A sad thing that the greed of the giant tech brah co.s impacts people so heavily that this young woman turned to violence and suicide. De-monitization of vloggers has hit all kinds of people. They let a thousand flowers bloom then shut off the water.
Unless we assume handwavium levels of magic to ‘make all the guns disappear’ we won’t ever completely be able to stop things like this. It gives me some tiny measure of solace that perhaps CA’s gun laws might have saved lives. She used a hand gun. Perhaps she was unable to obtain a AR15 or perhaps she was, but choose a easily concealed handgun. If she had chosen a not-quite-machine gun there would be deaths and many more injuries. They are weapons of war, not hunting tools or defensive weapons. Hoping the victims make a full recovery.
I would like to see a world where guns are looked at like anachronisms or dangerous tools you only carry when in the re-wilded areas. My son is considering being a park ranger or something like that. So I’ll go to a range with him, take a gun safety course and learn how to respect, fear and if necessary use these terrible tools.
And if we could get rid of all the nuclear weapons that would be a start on a better future for all humankind. What am I saying? We have a gameshow host rodeo clown as ‘president’ who pooptweets threats of thermonuclear destruction bangs porn ‘actresses’ and has the temperament of a 2 year old with a full diaper.
To further the side note: this is also one reason why talking about race as a matter of policy is difficult. Most bureaucracy in America recognizes three general races: Caucasian, Black, and Asian. Persians are white. Indians are Asian. In fact, pretty much anyone who is not Black or Caucasian is Asian.
For places where it matters – such as the census bureau – they recognize the above is nowhere near good enough, and will usually also add options for “Native American” or “American Indian”, as well as a checkbox for “(and I am additionally also) Hispanic”. True, sub-continent variety Indians are still Asian, though a large number struggle with the form and say, “well, I’m Indian… and I’m American now… so I guess American Indian?” So the system still sucks.
Some bureaucracies add more checkboxes for various ethnicities that should be broken out, but at this point most just give up and give a “check all that apply” form. Which is better anyway, because humans don’t stick to one ethnicity.
And God help you if you do studies that combine this data.
So in the future, when you file a FOIA request to investigate discrimination and results come back, “we honestly couldn’t tell you how many black people we pull over,” understand that they aren’t just lying or lazy. They didn’t know how to talk about it, so they just gave up on tracking the data, and now it’s harder for society as a whole to talk about the racial effects on policy because the data sucks.
The problem I see on a lot of internet forums is that “gun control” gets discussed without anyone clarifying what they mean by it. I’m not American so really I have no stake in the matter but I think that when people attribute the NRA’s speaking points to all of its members, they give the NRA more power. The same goes with painting all Republicans as being against any and all gun control measures.
What’s interesting to me about some of the proposed measures is that even with broad support they’re kind of stupid. For instance, if gun ownership is a right, preventing anyone with any kind of mental illness from owning a gun, regardless of whether the diagnosis indicated any likelihood of harm to self or others would be a violation of their constitutional rights. Banning anyone on the no-fly list when there’s no process to challenge being on that list and no way to find out why you’re on the list is similarly problematic.
Any measures related to previous diagnoses or arrests will be less effective in preventing violence, suicides, and accidents due to kids and teens getting their hands on relatives’ guns.
My personal opinion is that background checks, waiting periods, safe storage of guns and ammunition, and licencing owners and users (so you’re not permitted to access a gun in your household unless you also have a licence) are possibly more useful measures.
Aside from this being a lesson for gun control, I think there’s a problem with Youtube being able to randomly flag videos as age restricted when they’re not even by US standards sexually suggestive (apparently this was what set her off as her yoga videos being age restricted). It really seems like to me YouTube and company need to be put under some kind of common carrier regulation so they can’t just arbitrarily restrict content (stuff that tells you how to break into the bank, restricted. Stuff that tells you how to do the Dinosaur, not restricted). It’s one of those things that SV will fight, obviously, but it’s inevitable that they’ll be taken to task in the near future for their arbitrariness and opaque decision making.
I can not diagnose someone with sociopathy, since I am not a professional, but I have some experience with Anxiety Disorders. Most mass shootings look a lot like Maladaptive Stress Responses, common with people with Anxiety disorders. Dealing with Big Tech, as a producer or seller can be stressful. I got shingles dealing with Amazon. I was 30 years old at the time. IF you are not familiar, the shingles virus usually only attacks people over 50. If I had suffered from a severe anxiety disorder, and coupled by your observation of American culture of violence, it would have seem like rational response.
Disregarding Mental Health’s role in this would be tactless. It is a mutually exclusive issue from gun control and needs to be discussed in society regardless of whether Gun Fetishists wan to stroke their AR15s
The problem is that when people say that its a mental health problem, they don’t mean it in a “let’s make it easier for people to get out-patient treatment” way. It’s about demonising the mentally ill, even if it isn’t a conscious intention for a lot of people.
It does matter what you think because it matters whether people are raising real issues or being disingenuous. I can’t produce evidence of a lot of things I believe, but if someone wanted to have a serious discussion about why I believe them I could engage in that if it was a good faith discussion. If someone genuinely doubts something then it’s worth going into, if no one does then it’s not worth going into.
I don’t think that’s the sort of thing that would show up well on a search engine. I say with confidence that somewhere in the US there is a gun owner who was nervous that they might have colon cancer yesterday until they remembered they ate beets the day before, but I don’t think I’ll find that on google either.
I can find cases but they are only picked up by right wing media that I don’t exactly trust. I find law explainers explaining that, yes, it is totally legal to fire someone for owning a gun. I also find state legislatures that have introduced laws to make that illegal (though I assume they are chasing phantoms or making mountains out of individual cases).
But to actually sustain the belief that this has never happened in the whole of the USA? I don’t know, that seems super far-fetched. Knowing that people have asked this question of lawyers is enough to make me think it probably happened once. I don’t think the burden of proof is where you suggest it is.
I think you’re both touching on something which I find to be the elephant in the room on all of this.
These people clearly feel that they have nothing left worth living for. I think we (everyone) underestimate the impact of an organism being backed into a corner – even us ostensibly-rational humans. Did these people have access to free counselling? Did they have easy access to a temporary means of financial support? Did they have easy/free access to career retraining? What did they have easy access to? Guns.
I think the most ABLE of us forget that our society is daunting and unforgiving, particularly American society (“sink or swim amirite?”). Society corners these people and hands them a gun, and somehow we’re always shocked at the result.
Like the ability to vote, the right to a gun can constitutionally be denied to someone who has committed a federal offense. And in addition, the Gun Control Act and Viloence Against Women Act make it illegal to possess a firearm or ammunition if you have committed a federal crime, if you have a protective order against you, or if you’ve been convicted of even misdemeanor domestic abuse of a woman. Just figuring out good enforcement mechanisms for existing laws would improve the number of criminal shootings more than yet another under-enforced law.
Keeping guns out of the hands of mentally ill people nationwide requires the U.S. government to step in with a national definition of mental illness, at least where gun ownership is concerned. That would be a heavily political process arguing over very gray areas, and even then the government is not qualified to make such a judgment without written orders of some sort from licensed medical professionals.
The sort of people who aren’t considered threats – just your baseline asshole, of which we have plenty who never fall into violence – until they just snap would not be stopped. Some suicides might be prevented, though most would probably just change from gun deaths to drug deaths. I’m not sure a slow, painful, chancy suicide by OD is a better public good.
I looked at her website and felt a weird sense of relief that her motives couldn’t be ascribed to any of the stereotypes the right uses to vilify brown people, immediately followed by outrage out how fucked up it is that the present situation is such that I thoughts like that even occur to me.
Unfortunately, it won’t matter. If their position was based on reason, it wouldn’t exist. They’ll ignore all of the details and paint her as both “just another bad immigrant” and probably also throw in some “angry woman” jabs as well. By the time it’s all said and done, I fully expect the right wing media to have used every conceivable facet of this person to help bolster their cause, right down to making commentary about her appearance.
She was clearly unwell. That’s why she did the horrible thing she did, but she’s also dead now and there’s not very damned much anybody can do about that now. What I worry about is all of the other people who aren’t unwell, and who aren’t going to do anything horrible, and are still alive, and yet their lives will be made just a bit shittier because of one unstable person suffering some kind of nervous breakdown and did something awful.
A few years ago a man in Michigan went on a multi-hour shooting spree. The sheriff explained to the press that the man was “just going through a lot of things” at the time, and saw no reason to ascribe the motive to anything else. We have here an example of another person who was “just going through a lot of things” too (business failing, her genuine belief that anti-vegan people were out to get her) and I’m just gritting my teeth in painful anticipation for the kind of stupid rhetoric that will be applied to her simply because she’s not a white man.
(Just in case there is any doubt, I’m in no way justifying or condoning what she did. This is an inexcusable tragedy. We all know that though, and I’m taking the opportunity to criticize some of the elements of American culture/society that perpetuate its cycles of internal violence.)
You forgot the part about her being a woman. That means she’ll be labeled a “Muslim”, a “terrorist”, and they’re going to say disparaging things about her appearance. In addition to everything else, right-wing media has decreed that no woman’s appearance may escape judgment, even if it has absolutely nothing to do with anything.
Well, that’s where it gets complicated, and past the grasp of the general public.
Most people under the very broad umbrella of “mental illness” are non-violent, and not at any higher risk of violence than people without a diagnosable mental illness.
However, a small subset of mental illnesses are vastly more likely to be prone to violence, either because of empathy-lowering and consequence-prediction-blunting as in antisocial personality disorders (or in subtypes where antisocial elements are present, such as in malignant narcissism), or in cases where reality testing fails, such as in various psychoses or in very extreme cases of schizophrenia and schizophreniform disorders. There’s also some association with the whole Cluster B personality disorder set (since they kind of bleed into each other) that includes antisocial, narcissistic, histrionic and borderline personality disorders.
But… Your average Joe isn’t going to understand any of that, because it’s a pretty specialized knowledge set. So the natural response of people is to simplify, and they hear “crazy folks gonna kill me”, and there’s not really any good way to work around that, other than to stop using the mental illness label so generically, and at least to start introducing the more specific terms more often (personality disorder, mood disorder, psychosis, etc.) and used correctly.
This is so true, but I would take it even further.
I think the psychological and psychiatric associations have been so very concerned about stigma (and rightly so) that they have issued a number of statements on mass shootings that are vague, and a bit confusing, and have been picked up by the press and general public in a way that is just plain wrong.
It is true that people with mental illnesses (which is a broad category encompassing many, many different disorders), are more likely to be victims of violence than to perpetrate violence. However, it’s also true that SPECIFIC mental disorders are KNOWN to cause elevated risk of perpetrating violence (e.g. certain subsets of schizophrenia). This is a fact. What’s happening with mass shootings, however, is a difficult to study phenomenon – the sample size is incredibly small. And there also seems to be a “social contagion” effect – which is definitely of psychiatric interest.
But regardless, in EVERY case there is something “not right” with the mind of the mass shooter. Adam Lanza had depression, OCD, and anorexia so severe that it was found to have caused brain damage upon autopsy examination. The kid was referred for help, and his mother was less than eager to get him the help he desperately needed. Same with the Parkland shooting – the kid was referred many, many times for psychiatric interventions. The Columbine shooters each had different mental illnesses (psychopathy and major depression), and they fed into each other. Even the Texas Tower shooter had a brain tumor that he himself recognised as causing personality changes (he wrote about it in his suicide note, and even requested an autopsy).
Part of the problem we face is the language problem – we use “mental illness” as a blanket term for a whole range of symptoms, and some of those even put you at DECREASED risk of lashing out violently. Others, however, are clearly linked. Even mere depression puts you at increased risk of committing violent crime. (Diagnosed depression linked to violent crime, says Oxford University study | Depression | The Guardian)
Anyhow, I think these associations have made an error in public policy, because now on Twitter, I’ve seen countless oversimplified versions of “it’s not mental illness”. Well, it depends on what you mean by “mental illness”. Violence begins in the mind. I’m perfectly comfortable calling this phenomena as related to “mental illness”.
The real meme should be – there is NO NEED to fear people with mental disorders, as violence is very rare. HOWEVER, it is always recommended that people seek out treatment – you don’t have to go it alone.
Because what you close with is absolutely true – all of these people, the victims and shooters alike, could have been saved.
And then ask yourself this – if the public sentiment shifts so far that we say these are just the acts of people acting perfectly rationally (and yes, I’ve gotten into Twitter debates with folks who argue this), will people experiencing distress be MORE or LESS inclined to seek help? I think less. It’s already intimidating enough to find a therapist you can trust…
One last thought – the science of head injury and impulse control might also reveal new causation:
