05-02-2023, 08:06 PM
So the study finds that when you look at people who actually did a mass shooting, you find seriously disturbed individuals who don't generally fit into the definition of insanity that would get them confined in an institution, largely because we don't generally do that sort of thing unless they commit some horrible crime first. Then they get "not guilty by reason of insanity" and go to the state hospital instead of prison.
But the really obvious alternative answer -- to limit gun possession -- is not even considered in the article up to the point I read. What's missing in the article is any quantitative argument: Just how many of these isolated, unhappy, potentially suicidal young people are there? A hundred thousand? A million? And even if we could identify them, what would we do, unless it's the idea of the red flag laws?
But serious reduction in high power, semiautomatic weapons would reduce the chance that any one of them would have the tools available at the time of the final crackup.
The continuing argument that we ought to look at the person, not the gun, is denial of the reality.
And of course there is the other point, that in most civilized countries in the industrial west, the mass homicide rate is low because the level of gun ownership is low in comparison to ours. It's interesting that the Swiss are more or less midway in the graph between other European countries and the US, almost exactly matching their higher level of gun ownership on the graph.
But the really obvious alternative answer -- to limit gun possession -- is not even considered in the article up to the point I read. What's missing in the article is any quantitative argument: Just how many of these isolated, unhappy, potentially suicidal young people are there? A hundred thousand? A million? And even if we could identify them, what would we do, unless it's the idea of the red flag laws?
But serious reduction in high power, semiautomatic weapons would reduce the chance that any one of them would have the tools available at the time of the final crackup.
The continuing argument that we ought to look at the person, not the gun, is denial of the reality.
And of course there is the other point, that in most civilized countries in the industrial west, the mass homicide rate is low because the level of gun ownership is low in comparison to ours. It's interesting that the Swiss are more or less midway in the graph between other European countries and the US, almost exactly matching their higher level of gun ownership on the graph.