Seven dead, seven injured in Santa Barbara rampage shooting

Anyone contemplating a Murder-Suicide should try reversing the order of their itinerary.

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The women who rejected him obviously made a very rational choice to keep his little swimmers out of the gene pool ā€¦

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California already has the touhgest gun control laws in the US. Proving once again that gun controls is useless to stop psychos and criminals.

We also learned today that the 3 first victims of the murderer were STABBED to death.

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Women do like nice guys, and some donā€™t. Itā€™s just thatā€¦ most jerks think theyā€™re nice. Male and female both.

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Proving once again that gun control is inadequate to stop EVERY psycho and criminal,

and also that the American educational system is inadequate to stop lazy fallacies from escaping the mouths of all citizens.

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But they really really do. The mirage here is you being magically above them. Magical thinking is a sign of mental illness.

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Yeah but NEWTOWN WAS A HOAX!!!

Sorry, forgot my meds this morning.

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Most industrialized countries with significantly larger barriers to gun ownership have vastly lower levels of gun violence. Themā€™s the facts. I donā€™t disagree at all that other social systems also need to be addressed ā€“ mental health, economic, etc. In fact, my post essentially said that the gun rights lobby has won, and all we have left as recourse is to examine those other systems. And if you choose to identify with ā€œstupid hickā€ because you live between the coasts, thatā€™s your call. Hint: coastal states have their share of stupid hicks, including California, Massachusetts, Florida, etc.

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As far as I can tell, the ā€œrejectionā€ amounted quite literally to women not throwing themselves at him. He writes 140 pages about his life from birth and (while Iā€™ll admit I skimmed chunks for my own mental health) not once did I see ā€œI actually asked a girl out and she said no.ā€ He seemed to think that ā€œgettingā€ women consisted of looking really good and then we fall from the sky into your arms.

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Hey gun-nuts: Iā€™m a gun nut too. I oppose gun bans. But there are still reasonable measures that we arenā€™t taking that we could be taking.

This kid was prescribed anti-psychotic drugs. It is not unreasonable to create a system whereby anyone whoā€™s prescribed anti-psychotics or who is diagnosed by a medical professional as psychotic gets flagged in the background check system so they can be denied a purchase.

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You would be more convincing if you snipped the last paragraph off.

Speaking as a Kentuckian, that kind of whining comes off sounding nothing like you think it does. Posturing like that doesnā€™t just come across as childishly belligerent and faux-macho - around here one only hears it as the rhetoric of dilettante poseurs who reconstruct a cultural identity based on Larry the Cable Guy and Duck Dynasty - two entertainment conglomerates that turned frost-tipped 80ā€™s fops into images of redneck pride.

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The only public references (i.e., not on blogs, message boards, Facebook, etc.) to non-coastal people being ā€œstupid hicksā€ are all from right wing media. Itā€™s the Rush type who whip people in a frenzy telling them the Others are calling them that. Iā€™ve never heard the term in mainstream or left wing media sources unless it was being quoted from another source.

And as a born-and-bred Midwesterner, I see red every time someone tells me that I think in that prejudicial way about Midwesterners simply because I donā€™t toe the reactionary extremist agenda that is now falsely being called ā€œconservativeā€. (I also see red every time I hear the word ā€œconservativeā€ these days, but thatā€™s a lost cause, I know.)

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Watching these debates between the opposing sides has been informative over the last few weeks. There have been a few.
Most cogent of the points made seems to be the ramping up of treatment of the causes of mental illness.

That could be a herculean task, even if all agencies concerned were to immediately dedicate themselves to it; the funding isnā€™t there and anyway, neither is the prerogative or drive.
The VA seems to be the perfect example, if they donā€™t have the will to help well studied cases of mental illness brought about by planned-for theatres of war, what hope do civilian agencies have?

Could the outright banning of personal firearms help? With the proliferation of weapons in the country, I imagine this too has passed the point of no return. Even as a physical exercise, amnesty wouldnā€™t dent the philosophy of gun ownership in the States. Everyone would have to agree to forgo what most people see as an inalienable right.

I read somewhere on this site recently that in Canada, even suggesting someone commit suicide carries a harsher penalty than attempted murder.
Perhaps new laws that are predicated on the removal of self-identifying threats need to be taken more seriously.

Joke or no. If someone speaks out about their intention to kill people, perhaps the right thing to do is hold that person for serious observation and treatment, jail time even. I can imagine this impinging upon notions of free speech and the potential abuse of people who use particularly violent metaphors could be troublesome but at this point, some other angle of approach needs to be considered.

Based on the current news reports maybe update the title of this thread. Seems like 6 dead (3 stabbed, 3 shot, 4 men, 2 women) and 13 injured.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/dead-drive-shooting-uc-santa-barbara-23853689

Sheriff: Calif. Gunman Killed 3 People at Home
GOLETA, Calif. May 24, 2014 (AP)
By RAQUEL MARIA DILLON, MARTHA MENDOZA and JULIE WATSON Associated Press
Associated Press
The son of a Hollywood director stabbed three men to death in his apartment, gunned down two women outside a sorority and killed a sixth person in a rampage that was foreshadowed by a chilling Internet video in which he vowed to his victims that he would ā€œtake great pleasure in slaughtering all of you.ā€

The most unsettling thing to me is that several people sensed that this was coming- including his own parents- yet there was no stopping it. What else were they supposed to do beyond alerting authorities and therapists? Sequester or poison their own kid before he blew up? I canā€™t imaging how horrific and desperate it must feel for them to have tried all available avenues and yet the absolute worst still happened.

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I believe that the 7th death refers to the shooter himself.

Ahh, yes. Makes sense.

Still itā€™s news that the injury counts are continuing to rise. Awful.

There is a process in California to place a person in an involuntarily hold for observation if they are considered a danger to themselves or others. I believe the common term is to ā€œ5150ā€ them from section 5150 of the CA Welfare and Institutions Code

However, putting someone in a 5150 hold requires ā€œprobable causeā€ so the question here is was there probable cause available to the police or other qualified professionals in this case, or for comparison, in the Coronado case in Los Angeles less than a week earlier?

It seems to me there is a serious discussion to be had about what we, as a society, feel should be the appropriate probable cause for a ā€œ5150ā€ or similar intervention. Set the bar to low and we start committing people who are merely annoying, too high and we allow avoidable harm.

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Honestly, thereā€™s not enough shame in our society. Of course, that comes with all kinds of other puritanical baggage because white American settlers were the descendants of the economic, social and political rejects of Europe.

In other places, much of Asia for instance, people are taught from a very young age how bad it is to bring shame upon oneā€™s family and how good it is to bring honor to the family with high achievement. There, it is far more unconscionable to pick up a weapon and harm someone because people are taught to look upstream and downstream within their own family and examine the level of shame that a rash action would bring everyone. And everyone in a family is watching a loose cannon; theyā€™ll bring the family hammer of doom down on him or her much, much earlier in life than we do here in the USA.

This doesnā€™t mean that Asia is free of rash actions! But they are subject to far fewer incidents of mass murder and have a much higher population. This tells us something about the attitudes and thought processes of the people within those populations.

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