According to the family’s lawyer: Police interviewed Elliot Rodger and found him to be a “perfectly polite, kind and wonderful human”
Right. The same was said of Ted Bundy. Did they expect the little psychopathic narcissist to hand them a detailed plan of his projected murders written in blood?
Some statistics on homicide. Unfortunately, 2010 appears to be the most recent date. Gun murders are far and away the most likely way for someone to be killed.
I don’t expect you gun nuts to ever accede to any kind of gun control, no matter what outrage is perpetrated. 20 dead children weren’t enough. Why would three dead college students mean anything to you?
As for the toughness of CA’s gun control laws: they weren’t tough enough to keep someone like this guy from obtaining firearms. Both psychiatrists and cops knew he was messed up, but he still managed to buy guns legally.
We have shaped our modern society around the concept of individualism, and that is the center of how we view ourselves. That is part of the problem. We do have shame, but it’s based on “not living up to our individual potential” or “being sheeple” or not “getting ours”. I suspect we’ll keep having these kinds of horrific incidents until we learn to better balance out the individual and society.
Thats a pretty thin broth you have there.
If you are happy with that conclusion, then I’m happy for you. You got me.
A person came on earlier and stated flatly that it can be difficult to hold someone. Here’s why:
In this case, concern stemmed from the youtube videos he posted, and a month before his rampage, his own parents contacted Isla Vista police stating that they were concerned for his welfare. At that time an officer could have visited him, and brought him in, but then it gets tricky…
…if he’d said the videos were just a joke (other too-real vids like lonelygirl15 exist on youtube and he’s a director’s son) the officer would have most likely had to release him. There’d be no real probable cause to hold him, because the officer wouldn’t have any other proof that he was unstable. The hold would have only happened if the officer took him in, and he either stated that he was serious or somehow displayed behavior that concerned someone while in custody.
A 5150 requires that the officer or clinician sign off that there was probable cause for the 72-hour hold. “Probable cause” is already broadly defined. You must display one of three concerns: danger to self, danger to others, or gravely disabled. After the 72-hours, you can be re-revaluated by a psychiatrist, and if needed, be held to be placed on corrective meds. You’ll be held at least until your med levels are stable. If the psychiatrist releases you without hold, it’ll be even harder to bring you in again if there are no other concerns (no arrests, doctors reports, or other corroborating evidence to show you need care). That’s why people don’t “waste” 5150’s - you use them for emergencies, only when the threat is clear.
The broad acceptance of violent and threatening rhetoric also makes it hard to distinguish the blowhard from the imminent danger. Look at the average statement from Ted Nugent, Alex Jones, Ann Coulter, or G. Gordon Liddy. Or look at the tsunami of rape threats outspoken women get online. When half the audience in every crowded theater is shouting “fire!” because they think it’s fucking hilarious, how to figure out if there’s an actual danger, much less how to identify the real source?
Wow, whilst I slept people came to my defense against a spurious accusation, despite the fact that Im kinda a tool.
You people are alright.
The day is still young, but Im going to go ahead that say that this is the best thing I read all day.
Ok, yer good pal, Bobby is in a good mood this ‘morning’ so I want to give the BB Nation a quick lesson in manipulative discourse.
Observe the use of the word ‘nut’ in the quote above. As most of us know ‘nut’ in this case, refers to a mentally deficient or disturbed person- not a particularly politically correct word to be using, but ok, lets go with it.
This is a screamingly common feature found when debating atheists, or gun control nuts. This technique is to assert that the atheist, gun-control advocate, Obama voter arrived at their decision via logic and reasoning, while the opposition is psychologically damaged.
I believe this technique was perfected by the communists, the rationale being that anyone who didnt want to live in a global socialist love farm must be a ‘nut’ and in need of ‘reeducation’.
I wish I was exaggerating…
Larry the Cable Guy:
Duck Dynasty:
It’s enough to make me suspect that Honey Boo-Boo’s family are really Gore Vidal and Hannah Arendt in disguise.
You carefully omitted the high cost for taking rash actions in most asian countries. With only few exceptions, guns aren’t allowed in China, Japan, or Korea (to name a few places you might go looking for honor). The same is true of several other asian countries. Without a gun, multiple killings are simply harder to pull off. That doesn’t mean murder doesn’t occur.
Asian countries are very serious about controlling guns. For example, in China, you don’t even have to use your gun to be put in prison or killed for it: “Illegal possession of firearms is punishable by police supervision, criminal detention, or fixed-term imprisonment for up to seven years. Illegally manufacturing, trading, transporting, mailing, or storing five military guns, five gunpowder-propelled nonmilitary guns, ten other nonmilitary guns, fifty military bullets, five hundred nonmilitary bullets, three hand grenades, or any explosive devices that can cause serious damage is punishable by fixed-term imprisonment of not less than ten years, life imprisonment, or death. The same punishments may be imposed for theft or robbery of firearms, and using firearms to commit robbery.”
You also may want to go look up the actual murder rates. We rank high for multiple homicides, but we are not topping the list for murder. So, without guns, Eastern Asian killings still occur at a rate of 1.3 people per year to every 100,000 people (actual 2012 count 19,828). Here in the U.S. and Canada, the rate is 3.9 per 100,000 people (actual 2012 count 13,558). More people actually died from murder in Eastern Asia in 2012, but it was a lower rate by population. It’s their gun control, not honor, that keeps their murder rates lower.
If you really want to find high murder rates, look to the Africas, Central and South America. That’s where crime and corruption are (very unfortunately) rampant, as well as people fighting over land that can still be held by whoever has the most force.
P.S. As I said in an earlier post, as current gun laws stand, this crime was committed with a legally-owned gun. So, I am not trying to aggressively turn this into a gun-control debate. I’m just pointing out the information you omitted in your own discussion. Honor has little to do with the numbers.
That’s the problem with psychopaths. It’s also why they’d never have gotten him in for a hold. Even if they had, a psychiatrist might not have recognized his pathology. If he had psychopathic tendencies, his skill at lying would have been really well-developed.
Yes, that was me. I’m a licensed mental health provider in California. I don’t see a lot of 5150s in my private practice, fortunately - I’ve only ever had to send two people to the ER and both went voluntarily. But I supervise students who see much more troubled clients, and a close friend works with “dual diagnosis” folks - mental illness and substance abuse, usually homeless as well.
You have to be so far out of touch with reality to actually get held against your will, it’s not even funny. And don’t get me wrong - we should have strong protections against confining people through the power of the state, or else it’s ripe for abuse. The parent who says “my kid was violent earlier” because they want to teach the kid a lesson or punish them or make them be not gay; the disgruntled spouse; the feuding neighbors; the pissed-off ex; the angry teacher or cop; the parents who just want respite from a difficult kid - there are too many incentives to abuse the system and we are not so advanced in our treatment of psychiatric patients that we can say “well a few mistakes won’t hurt anybody.” But this does mean that a reasonably oriented person can avoid commitment much of the time.
And as I said elsewhere, clinicians aren’t psychic. I should know - I had a client once who had a serious personal life crisis, came in for an emergency session, denied having any suicidal thoughts or intentions or owning any weapons… and then blew his own head off a day or two later, with a gun he’d purchased weeks earlier. I didn’t send him to the hospital because he gave “all the right answers” and was able to present the image of someone who was keeping it together.
Not about gun controls or not. There are other countries with very high gun ownership rates and 1/10th the gun murder rates. It is a cultural fixation with guns that is the issue, and that is a much more difficult onion to chop.
Fighting pitched battles over petty details of gun control legislation or rules is just a sideshow to the ongoing slaughter in a country where gunfire is seen, portrayed and celebrated as a viable solution to a wide range of personal, social and political challenges.
There is a reason incompetent or unpopular presidents go to war. There is a reason police gun people down at alarming rates for minimal provocation. There is a reason people go on shooting rampages. All are on the same continuum of action and alienation.
A culture that allows, participates in and even celebrates the vaporization of entire villages via automated drones on the other side of the world should fully expect that same cultural glorification of violence to manifest in the alienated, the stupid and the dysfunctional within its own borders. GWB strutting around on an aircraft carrier after his delegates obliterated a vastly inferior army and created a monstrous deadly mess is only a few short steps away from an equally moronic but much less privileged asshole like this current shooter enacting his own violent fantasies on the world.
Yea, I saw the Duck Dynasty one. And every so often, if you listen to him long enough, you will hear Larry the Cable Guy forget that he is supposed to be a hick and fall out of his fake accent.
I wonder what prodded these two to reinvent themselves?
Or, for that matter, why?
I hypothesize that its a reaction to the divestment of WASP culture here in our so,so postmodern age. So ‘redneck’ is created to substitute for it.
discuss
That makes it even worse. We know (and you’d think the police would know as well) this of psychopaths: manipulative, charming, extremely good liars… You would think that by now the authorities would not trust mere appearances and conduct a proper check. Despite acting ‘polite and charming’, this was a young man who had few friends and no stable relationship, who’s own mother was expressing concerns over, whose long-term therapists already described as very mentally perturbed, and who had already openly expressed hateful/violent fantasies. Those are all glaring red flags, no matter how polite and good-looking the guy might have been at the time police spoke to him. I’m having trouble understanding how they were so quickly fooled by it or so careless.
They even found a note from the killer himself in which he expressed his relief at having fooled the police and how happy he was that they did not search his room, where they would have not only found the weapons and ammo but also his written thoughts on what he planned to do with them. It’s enough to make you want to bang your head on the wall.
ETA: Then again, this is perhaps a similar situation than the time my ex-husband began harassing myself and my co-workers with violent threats. The police only finally showed up once my ex himself called the cops (incredibly enough) and began ranting scary nonsense at them. I guess before they saw it first-hand, they just thought I was the paranoid idiot. Big help there.
It’s probably the same reason that GW Bush (from New Haven, CT) decided to stop being a suited East coast college grad (Yale and Harvard) and “git all folksy”. Basically, he lost his first race in Texas to another politician who had a drawl and drove an older car and didn’t wear nice suits. The next election, GW Bush had magically become a Texan who just didn’t always speak correctly.
I didn’t watch his videos, other than a brief clip that appeared on the TV news. But I do read micro-expressions —and he was micro-ing subtle contempt and disgust when he mentioned women in the clip I saw. If he did that in normal conversation then he’d have given off a bad vibe, even if the unfortunate women in his sights didn’t understand why they felt that way about him.
I totally agree. It’s incredibly frustrating. I also want to refer you to Elusis’ response to my comment. As stated there, “we should have strong protections against confining people through the power of the state, or else it’s ripe for abuse.” We need to not hold people for too little reason.
The problem with psychopaths, narcissists and similar issues is that they do appear to be so very normal. That’s what they do. As Elusis said, “You have to be so far out of touch with reality to actually get held against your will, it’s not even funny.” That’s exactly why certain people get missed. You can’t legally hold someone for complimenting your hair, being polite and smiling. All it takes is a clear denial and a good pass on interview (which they’re usually skilled at from years of therapy), and a person can get out. There isn’t a lot of time to decide if a person is a hazard.
I sympathize with you. I grew up with an unstable brother, and for years no one believed me about his problems - mainly because my parents were absent. The entire family thought I was lying. I got a lot of apologies when he and his wife separated, and she had a long talk with my aunts. Even people who know someone well, but peripherally, may not see this type of disorder.
The guys said this about guns:
“My first act of preparation was the purchase my first handgun. I did this quickly and hastily, at a local gun shop called Goleta Gun and Supply. I had already done some research on handguns, and I decided to purchase the Glock 34 semiautomatic pistol, an efficient and highly accurate weapon. I signed all of the papers and was told that my pickup day was in mid-December.”
“After I picked up the handgun, I brought it back to my room and felt a new sense of power. I was now armed. Who’s the alpha male now, bitches.”
He didn’t say that about the knives, just the guns. It points to something… Something that the gun control people all know, and the people who care more about loose gun laws than society are unwilling to admit.
