The same way you get to Carnegie Hall?*
Neil just totally blew off the guy raising the HIPPA privacy problems not allowing this psyco's mental condition to make it into the system so that he couldn't buy a gun in order to go back and try and score some points against the evil NRA. The man has blood on his own hands and he can't get off of his extreme left wing template.
They end with homages to Shep Smith and Jerry Rivers (Geraldo Rivera) about just how tough it was to report on the VT story. Someone in the media is going to have the insight to point out that the murders happened precisely because of the "investigative reporting" that made Geraldo famous on the truly horrendous conditions at NY mental hospitals. The net result of that expose, however, was laws that led to the dumping of truly distrubed people out onto the streets from many other institutions. It also led directly to the current disfunctional health care system that lets dangerous maniacs out on the streets and campuses of America and, in the name of privacy (remember the penumbra granted privacy rights in the Constitution) prevents law abiding citizens from knowing about the danger, to the point that the gun dealer couldn't even find out about Cho's mental condition.
In some ways this can be viewed as the Jerry Rivers massacre.
* the punchline to that old joke "how do you get to Carnegie Hall" is "practice, practice, practice."
Excellent tying in and you are quite right.
One of my fellow lawyer friends was working hard back then to get lunatics released from their “unfair” detention. I told her she might just be crazy if she wanted these people out on the street where they would become both prey and predators.
I was pretty liberal myself at the time (or I thought I was), but some things just defy common sense.
“The net result of that expose, however, was laws that led to the dumping of truly distrubed people out onto the streets from many other institutions. It also led directly to the current disfunctional health care system that lets dangerous maniacs out on the streets and campuses of America and, in the name of privacy (remember the penumbra granted privacy rights in the Constitution) prevents law abiding citizens from knowing about the danger, to the point that the gun dealer couldn’t even find out about Cho’s mental condition.”
^^^^^
Not even parents can find out about their child’s aberrant behavior if the child does not give permission to the health care professional. Truly bizarre! One caller to a radio show this morning gave the example that a hospital phoned to advise parents that their child was in a hospital, but could not provide any details on condition due to HIPAA rules. In that case the child was unconscious, and not in any condition to talk to his own parents!
Well, a lot of persons having difficulty with mental health are just as incapable of communicating their health problems to someone like a parent who should be informed.