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Maine's mass shooter found dead
(ghostarchive.org)
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this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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He got all the help anyone could give him. We simply can't cure "I'm hearing voices and want to kill people" in a couple of weeks.
What we can do is ensure that it's not cheaper, faster and easier to go on a killing spree instead of recovering.
But that might impact the profits of the gun lobby, so they insist we instead cure every single person of every single mental health problem before they kill people with their legal guns.
It's possible for both things to be valid. I'm not American so the whole owning guns thing is weird to me anyway but surely the bare minimum is banning weapons that are expressly made for killing humans, like hand guns and assault weapons.
But alongside that, it's a fact that this guy did not get the help he needed, certainly not all the help anyone could give him. Two weeks on a ward is nowhere near enough time to treat someone in acute psychosis.
Literally all guns are made for killing, that's their primary purpose. There are tons of gun owners that don't use it for that purpose though. IMO we should work on mental health reform (and reforming other things) so people don't want to go out and commit mass murders. Of course, there's always going to be the unhelpable people but you can at least get rid of about 75% of them.
As I understand it, the primary purpose of some guns is not for killing humans - hunting rifles etc - but for those that are, the bare minimum of a total ban seems proportionate.
Do people not think that these guys will choose another gun if they ban all assault rifles? Semi-auto handguns are a thing. Also Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK with a bolt-action rifle.
That's why I said 'bare minimum' - as I said elsewhere, I'm not American so the whole owning guns thing is fucking weird to me anyway, I think the US would be much better off totally banning all guns but as that's very unlikely to happen, banning all guns created with the express intent of shooting humans seems logical.
The thing is, some people need guns. The US is so vast that North Dakota is completely different from New Jersey. In North Dakota, you could be living on a 50 square mile cattle ranch, and you have to protect hundreds or thousands of cattle from predators. If a pack of wolves jumps your fences and starts to attack your cattle, what are you going to do without a gun to protect them? Yell at the wolves? Use a bow and arrow? Those predators are literally destroying your livelihood. The cops, game warden, or Department of Fish and Wildlife aren't going to come to your rescue. You're on your own.
What if you live in Alaska out in the wilderness and a 600 pound Kodiak bear shows up on your property looking for food? Are you going to let it destroy your car, food supply and possibly harm your family?
People in these areas "live off the land", they fish, they farm and they hunt wild game to stay alive. They don't go to supermarkets and pick up packaged food and bring it home, they slaughter and prepare it themselves or else they starve. Guns are a necessity for them, using anything else isn't efficient.
In New Jersey, even in the most rural places, you only 5-10 miles or so from civilization. In more populated areas people feel that they need guns for protection from other people because the police forces largely suck in this country. If someone breaks into your house, it could take the cops 10 minutes to get to you. Are you supposed to let them do what they want while you're waiting for the cops or do you draw down on them as soon as they break in and say "GTFO or die"?
My parents live in a larger city in South Jersey with a few acres of land (3 houses in a row), my dad owns a few guns and is known in the neighborhood to go outside at night if he hears something unusual with a pistol stating "come out and get shot or get the fuck out of here." A few years ago about 5 houses on our street were broken into, they hit houses on either side of my parents three houses, but didn't touch any of the three they own. I wonder why... 😉
These are real things people have to worry about here. Europeans (and others outside of the US) simply don't realize how gigantic and diverse the US is. Watch Yellowstone if you want a sense of what it's like living out in the rural Midwest, or Life Below Zero which is a reality TV show about people living in or below the Arctic Circle.
The problem is that you can't say "only people that live in the wilderness can have guns" because it's written into our constitution that we can own guns (well, technically, it says we have a right to form a militia, but I digress...) and that isn't easy to change. It's a big problem without an easy solution.
No, it's not nearly enough time. But it's also far more time than it takes to buy a semi-automatic weapon in America.
The help he received is the limit of what any healthcare system, anywhere in the world could have given him.
The only mental healthcare system that would make America's gun laws safe is one that involuntarily comitted people for the rest of their lives, purely because they weren't healthy enough to sell guns to.
If by 'limit' you mean 'bare minimum' then I agree. Because it definitely is not the amount of help he would've received in some other countries. Two weeks would barely be enough time for an assessment to take place in some countries, let alone treatment.
As for your other points, I agree. I don't see why American's think owning a gun is in any way a good or positive or useful thing (unless you're a farmer or similar). But, if a countries leading cause of child death is guns and that country still does nothing about guns I really don't know what it would take to make change happen.
There was only a few months between him receiving emergency mental healthcare because he'd been hearing voices and him killing as many people as he could with a legal firearm.
That is not enough time for any doctor, in any country, with any form of treatment and any known medication, to have made significant progress.
This was not the fault of doctors.
I don't know enough about how the medical system works in the US to say who's fault it was he wasn't treated appropriately and neither do I know what his exact mental state was upon release. All I'm saying is that two weeks on a ward is barely enough time to assess someone who's in the grip of acute psychosis, let alone begin treating them.
I don't know what your experience is with psychosis (I have schizophrenia) but it very often is not something that is ever going to be 'cured' in that you go to a ward, they give you a handful of meds and two weeks later boom you're safe (and by safe I mean no danger to yourself, the vast majority of people with psychosis are not violent). It can take years to get to a stage where you feel stable.
This guy should not have been discharged after two weeks. And that is not particular to him - I can't think of any situation where any person with acute psychosis should be discharged from a ward after only 2 weeks. It's simply not enough time to treat someone.
Is it the discharging clinician's fault? Or the fault of the mental health system (or lack thereof) in the US? Or inadequacies in both? I don't know, I don't know how the system works over there. But that guy should not have been discharged.
Guns aren't the problem, it's the people that are the problem. Guns just make it easier for them. I'm all for stricter gun control laws federally but there are so many other people that need mental help and focusing on gun control doesn't help them.
Also you can stop the "I'm hearing voices and want kill people" in a few weeks, we do it all the time with medication, the problem is administering said medication because you can't force someone to take it.
The number of people who support gun control but oppose socialised healthcare is virtually zero.
Voting Republican ensures they get no help before they decide to become domestic terrorists but the moment they decide to buy a gun and kill as many people as possible, Republicans have their back.