Posted on 04/05/2013 1:05:05 PM PDT by Malone LaVeigh
In a revelation that may have Colorado voters rethinking their state’s push on gun control, court documents revealed that the mass shooting in Aurora that killed 12 and injured 70 more could have been prevented by law enforcement. The psychiatrist for suspect, James Holmes, had warned campus police that Holmes was dangerous and homicidal a month before the shooting took place. Lynne Fenton even told the police that Holmes had begun to stalk and threaten her, and yet no action was apparently taken:
(Excerpt) Read more at hotair.com ...
This will be buried.
The Governor?
Senators?
Representatives?
Most of them are pretty well insulated because the next election is in 2014. That is plenty of time for them to cook up a reason for the low information voter (Now the majority in Calirado) to blame anyone and everyone except the ruling majority.
Nonsense. All they could have done was question him. If he acted weird enough possibly commit him for a limited time for observation.
Then he's back out and really ticked off.
How exactly is this an improvement?
All of these "prevent mass shootings by locking up the nuts" ideas would probably require warehousing thousands or tens of thousands of odd people who have committed no crimes in order to catch the one mass killer.
They're the pro-gun side equivalent of gun control. A theoretically simple solution to a complex problem that just will not work.
Guess it did not fit the AGENDA desired.
Both Holmes and Ebel should not have been on the streets and the only thing that would have kept them from killing was getting them off the streets. And it was government screw-ups and failures to act that put them out there.
“Police have testified to having no contact with Holmes before the shooting. Why exactly was that? The complaint/warning from Fenton should have prompted police to make sure Holmes wasn’t a threat to Fenton, at the very least. Had they performed that standard follow-up — and remember, this was a mental health professional telling the police that her patient was both homicidal and threatening her specifically — the police might well have had Holmes in custody long before the shooting.”
Law enforcement is reactive. To get arrested before committing a crime is almost unheard of. There are special stalker statutes, but that’s the exception. Remember the movie The Minority Report? If I recall, that was about a police unit that arrested murderers before they committed murder. Do we want that? We do have something in Florida called The Baker Act. Any official can arrest you if they judge you are a threat to yourself or others. But then the state has to take care of you; which is expensive. So it’s not often used. You have to really be nutso to get Baker Acted. Incarceration usually lasts 2 weeks. Two weeks would not have deterred this assailant.
Even if the doctor had a signed “I’m-gonna-kill-you” note, chances are they would have done nothing.
I don't know, maybe a bit of an overstatement? Modern medicine / psychiatry is pretty good at distinguishing between the odd and the dangerous. The problem is taking the dangerous off the streets before they act. Don't know that society would require the odd to be locked up, too -- we're all odd in our own way(s). Might not be many folks at liberty if we did that! 8~)
Not if we don’t let them bury it!
I maintain the only answer to all this is to ban guns from being owned by liberals.
Everyone wins. They don’t want them. We don’t have to have any conservatives murdered in cold blood by mass-murdering homicidal liberals.
Seems simple enough to me.
Pardon my cynicism when I see articles such as the one posted. Doesn't it suggest that psychiatrists should have the final word on who is permitted to own a firearm? Doesn't it suggest a psychiatric examination as a precondition for gun ownership? Who is to design, administer and record such tests?
Of course, if one patron had been armed, it is possible that a few grains of well placed lead would have restored mental balance to the shooter.
Amen.
I don't pretend to know the answers to the dilemma this kind of thing puts doctors in, or how to reconcile it with RKBA (which I'm very firmly committed to) and other civil liberties that we all treasure. It's perplexing. I only posted that fact because it came to my mind when I read the article.
The police were alerted by a health care professional that the kid was dangerous. Yes, all they could have done was to question him, it reflects the tendency of cops not to intervene until a crime actually happens. That’s because their bosses put little stress on prevention.
How many “odd” people do you have to sift through in order to find the “dangerous” ones? What level of reliability is there in psychiatric diagnosis? How many false negative and false positives are there?
Do we really want to give this much power to psychiatric professionals, many of whom believe conservatives, especially people who like guns, are by definition mentally ill, dangerously so?
What we have here is a case of severe hindsightitis. Like the morons that claimed 911 or Pearl Harbor could have been prevented. Which is of course true, had intelligence analysts lined up half a dozen of the many thousands of snippets of information coming through and drawn the appropriate conclusions.
But in real life, do you have any idea how many “odd” people the cops deal with? About the loud uproar that would follow from “human rights activists” if they started rounding up all who don’t “fit in?”
The lady in Colorado, however, also felt she was in danger and so in this case, there was no dilemma.
What should they do? You would perhaps prefer the cops institute a "pre-crime program?"
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