or may not have attributed to her mood swings. My father is on the move enough to avoid most victims of his cons and we talk on the phone once or twice a year. The outcome for each of them has only one commonality, nothing changed. Sometimes the most difficult answer is to admit there is no answer and certain people are stuck with certain personality traits. Sometimes the only solution is to give them a peaceful environment that will keep them and others in the community safe.

This blog post reminds me of a New York Times article about Child Psychopathy... I'm not sure if it is the same as Schizophrenia but if they are not the same, I would say the child in this article sound closer to being psychopathic rather than schizophrenic... There are certainly not much the system can do for you in either case.

If you're interested, here's the chilling article by the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/magazine/can-you-call-a-9-...

Divorced 4 years ago, children angry, this kid probably needs discipline more than he needs drugs, many of which aren't even properly tested on developing brains.

Right there, is why we needed health care reform. (And still need more.) I'd like to meet one middle class person who's not on a big company's premium plan tell me otherwise.

I'd like to meet one middle class person who's not on a big company's premium plan tell me otherwise.

Happy to oblige. I recently looked into this before I quit my job four months ago to spend some time working on hobby projects. So here's the situation as I understood it: (a) There is a law called COBRA which says after you've quit your job the insurance company has to keep you on the same plan you had for the next 18 months (36 months in California), with the same rates your employer was paying, (b) There is a law called HIPAA which says that after you've used up all COBRA the insurance company has to give you coverage regardless of any preexisting conditions, as long as the gap in your coverage was below (I think) 60 days. So someone in my situation (middle class person not on a big company's plan, as you asked) there is no gain from the healthcare reform. Also, while this was not immediately relevant to my situation, I think that (in CA at least) the insurance company cannot deny you coverage based on the preexisting condition if you're below certain age (19 years old I think?). So as long as you've either gotten the coverage below that age or had a job with a group plan at any point later in your life, and had no gaps in coverage since, you are fine.

I'm not at all against the healthcare reform, but I suspect that most of the time when people complain about the healthcare situation in the US they just don't know the facts. I also suspect that in many cases when people share their health insurance horror stories, there is something they're not telling you. Like that they had a gap in coverage. Or that they had to take a job because they needed steady income, and saying it was because of health coverage has a better ring to it.

> Happy to oblige. I recently looked into this before I quit my job four months ago to spend some time working on hobby projects.

I should simply extend this to, "one middle class person who's not had the benefit of being on a big company's premium plan tell me otherwise." If it wasn't for COPBRA and HIPAA, you'd be in a much different situation.

> So as long as you've either gotten the coverage below that age or had a job with a group plan at any point later in your life, and had no gaps in coverage since, you are fine.

That's a whole lot of stipulations. I think it should just be reduced to the last 3 words.

> I also suspect that in many cases when people share their health insurance horror stories, there is something they're not telling you.

I see lots of people roll their eyes when I mention my sister's healthcare horror stories. How is it that people know a priori that, "there is something they're not telling you?" There is some clear prejudice operating here -- without exception, people who have that axe to grind don't even let me finish the sentence before their eyes roll. Incidentally, my sister is covered under the plan for the New York City Ballet. She's a dance educator and takes the same classes as the company as enrichment for her job. Even she has a healthcare horror story.

She blew out her hamstring during one of those classes. She was scheduled to go in for an MRI to see if she needed surgery, but there was a traffic accident involving a toddler, and they had to MRI the kid first, so she couldn't get her MRI, so the doctors have her stay overnight at the hospital to get her MRI first thing in the morning. Well, it turns out she didn't need surgery, so the insurance company sticks her with over $4000 for the hospital stay! There is nothing I'm not telling you about that.

I quit my job at a tiny company 2 years ago and then I got an individual plan for myself while I worked for myself.

Why did she need to stay in the hospital to get an MRI? Couldn't she just wait in the ER until it was her turn? Seems like blown hamstring shouldn't require an overnight hospital stay for any reason ever...

> Why did she need to stay in the hospital to get an MRI?

Have you tried to get yourself home with a blown hamstring?

> Couldn't she just wait in the ER until it was her turn?

The toddler in the accident had the last slot of the day. So, are you recommending that she could've just waited all night in the waiting room?

> Seems like blown hamstring shouldn't require an overnight hospital stay for any reason ever.

She just did what the doctors recommended.

>Have you tried to get yourself home with a blown hamstring?

I assumed she had family in the area. Did she drive herself home the next day with a still blown hamstring?

> The toddler in the accident had the last slot of the day. So, are you recommending that she could've just waited all night in the waiting room? For 4k I would have.

> She just did what the doctors recommended.

I can certainly understand that, but also don't think it needed a hospital stay. The MRI doesn't fix anything, it just tells you how bad things are. She could have had a relative drive her home, sleep in her bed, and drive her back the next day.

For the record, I broke my arm playing softball 3 years ago. The paramedics wanted to drive me to the hospital. I told them no, because I knew it would cost 1-2k for the 10 minute drive. Instead I had a friend do it. They didn't ask me to stay overnight for my x-ray, but i did wait for several hours. If for some reason they had asked me stay because it broke (the machine) or wouldn't be ready, you can guarantee I would not have. I know it's really expensive, and there isn't anything they would be doing for me. I'd have gone home and been miserable for free instead of staying and been miserable for 4k.

Sometimes you need to question what doctors tell you. They are in the business of helping people, but they are also for profit. Maybe they assumed your insurance would cover it, but that doesn't mean it was necessary.

> So as long as you've either gotten the coverage below that age or had a job with a group plan at any point later in your life, and had no gaps in coverage since, you are fine.

That's a whole lot of stipulations. I think it should just be reduced to the last 3 words.

It's not "a whole lot of stipulations", it's the complement of "you've only decided to look for health insurance after you got sick."

Sorry, but what is "society" supposed to do exactly? Last time I checked, mental health professionals don't know how to cure or fix kids like this. What exactly does it mean to say we don't have enough mental healthcare? This article did nothing to help me understand that.

Right now I can understand why it's a gun control problem rather than a health care problem. But what about when one day 3D printer is everywhere? Printing of firearms would be made possible by high-quality 3D printer and it would be next to impossible to control. Just as it is impossible to control piracy. We have to deal with this problem, before it is deemed too late.

There's still a bit of time before we can print ammo. Gun control could evolve into ammo control.

I don't mean to come off as insulting, but you do understand how incredibly easy it is to make your own ammo right?

Dye casting lead is peanuts, considering the low boiling point of lead makes for easy casts.

There is so much ammo already out there, new brass probably won't even need to be created, simply reusing all old brass that's out there would more than suffice for the needs of even a large squad.

So we have lead, and we have brass covered. Next is the explosive primer. That would probably be the weakest link in the chain, in that your average basement redneck won't be creating his own primer anytime soon, but it is possible. The problem is how little primer is actually needed per round; and you have guys that have put away in storage literally pounds of primer.

It might be possible, but I'm sure if it ever got to that point, it would be trivial to order primer online, just like how one can order not-quite-legal-drugs online and have them delivered right to your front door.

In this modern world, I don't think it is possible to regulate things like it used to be. Anyway, anything can happen, and thanks for reading.

I wrote that in a spirit of "put ingredients in the machine on one side, collect ammo on the other."

I just meant to say it's just as sensible to regulate ammo than it is to regulate guns, and (IMHO) easier. That doesn't mean home ammo is out of reach. Just like I don't think home-built guns are.

I admit not having considered it in as much detail as you did :-)

That's a bit fantastic. Honestly, no disrespect to you, but it's an example of thinking that makes non-technical discussions on HN very odd. OK, if you had this magical 3D printer, probably we'd have Armageddon every other day. In fact, probably we'd only have them for a day because that's the day doomsday weapons would be created by anyone and everyone. I don't think we need to deal with that because it's just kind of crazy-talk. :)

Sobering read, reminds me of this rather depressing NY Times article: "Can you call a 9-year old a psychopath".

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/magazine/can-you-call-a-9-...

Does anyone know a) how often this sort of pattern presented itself historically, and b) what people did back in the good old days? For example, what would a small rural town have done to support someone like Michael? Would they have treated him somehow? Would they have assumed he was possessed by a demon and tried an exorcism? Or would they have found a way to get rid of him in a hunting accident, and had a dirty little town-wide secret? Or what? It's a really hard problem, obviously, and history might at least give us some ideas (possibly some very bad ones, granted).

Of course, since his outbursts are so episodic, it would be interesting to consider installing some sort of drug system in the kid, remote-controlled that either knocks him out or just sedates him when he gets belligerent, similar to how diabetics have insulin dispensers. It would be interesting to see if his "sweet, sunny" self would accept this leash on his evil twin, or even the particularly interesting possibility that he can be taught to observe the episode and trigger the device himself. It would also, of course, be interesting to get an fMRI of his brain before and after an episode - he could advance our knowledge of the biological basis of rage and hatred. Heck, if he's really that smart he'd probably do well to consider a neuroscience track so he can study himself, eventually.

> Of course, since his outbursts are so episodic,

My suspicion is that they very specifically aren't episodic - lots of kids with this style of behavior problem are excellent manipulators. You can't discount the possibility that he's behaving well and poorly in order to extract what he wants out of other people.

That doesn't sound consistent with the article at all. I mean, the kid seems to have uncontrolled outbursts which don't sound manipulative to me. I mean, he didn't want to go to the mental hospital but he repeated the behavior he knew would get him there. Perhaps it was a gamble to see if his mom would keep her word, but the way the article is written, it doesn't sound like that.

Outbursts can, from what i've seen, be a final attempt to manipulate somebody. If every time you bring up death/suicide, and you get what you want, well then... why wouldn't that child try that technique again.

I hope that clockwork-orange style behavior modification or remote "kill switches" in people are never socially acceptable answers to this problem :(

That seems like the most humane way to go. I don't see anyone else in this thread doing anything more than throwing their hands up in the air saying that it's a problem too difficult to solve, including you. So, rather than poo-poo my ideas, how about offering up your own?

You're right that there are no easy answers, especially for the mentally ill who may not be treatable. [Note: I come from NZ, so the perspective of a largely state-run health system].

I think that humane mental institutions would be a much better alternative to prison or surgical intervention.

A lot of people were locked up in mental institutions right up until the late 80s, early 90s. Often, people who should not have really been in them. I know people who were seriously fried by drugs administered largely to induce docility, and the brutal ECT of 50s-70s.

There were some serious problems with the way these institutions were run which were very difficult to fix. The pendulum has swung towards community care. In NZ at least, most of the mental hospitals have closed. The mentally ill were flooded back into the community. To be fair, the problems with the system were so severe that this was not an entirely bad outcome. Many have done well in the community.

From here we can divide the mentally ill into two classes: those who manage to function in the community, and those who end up in prison or dead. Sometimes it's the degree of social support they have which makes the difference, while some simply cannot be treated.

I think the pendulum needs to swing the other way a little. We need to identify the truly dangerous and incurable and care for them in humane environments before they hurt themselves or others.

Identifying when this needs to be done and ensuring the system works properly is obviously an incredibly difficult problem. Essentially you will be locking people up based on psychiatric diagnoses for things they haven't done yet. However in the current scheme of things even clear pleas from family members for intervention are ignored.

As an aside, I'd like to point out that you're proposing to take people who might be psychotic or schizophrenic, and implant remote control devices in them.

>As an aside, I'd like to point out that you're proposing to take people who might be psychotic or schizophrenic, and implant remote control devices in them.

A Kiwi, great. I've travelled fairly extensively through that part of the world, and it is a beautiful place - minus the sand flies, of course.

I think it is a good instinct to be wary of new ideas, but not good to dismiss them out of hand. One of the things I liked about the Kiwi culture is the can-do attitude. People are happy to try things for the first time, and maybe fail, but somehow the culture gives people a rush of success. It's a unique and great feature of the society.

And it's that attitude of empiricism that we've somehow lost. We don't see political or social solutions as experiments we see them as set-in-stone moral mandates. Remote medication may be a terrible idea, but we don't know. It certainly leaves a bad taste in my mouth - but frankly, it's a better taste than the one left by the OP's heart-wrenching article. The possibility that the boy could be given the remote himself is a hopeful one, similar to how diabetics or even epileptics can learn to see danger coming and take steps to prevent it.

And the "bright side" to this, if it worked, is huge. This person could be a real part of society, living as happy a life as any of us, rather than living out his life locked in an institution. Permanent institutionalization is societies way to kill someone without actually killing them.

In other words, I feel that this solution could be more humane, far more humane, than life-long incarceration in a mental institution, and it's an experiment that is worth trying.

(Of course, I'm assuming that life in a mental institution is pretty terrible, which I suppose is not really a given. If I could be convinced that such a life is actually worth living, then no, I probably wouldn't pursue such a questionable alternative.)

Well, I can imagine as humans evolved and were still quite tribal, this sort of anti-social behavior simply wouldn't be tolerated. If one was a threat to the tribe's safety and didn't fit in the social order, they were culled our ejected and eventually unable to survive on their own.

After reading the story, one big glaring question. Where is the father? He's not around. Boys need fathers. If you want to screw up a child, take away the father.

This article [1] seems to highlight a number of issues with the original.

[1] http://thegirlwhowasthursday.wordpress.com/2012/12/16/you-ar...

There have been suggestions that this woman's son has issues in part due to abuse at the hands of his parents: http://sarahkendzior.com/2012/12/16/want-the-truth-behind-i-...

I don't know enough about the situation to make a claim one way or the other, but it's worth taking note.

Outlaw guns, knives and rocks, and wink them out of existence, and these people are still there.

Treat them, and some of them will come back.

Outlawing guns doesn't solve this problem. But outlawing guns is the kind of "solution" we like, because a) there's a clear, specific action to argue over, and b) we can focus on it long enough to get the law through and then fool ourselves into thinking we've done something.

Regulating guns ("outlawing" is a straw man) ameliorates the problem of how much damage a mentally disturbed person can do.

A knife in the same situation is much less dangerous, as evidenced by the incident in China at the same time where people were hurt, but none so far killed.

Degrees matter.

Everyone reaches for answers at a time like this, and a sad majority reach for thoughtless answers like gun control, that ironically embody the very stupidity and carelessness that contributes to this violence. It's such a smug, pat answer that relegates responsibility to some higher authority. It's the same sentiment that makes people feel isolated, alone, unheard, helpless, and eventually, desperate. "Just shut up, get a job, go to church, watch football and pay your mortgage. And if that existence doesn't make you happy, then there's something wrong with you." If you hear this often enough, and if you don't manage to connect with others who are equally appalled by it, then you WILL go mad.

Oh what a conformist Hell it must be to live in a world where the severely mentally ill don't have in-home access to six semi-automatic weapons. Unpack your baggage before wading in to this one.

If you live in america, you are more than welcome to leave if the laws bother you that much. It's a fundamental right for an individual to own their own weapon. Instead of sitting on the internet making snarky comments to people, perhaps your time would be better spent researching new countries to move to?

And if you already don't live in america, why so much attitude?

You keep talking about people leaving America. Is that you would have told the slaves before being freed? Laws are little more dynamic than you seem to imply. But I don't want to argue gun rights with you.

I would like to ask you approximately how old do you think the Earth is?

So how about we blame the mother with poor decision making skills? Why do you need to ban me from owning a gun for self defense, hunting, or other sporting reasons, not to mention the fact that I like liberty in America better than a totalitarian government that doesn't allow it's citizens to have freedom.

"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Ben Franklin

You have brought a knife to a gunfight, so to speak. Mellow out.

"Fart, poop, I farted." - Dr. Who

http://www.policeone.com/edged-weapons/articles/102828-Edged...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tueller_Drill

"...and a majority reach for thoughtful answers like gun control"

TFTY. :-)

It wasn't meant as a straw man, it was meant as a way to identify a boundary. The most restrictive regulation possible would be a total ban, and only a total and successful ban would prevent people from using guns in massacres. So "regulation" while well intentioned is practically meaningless. Those people would still be mentally ill, and outlawing guns or some lesser regulation would not have addressed the actual problem.

And yes, a knife in the situation is less dangerous. But the person is still mentally ill, a danger to themselves and those around them.

It's medical treatment that's needed, in the worst cases combined with confinement.

Gun regulation is not medical treatment. Gun regulation is a separate issue, admittedly related, just as knives and baseball bats are related.

Again, total prevention is a straw man. No-one is claiming that total prevention is an achievable goal. (Massive) reduction is.

I am a pilot. It is said the FARs (Federal Aviation Regulations) are written in blood. We still have fatal accidents from time to time, but they have been reduced by an almost incredible amount, especially considering how much air travel has increased.

Yeah, you could argue that the fundamental problem is that people want to travel and that the laws of physics are not favorable for the safety of air travel (gravity and all that). However, throwing your hands up in the air and saying we can't do anything without addressing the fundamentals is fundamentally and provably wrong.

I'm not throwing up my hands and saying do nothing. I'm suggesting that we address the fundamentals, which in this case is mental illness.

What I am saying is that mental illness is not the fundamental issue of the case. Somebody going mental with a nerf gun just isn't the same sort of problem. At all.

Not that mental illness isn't also a problem.

Evidence to the contrary: http://smallbutkindamighty.com/2012/12/16/guns-dont-kill-men...

Outlawing - at least if you are not police officer or soldier - is not a straw man at all. Only recently we got a SCOTUS decision that proclaimed US citizens have right to own guns, and that was a close one too. Before that, many places existed where private ownership of guns was essentially banned, and many still exist now, even though with the new decision they will be eventually phased out. However, people that instituted these bans are still in power in those places, and they very well intend to put a good fight and make obtaining legal guns as difficult as is could be without running afoul of the law, and probably more difficult just to see if they can get away with it.

Regulation of guns would absolutely help nothing unless you ban possession of guns by healthy individuals without criminal record or any other problems - because you can not predict people going crazy, and you can not eliminate all sources of obtaining weapons by somebody very smart, very determined and having absolutely no moral problem to lie or commit any unethical or criminal behavior. In fact, even completely removing all guns from law-abiding citizens would not change that - criminals will still have guns. Only coordinated campaign of terror and totalitarian control from the state - something of Soviet or North Korean measures - can make guns relatively unavaliable to common person. If you doubt that, think about how much successful were governmental efforts to make illegal drugs unavailable.

Given that, I would rather live with relatively small threat of psychos than in a totalitarian state needed to get rid of the threat of psychos.

Outlawing is a straw man in that it is not the only option for regulation that would help. These things are not booleans!

Countries with much tighter gun regulations than the US don't outlaw guns. They also don't prevent 100% gun violence. They just have less of it. A LOT less.

So "Regulation of guns would absolutely help nothing" is just plain false. It would help some, as the numbers clearly state. It would not prevent everything, but that's not the same as it would "help nothing".

Correlation doesn't imply causation.

Thank you, Captain Obvious. From the WaPo article:

"Last year, economist Richard Florida dove deep into the correlations between gun deaths and other kinds of social indicators. Some of what he found was, perhaps, unexpected: Higher populations, more stress, more immigrants, and more mental illness were not correlated with more deaths from gun violence. But one thing he found was, perhaps, perfectly predictable: States with tighter gun control laws appear to have fewer gun-related deaths. The disclaimer here is that correlation is not causation. "

So the other things that are claimed as "the root cause" here aren't even correlated...yet somehow the one thing that does correlate closely...

Link to the actual paper?

"Gun death" is a very suspect term. If you equate some fool shooting himself while trying to repeat what Bruce Willis did on TV, actual violent homicide crime and potential rape victim shooting the attacker, and add there policemen shooting suspects (which they can do at smallest provocation) - you get quite a wrong picture. I wonder also how places like Chicago - where they had mafia-initiated gun bans - fared in this paper. I also find it very suspect that poverty level, etc. did not have correlation - do they want to tell me Chicago ghetto and some rich millionaire neighborhood in non-gun-control state have same level of crimes with use of guns? Very hard to believe without seeing the actual authenticated data.

Why don't you look into DC and how gun control there correlates to gun crime.

The countries that do not have "tighter regulations" (by which gun control proponents usually mean impossibility for a regular person without special connections or exceptional trade to obtain a firearm unless he proves to the state his life is in immediate jeopardy) also have lower violence levels than USA. See Switzerland for example. On the other hand, Norway has pretty strict gun laws, which did not prevent Breivik from committing his crimes.

Can we conclude now that plural of anecdote is not data, or do you have any actual data that shows banning lawful citizens from possessing means of self defense actually prevents violent crime?

Switzerland is a great example, thanks for bringing it up!

As you point out, Switzerland has an overall rate of violence that is quite low, for example slightly lower than that of Germany (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...).

However, surprise, surprise, it has a "firearm-related" violence level that is 3x that of Germany, and more than 8x the gun-related homicides. Could that have anything to do with the fact that the Swiss have their Army rifles at home?

How again does Switzerland demonstrate that higher gun ownership does not correlate with higher gun mortalities?

And you say "the plural of anecdote is not data", when just before you used a single incident to "demonstrate" that tighter gun control doesn't work. Huh?

Or is this the old straw-man of "if we cannot eliminate gun violence completely, we shouldn't do anything?" Reduction is a good target.

And no, we do not need double-blind controlled experiments to (a) change regulations that affect lives and (b) actually have those regulations have a measurable positive impact.

Aviation regulations are often changed because of single incidents, when careful analysis of the factors that led to the incident leads experts in the field to the conclusion that making the change could prevent that accident.

Take the awful accident that happened in Tenerife (largest civil aviation disaster ever): one of the contributing factors was that one of the pilots heard "take-off" from ATC and thought he was cleared for take-off, when he had been told to stand by for take-off clearance.

Nowadays, the words "take-off" have been eliminated from pilot/ATC communications except for the phrase "you are cleared for take-off".

They didn't wait to have a statistically valid sample of horrendous air-crashes to make this change, a single incident and its subsequent analysis was sufficient. It is this sort of careful analysis and action that has made air-travel as ridiculously safe as it is (in fact so safe that statistical analysis is nigh impossible these days...that's a good thing).

>> However, surprise, surprise, it has a "firearm-related" violence level that is 3x that of Germany, and more than 8x the gun-related homicides. Could that have anything to do with the fact that the Swiss have their Army rifles at home?

What you are saying is that if the firearms are available, some of them will be used for violence. If not, the same (actually, slightly higher) level of violence will be achieved by other means. And you think this proves your point that guns lead to violence. I see.

>>> And you say "the plural of anecdote is not data", when just before you used a single incident to "demonstrate" that tighter gun control doesn't work. Huh?

I did it to demonstrate that on each anecdote another anecdote can be found. I hoped, after my explanation, and specifically stating "plural of anecdote is not data", it would be clear that I do not consider it to be data. I was wrong. Sorry I wasn't clear - I meant that bringing anecdotes does not constitute data.

>>> Aviation regulations are often changed because of single incidents, when careful analysis of the factors that led to the incident leads experts in the field to the conclusion that making the change could prevent that accident.

It would be smarter to think what could prevent the next accident, but who I am to give advice to experts? After all, those are probably the same experts that make men dressed in uniforms grab my balls and feel my ass each time I fly, for the benefit of my security of course. Nobody can argue with this level of expertise.

Meanwhile, back to our topic - you completely ignored the fact that places with complete gun bans still have very violent and very gun-related crime aplenty. Right here in the US. "Murder capital" of the US is the same place that had gun laws so strict SCOTUS had to rule they are unconstitutional.

"What you are saying is that if the firearms are available, some of them will be used for violence."

No, I am saying that greater availability of firearms is correlated with greater number of deaths caused by guns. Lower availability of firearms is correlated with lower number of deaths by guns. Not the same thing.

"If not, the same (actually, slightly higher) level of violence will be achieved by other means."

No. A country that is otherwise much more peaceful and has less crime (Switzerland) has many more gun-related deaths and also has more guns available than another (Germany, UK).

"It would be smarter to think what could prevent the next accident, but who I am to give advice to experts? After all, those are probably the same experts that make men dressed in uniforms grab my balls and feel my ass each time I fly, for the benefit of my security of course. Nobody can argue with this level of expertise."

Nope, not at all the same experts. You are talking about the TSA, I am talking about the FAA, NTSB and related. I am certain they would appreciate your thoughtful input.

It's worth noting that Heller might not be as absolute of a decision in regard to a right to own any type of weapon/firearm as it seems - particularly read point 2 in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller#....

> Regulating guns ... ameliorates the problem of how much damage a mentally disturbed person can do.

No, it makes it much worse. We want the violent lunatics to have guns, because guns are not particularly fast or efficient at killing people. A lone gunman can kill at most a few hundred people before he is stopped.

You know those nightclub fires that kill hundreds of people in ten minutes? We want our nutjobs to have guns so they will not be forced to recreate a nightclub fire on a stadium scale, followed by decades of copycats.

So, i'm sure any minute now you'll post the statistics on how countries with tighter gun laws have huge numbers of stadium fires...

We don't need to talk hypotheticals here. There are many countries with tighter gun laws. Any "but regulation will make it worse" argument can be vetted based on real world observations.

It is not a matter of statistics. You can smugly measure water for 10 years and learn nothing about ice. No amount of data on Swiss shootings has any bearing on whether Joe Gun-Controlled will back a gasoline tanker up to a high school basketball stadium.

To predict unknown unknowns, you have to do RAND Corporation-style operations research and hypothetical projections. This has been done, and it turns out that mass killing is easy. Really easy. As in, the 9-11 attackers were a bunch of pikers.

That's why after 9-11 security for prominent targets shifted to a strange combination of bollards and guard patrols. Metal detectors and gun screening do not affect safety much. Intercepting truck size weapons does.

I'm flabbergasted that my comment was voted down and justified by "what matters is the past, not your ridiculous hypotheticals". It reads like the Microsoft buffer overflow manual circa 1998.

What matters is what is likely, and what is likely is largely what is observed. People don't blow up schools with tanker trucks. They could, and if they had the intent to kill they should, but they don't.

But that's not my point. My point is that the best source for wise decisions is hands-on experience. Many countries have a better handle on the gun situation than the U.S. What's wrong with learning from their experience?

Oklahoma City bombings: how many copycats?

These "more efficient" methods are also available without gun regulation, so why doesn't this happen already? Apparently there's something about guns that makes them an attractive weapon for these people.

Another thing here is that gun regulation alone is not sufficient. In the Netherlands guns are heavily regulated, but we still had the incident in Alphen a/d Rijn [1] last year. The shooter was a member of a shooting association and was known to have mental problems. That's just not a good combination.

If guns could be regulated in such a way that they never end up in the hands of violent lunatics that would probably be okay, but I just don't see how you could do that without banning them altogether.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphen_aan_den_Rijn_shopping_ma...

> Apparently there's something about guns that makes them an attractive weapon for these people.

Thousands of exciting movies and TV shows about guns as a tool for "justice".

Well, let's take an example.

Breivik built a bomb, which killed 8. Awful. Because he was dissatisfied with the result, he went on a shooting spree that killed 69.

I think I see your point...

"outlawing" is a straw man

I'm so glad that someone said this. So many otherwise reasonable people get seriously worried that someone with a badge is going to come to their home and pry their guns from their hands (which may or may not be cold and dead at the time)

The reality of gun control is far less dramatic, and make for far less compelling soundbites. "You can close the gun show loophole which allows people to sell handguns without background checks over my cold, dead, body" doesn't have the same ring.

Children are a severe puzzle. What can we tell mothers like this?

Is there a long-term self-care situation for a child that misbehaves, even if his IQ is "130"? Do we tell her to modify her expectations—that no test can change his disabilities?

Or do we embrace the neurotypical? At low expense the taxpayer can pay people to study kids like these and build an environment where their "high IQ" can thrive.

We are weird with children in this country. Our constitution does not establish any interest, state or federal, in them. We have gun rights and not children's livelihood rights. We abrogate responsibility of the hard question—treat like disabled or treat like special genius—to fallible and powerless parents.

The discussion is not, What do we do with moms or guns? It's what do we do with children.

Here are some numbers from Gloucestershire, a rural county in England.

In a population of about 800,000 people there are about 4,000 people on the books of specialist MH treatment services at any time.

There are about 2,000 people with a diagnosis of psychotic illness (eg, schizophrenia). There are about 3,000 people with a diagnosis of mood disorder (eg, depression).

There are about 60 beds for 'adults of working age'[1] with a MH problem. Most treatment is successfully provided in the community by community and home treatment teams. Staff visit people in their homes daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly, whatever. Treatment is not just medical and drugs, it involves therapy, but it also involves occupational stuff. (Occupational stuff does not just mean 'work' (although that's important and there are specialist teams focussed on 'place and train' return to work) but includes meaningful social activity, education, exercise, family and friend networks, etc.)

There are no beds in county for children. Children with a need for a psychiatric in-patient stay are sent out of county. (Apart from a short time each year when adult drug and alcohol re-hab is used for children.)

There are a small number of beds in a low-secure forensic unit.

There is an estimated 30,000 (thirty thousand) (high end) or 22,000 (twenty two thousand) (low end) people with a probable diagnosis of one of the personality disorders.

PD is a difficult diagnosis. It used to be a diagnosis of exclusion. Someone with a diagnosis of PD would not be committed to MH hospital, because PD was thought to be not treatable. PD is no longer a diagnosis of exclusion. Someone with a diagnosis can be committed to a MH hospital. But they are much more likely to find themselves involved in the criminal justice system.

Gloucestershire has had a well known incident where someone with a mental illness has killed - (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1182902.stm) (etc).

The serial killers Fred and Rosemary West lived in Gloucestershire. They killed maybe 13 people. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_West)

We hear a great deal about these significant murders. We hear very little about the every day murders - the murders by the sane. Very many children are raped or abused or murdered by their sane parents; very many people are murdered by their sane spouses; very many sane people commit acts of violence every day. We don't hear too much about the number of ill people killing themselves. (UK: about 1000 murders a year, about 4000 suicides per year.)

People with a mental illness are far more likely to be the victims of violent crime than to be the perpetrators of violent crime.

The US does have serious problem with terrible care for people with mental illness. Do you really need a spree killing to start that discussion? Do you walk past the homeless and think it's okay so long as they're not killing anyone?

[1] Historically services have been split between "old people"; "adults of working age"; "children and adolescents"; and "people with an IQ < X". There are problems with these arbitrary divisions, and modern services are moving away from them.

You should be thankful that you have 1000 murders a year. We have 3X as many per capita in the US.

Well, I'm really just comparing rates of murder to rates of completed suicide. From a very quick bit of web searching I find that rate of completed suicide in US is about 11.3 per 100,000 while rate of homicide is 5.5 per 100,000 people. Completed suicide numbers are roughly double homicide numbers.

Here's my sources:

(http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/suicide-in-the-u...)

NIMH (national institute of mental health) say about suicide in the US:

> In 2007, it was the tenth leading cause of death in the U.S., accounting for 34,598 deaths. The overall rate was 11.3 suicide deaths per 100,000 people.

(Suicide statistics can be tricky and there are normally a bunch of caveats.)

(http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm)

For 2009:

> Number of deaths: 16,799

> Deaths per 100,000 population: 5.5

> Cause of death rank: 15

Nobody wants to consider the fact that there are children that are unwell. Regardless of whether it is physical (leukemia, bone cancer, any one of a whole host of really nasty immune system related and quite deadly genetic predispositions) or psychological. Schizophrenics have been cute little babies too, with parents that love them very much and want the same wonderful life for there children as anyone else. And that goes for all of the people who have any kind of autism spectrum issue, borderline, bipolar disorder, chronic depression and so on. They exist. Their parents exist and many of those parents are in hell. In absolute hell. You would do well to remember that, one day you might be the father or mother who is crying themselves to sleep every night wondering what will become of your child or whether they will survive their next suicide attempt. Whether they will ever be able to make it on their own. When the next call from school will come because they've hurt someone. Blaming them accomplishes nothing. It's just a sign that you are lacking in empathy or have never loved something so much that the thought of them suffering is physically painful.

Why is it so hard for people to conceive of the possibility that there may be multiple issues contributing to tragedies like Friday's? Mental illness is certainly an issue that does not get enough attention in the US. Gun control is also an issue that does not get enough (real) attention. These /two/ issues, and likely others, are together responsible for the shooting.

We need to address both.

C'mon guys... The kid is not ill. He is angry and pissed of at the world. He has established different society norms for himself and his behaviour is off limits, but he is still in control of his brain and his body. And he understands what he's doing. He is not brain damaged. Don't treat him as one, cuz it would piss me off to.

I feel very similarly. I knew kids who threatened to kill themselves and swore at their parents. They were bad kids, but not mentally ill.

Discipline is something that needs to be taught from a young age. I've seen it do wonders for autistic children (but definitely not cure them), and I have no doubt that learning to live with and manage a mental illness is better than attempting to treat it. Psychiatry is still a very ham-fisted science.

I live in northern ireland where the state of mental health institutions is probably closer to eastern europe than it is to other western institutions (at least it is in my limited experience). Patients are usually prescribed a bunch of vague, cure all drugs and left to rot. There arent any activities or things to do for patients. Patients tend to get worse rather than better because of effect of the drugs and the general malaise and hopelessness of the place.

Mental hospitals are more or less the lowest common denominator when it comes to treatment of mentally ill people. It takes more money in the short term to do house calls, and to support people in normal life, but in thelong term it is more beneficial to keep these people in the mainstream of society, and not artificially compartmentalized and ostracized.

I never see diet mentioned in articles dealing with mental disorders. Research[1] shows that eating a natural foods ancestral diet free of gluten and casein can reduce symptoms of ADHD and autism. The recent rise in mental disorders seems to be correlated with the rise in diabetes. Could it be all the sugar and processed food we are feeding our children now? Why are we so quick to prescribe drugs with fatal side effects without looking at diet first?

[1] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120229105128.ht...

"can reduce symptoms of ADHD and autism" Both positive and negative or just negative?

Thank you for sharing your story. I agree with many of the points you made. But I have some questions. Knowing what you know about yours sons condition, would you ever consider taking him out and teaching him to shoot a gun? You said you lock up all the sharp objects around the house, but do you leave out your pistols and semi-automatic guns?

We definitely need to do and learn more about mental illness. But in the case of Adam Lanza, his mother shouldn't have owned guns and should have never been able to purchase one with a child that's unstable and has a history/record.

It's interesting to consider that if the mother, by keeping the troubled child "Michael" in the middle class artificially, she is some how enabling a possible shooter (but still unlikely).

If the child was shunned now, sure, he'd end up homeless in LA, but he would be so busy struggling with his daily existence that he wouldn't have the resources or time to go on a mass rampage.

The father seems to understand this.

Because poor people don't commit violent crimes? ... ... Really ... ... ?

As some point, as a loving parent, shouldn't you possess the right to have your son/daughter peacefully put to sleep for the sake of Everyone, and for the Love of God? It's almost too painful to imagine the combined heartache that resonates from the 1 in a million that simply need to be reborn instead of suffer through their glitch.

Well, the boy is indeed very naughty. But his behaviour or temperament is very likely to be caused by the environment he is livening in (ie. his family and social background). One obvious inappropriate thing his mom has done is that the mom chooses to threaten the son when he did anything wrong. Threatening only creates fear. And fear is no good, because it will most likely make the son more rebellious. An alternative would be love and care. To have a deep talk with the son, to find out what the root cause of his rebellious reaction is and to help the son cope with the society better may be a bette method. When America has an alarmingly high psychiatric problem rate, it is clear that most of them are not caused by genetics, meaning, they can be changed for good. Surely, the mom has tried to talk to the son. But the depth of the talk is questionable, simply because when the mom finds it urgent to have a serious conversation with the son, the son may have already developed a distrust against the mom, and the talk can be very difficult. When the mom gives up to call the police, even the 13-year old son may yet to have a serious mental problem, he will develop one.

which came first - the controlling mother or the breakaway child?

We have a mother that is proud of being anarchist loving Che Guevara, a man that will kill those people he did not agree with.

She is having an anarchist child, he does not want someone else to tell him what to do, and reacts aggressively when forced to.

Probably that could be a good thing, Bill Gates had the same issue, as a child he wanted to be left on his own, his parents went to the doctor and the doctor said: leave him, if he wants to leave home or make a company while being a child let him, and they did. It took a lot of money from their family to find a phychologist with common sense.

Not all children are created equal, the round pegs in the square holes are just that. We designed standard schools that more or less work for 95% of the kids.

Those 5% that not, they could burn in hell. If someone is introvert, she must be healed of his disease staying with a majority of extroverts that wont understand him, will isolate and humiliate her because of their fear to what they don't understand.

Could you cite me where Bill Gates threatened his parents with a knife? I must have missed that article.

This is a useful article http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/10/081110fa_fact_...

"And it’s impossible to predict what will set him off."

If I had to go to a school that had such ridiculous rules as having to wear black or tan pants I would probably be pretty ticked off too on a regular basis.

Armchair Doctoring on Hacker News, my favorite kind of thread.

Don't be so flippant. Some of us have our doctorates from the prestigious WebMD.

Thinking the unthinkable: boys of single mothers have bad outcomes.

And they also become President of the United States: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama

Bubba too. Unfortunately, the plural of anecdote is not data. Statistically, children of single moms fare poorly. I am curious as to the degree that it is different beween single fathers and single moms.

Mental disorders don't go away when you have two parents.

I think the literature disagrees with you. "The relationship [between single-parent families and crime] is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime." http://www.theatlantic.com/past/issues/2000/05/sommers4.htm also http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00497878.2012.707...

> Statistically, children of single moms fare poorly

That doesn't mean there's a causal relationship, of course.

It's also possible that third factors (poverty, etc) tend to cause both "single-mothership" and "poorly faring kids." [Indeed, it seems fairly likely.]

No, the correlation persists even at normalized income.

Where is the father? Boys need a father growing up.

I'll agree that you get better outcomes with two parents, but the idea that two-parent families are the solution is ludicrous. As a counter-point, a boy grows up in a two-parent family, but his dad consistently rapes him from an early age.

He's with another woman that he met online and married six weeks after his divorce was final. Now he's not paying any child support. http://anarchistsoccermom.blogspot.com/2012/07/news-from-war...

agree.

Angry white adult males don't go to the doctor. Get their guns.

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