Posted on 12/20/2012 4:42:02 AM PST by rellimpank
The film "Casablanca" has many famous lines, but none more immortal than Capt. Renault's order after seeing a Nazi officer shot by Humphrey Bogart's character, Rick Blaine: "Round up the usual suspects." He issues that command to give the impression he's trying to solve the crime. In the aftermath of the Newtown massacre, the Renault approach is alive and well.
The three suspects commonly cited are the purported danger of certain firearms, mentally ill individuals and modern forms of entertainment. They all make plausible culprits, until you look closely.
The first is our old nemesis the "assault weapon." The Newtown shooter used a Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle, which resembles a military model, and several 30-round magazines. President Barack Obama and several Democratic senators are therefore calling for a renewal of the "assault weapons" ban that expired in 2004.
But the guns they would ban are functionally identical to innumerable guns that would not be outlawed. Contrary to myth, these firearms don't produce bursts of automatic fire, don't "spray" bullets and aren't any more lethal than other semi-automatic guns. They are exceptional only in how they look.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
The entire ‘conversation’ about the murders at Newtown have gone from irrational to ridiculous to outrageous to insane. People need to shut up already. Leave these children and these families in peace.
I aknowledge that some things can be prevented -- if firearm safety classes were emphasized, there would be fewer real accidents. If more children were taught to swim, there would be fewer drownings.
But lunatics killing people for no good reason? That's not going away. You can't stop that. It's just reality. It's how some people are wired. And taking away the freedoms of the normal people who do no harm to anyone is hardly a justifiable response to an unsolvable problem.
In the 1960s, the United States embarked on an innovative approach to caring for its mentally ill: deinstitutionalization. The intentions were quite humane: move patients from long-term commitment in state mental hospitals into community-based mental health treatment. Contrary to popular perception, California Governor Ronald Reagan’s signing of the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act of 196712 was only one small part of a broad-based movement, starting in the late 1950s.13
There is no shortage of these tragedies that have one common element: a person whose exceedingly odd behavior, sometimes combined with minor criminal acts, would likely have led to confinement in a mental hospital in 1960. After deinstitutionalization, these people remained at large until they killed. The criminal justice system then took them out of circulation (if they did not commit suicide), but this was too late for their victims. There is a clear statistical relationship between deinstitutionalization and murder rates. Violent crime rates rose dramatically in the 1960s, most worrisomely in the murder rate.
Deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill was one of the truly remarkable public policy decisions of the 1960s and 1970s, and yet its full impact is barely recognized by most of the public. Partly this was because the changes did not happen overnight, but took place state-by-state over two decades, with no single national event. While homelessness received enormous public attention in the early 1980s, the news media’s reluctance to acknowledge the role that deinstitutionalization played in this human tragedy meant that the public safety connection was generally invisible to the general public. The solution remains unclear, but recognizing the consequences of deinstitutionalization is the first step.
And thousands die every year in airplane crashes. Are we to now ban all air travel or just the airplanes?
Common people, get your heads on straight.
Typical government over-reaction when a crisis occurs.
The thought occurs: why don’t all classrooms have “panic buttons” like most banks and many homes? A panic button (location known only to the teacher) could summon help silently, or be equipped to set off loud alarm bells and sirens. I know the ones installed in this house would scare the pants off anyone hearing them and scared off at least one set of burglars that I know about.
Also John Kass.
This is the best way of dealing with this, especially because this isn’t an epidemic. Unfortunately there are people more eager to become problem solvers than to actually discuss about donation plans for the victims of the mass murder.
Like this one: http://www.crowdrise.com/SHSRelief. Right now this is the only thing that can be done that may help the families. Other than that, private grieving is just that not an excuse for sociological arguments.
Roughly a thousand people die per year in airplanes worldwide, on average. Most of these are in private planes.
I think it’s been about five years since we had an airliner crash in USA, and I believe that was a commuter flight.
Flying commercial in the US is remarkably safe.
Not an over-reaction at all. A calculation. "Never let a crisis go to waste".
Situation leads to reaction leads to result. Create the situation, get the desired reaction, achieve the desired result.
Sadly though, there is a reality called EVIL, the viewable reality of the spiritual war that is going on.
The FBI classifies mass murder as single events where four or more people died. In 2012, we had 6-8 such events.
To come up with a remedy to stop these mass murders, we have to guess who the next 6-8 of them are out of a population of 313 million people.
Everyone should read this gem by Karl Denninger on the subject of Obama (and many others) being complete hypocrites on the gun ssue: http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=215107
Please also pass it on to other threads and your email lists. This kind of brutal logic MUST become part of the “national conversation on guns” that the gun-ban crowd wants to have.
Anything inconvenient to wire service journalism institutionally generally will be "generally invisible to the general public.” Maybe - just maybe - suicides in general are “demonstrations” against grievances (of whatever, if any, merit) - and maybe capricious murder-suicides in particular are “demonstrations” intended to be “great stories” which wire service journalism will advertise far and wide.I’m not here to prove that that is so beyond a reasonable doubt - but what is true beyond peradventure is that journalism will not promote that thesis until it is conclusively proven - and probably not even then.
If just being an odd duck is grounds for being locked up, we are going to need a lot of asylums.
There is in place a mechanism to place your child into a restrictive setting if they meet the criteria. I did it to my eldest son, in Connecticut, in the past year. He is now 18, but it was very apparent at 16 that he was unstable, and becoming a danger himself and others.
Or did it remain in the trunk of his vehicle?
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