This piece in the WaPO about the neo-Nazi who shot his girlfriend’s parents is horrifying. I honestly feel bad for his mother, but once again, an unsecured weapon was in play.
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.
Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.
Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.
Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.
if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.
Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.
Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?
Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.
It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.
… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact
Republicans in disarray!
When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.
We are aware of all internet traditions.
Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.
Fuck these fucking interesting times.
The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.
No one could have predicted…
Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll
A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.
I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.
Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.
They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!
My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.
dedc79
This is surely a sign of trouble to come in the same way abuse of pets/animals is:
schrodingers_cat
I thought this was going to be a story of Afghan war veteran who had done two tours of duty, deported to Mexico. He was a permanent resident but convicted of non-violent drug related charges
schrodingers_cat
@dedc79: Its a definite tell, all other bigotries flow seamlessly from that, or so I have noticed in RW nutosphere here.
Elizabelle
Mean girl here, but justice would be this woman and her ex-husband living in cardboard boxes under the overpass, for the rest of their goddamned lives, for leaving a gun unsecured around a dangerously disturbed kid.
As should Nancy Lanza, if her son had not taken her out as his first victim.
This woman and her ex-husband bear a LOT of moral responsibility for the Fricker family murders. They left the gun laying around, and it was used for murder.
WRT the kid: I guess some people are just not meant for this world. Very sad story. I don’t know what you do in a case like this.
Except: don’t leave guns, matches, weapons around where a severely disturbed person can use them to injure himself or others.
I wish the Fricker surviving family would civil sue this anonymous mother into the poorhouse.
Betty Cracker
As a parent, I fully understand how strong the power of denial can be about our own special little snowflakes, and I can understand how that woman would delude herself about her son. But she knew he had significant mental health issues, and she left a gun lying around. It’s past time to start holding parents who let children access weapons accountable. The woman in that story should be criminally prosecuted if possible, as should the father of the boy in Maryland who recently killed his ex-girlfriend and himself. If there are no statutes on the books, we need to push for a change in the law so that people who are this negligent serve time in jail, not just pay a fine or be deemed to have “suffered enough.” Jail!
Ridnik Chrome
Elizabelle
From the WaPost:
schrodingers_cat
I love this media dichotomy, when the psychopath who went on a killing spree is white and Christian, they are mentally disturbed and a lone wolf but when a Muslim or a black person or an immigrant is the perpetrator, the entire community needs to pay a price and they are somehow on the hook.
BTW WTF is a lone wolf. Aren’t wolves pack animals?
LAO
@Betty Cracker: This USA Today article has an interesting breakdown of how different jurisdictions treat these situations.
Nicole
Ugh. The father left a gun unsecured in the house, with a son he knew was troubled. That’s some bullshit right there. That said, I really feel the talking point from gun control advocates has to be “guns in a house make your kids less safe.” Direct it at mothers, who are less likely to be caught up in the view of owning a gun as making them look tough (toxic masculinity is a thing that needs to be addressed, for a thousand and one reasons, but it was MADD, not DADD, since “real men” were supposed to be able drink and drive).
“Guns in a house make your kids less safe.” Rinse and repeat.
psycholinguist
We need to start charging people who buy guns and fail to take any due diligence in securing them. If I let a bunch of kids come to my house and drink, and they go out and kill somebody in a wreck driving home, I’m going to be charged. That should apply here, and every other time some idiot fails to properly secure their damn killing device.
Bobby Thomson
@Betty Cracker: I agree. Opening position should be a strict liability crime if a gun you own kills a child, with an affirmative defense that you kept the gun locked up or secured at a club. Aggravated if you were on notice that an immediate family member had dangerous propensities.
The Moar You Know
The kids is showing signs of major mental disorders and violence since second grade, and the parents keep a loaded gun in the home.
Can’t fix stupid.
Aardvark Cheeselog
Billions for SWAT teams, not one red cent for community mental health.
Patricia Kayden
Sounds like the Mother was in denial. She knew that he had mental issues since he was a child but still allowed him to have access to a gun. Sigh.
Droppy
We are still in the medieval phase of mental health treatment (it feels that way anyway.) I even think if Trump had a better diagnosis at a younger age (and if there were some way to treat narcissistic personality disorder) he wouldn’t be the awful human being he is today. But even given the limited possibilities, we make it so much worse by giving no resources over to treating mental illness. Even if you have decent insurance, just try getting regular, decent psychiatric care for a troubled teen or an over-27-year-old child on the autistic spectrum who is off your insurance. But let’s repeal obamacare because that will make all this better. I hate them all.
LAO
@psycholinguist: One of my brothers is a federal agent and it’s not a secret. Almost universally, when his kids make new friends, the parents ask (1) where he keeps his guns and (2) whether the weapons are secured. Neither my brother and SIL think this is an unreasonable request.
Aardvark Cheeselog
@schrodingers_cat:
A lone wolf is a sick, fucked up wolf.
Nicole
@Betty Cracker: Truth. Although let’s not let the dad off the hook since, according to the story, it was his gun. If he wasn’t living there, he had a responsibility to remove it.
The attempt to spin the story of Jaelynn Willey’s death as the school security officer saving the day pissed me off no end, even before it was made public that the kid killed himself. That kid wasn’t intending to mass murder students (as was clear from the type of weapon he brought in); he was intending to kill exactly two people- his ex-girlfriend and himself. He completely succeeded, regardless of whether it was his bullet or a school officer’s that actually did it.
Mike J
Every criminal had a mother, most of those mothers probably feel bad after the crime. If you’re a white middle class criminal WaPo will write about how troubled and misunderstood you are.
trollhattan
@Elizabelle: @Betty Cracker:
Yep and yep.
Innumerable childhood issues are unfixable despite the parents’ efforts, but to not address potentially dangerous components of the environment is negligence, endangering child, family and community. Not inoculating your child is negligence. Handing your unlicensed child the car keys is negligence. Leaving your weaponry in reach of your little sociopath is negligence.
Immanentize
@schrodingers_cat:
Yes, that is why lone wolves are dangerous.
Elizabelle
Finding out the kid’s parents left an unsecured gun around made me ballistic. This is a local story, and it’s horrible.
Also, FWIW, we had an issue, maybe 20 miles away from the Frickers’ home, and 3-4 years past, of a father who was a sheriff’s deputy shooting his own daughter as she snuck into the garage after being out without his knowledge. The daughter survived, and I bring this up only in the context of guns keeping family members safe. Uh huh.
trollhattan
@Elizabelle:
Clearly, it’s the fault of teacher’s unions. [eyeroll] Betsy DeVos is here with more on the solution….
Nicole
@The Moar You Know:
But we can fix uninformed. The NRA today = cigarette industry in the 20th Century. They are absolutely controlling the narrative about gun ownership. It’s up to all of us to give no quarter, and change the conversation to, “Choosing to own a gun makes you an irresponsible parent.”
Elizabelle
JR
Parents need to face criminal and civil liability. Full stop.
My wife has a policy where our children are not going to be allowed to play at friends’ houses with firearms in them.
I might take that a step further.
Frankensteinbeck
@schrodingers_cat:
Wolves are pack animals. When a wolf does live alone, they are usually adolescent males and legendarily violent, aggressive bastards. It’s the opposite of how wolves normally behave. Thus, ‘lone wolf’ for an anomalous human bad actor unconnected to a pack.
The Moar You Know
@Ridnik Chrome: Saw that too. Something bothered me about it and I just this second realized what it is.
The parents left that gun in the house hoping that kid would kill himself with it.
marcopolo
@Nicole: To add emphasis to your point: Guns in a house make everyone in that house less safe…period. Probably make the neighbors less safe as well. For example suicide success rates increase dramatically if there is a gun available. Gun accident deaths cannot occur if there isn’t a gun around. Guns can’t be stolen from houses where there are no guns. And so on and so forth.
guachi
The most dangerous gun is the one in your own home. I wish we had laws requiring gun insurance or liability for negligence caused by guns you own.
Gin & Tonic
I like how the mother said it was the kid’s father’s gun. But the kid’s father didn’t live in the house, so it wasn’t his gun, it was her gun. If her ex-husband had bought a new water heater 10 years ago, then moved out (and divorced?) 5 years ago, then the water heater broke last year, she wouldn’t say “my ex-husband’s water heater has broken.”
She should be charged with criminal negligence.
Aardvark Cheeselog
@Betty Cracker:
While I understand why you write this, just sending idiots to jail won’t do any fucking good. There needs to be somebody to call besides the SWAT team. When you call, this
should never, ever happen. Until that’s fixed, you can fill the jails with idiots and nothing will get better.
Roger Moore
@schrodingers_cat:
Wolves generally are pack animals. Their packs are usually family units* headed by the mother and father. Young wolves will frequently stay with their parents for a year or two after reaching adulthood; they help to raise their younger siblings**. When they get older, they start feeling restless and break off from the family pack to try to find a mate. Those adult wolves trying to found their own, new packs are “lone wolves”, and their behavior is very different from wolves living in established packs.
*There is apparently a lot of flawed dog psychology based around studying groups of wolves at zoos. Those zoo wolf “packs” were just random groups of wolves thrown together by the keepers rather than natural family groups, which is one of many reasons the observations don’t generalize to wild packs.
**Interestingly, crows, with which wolves are known to associate, have similar family dynamics.
Elizabelle
This is probably not fair use, but for those who can’t click on to the WaPost story:
I don’t know how much recovery is possible for the Adam Lanzas of the world, but it is crystal clear that you don’t allow them anywhere near guns, knives, anything that can be weaponized.
And I am sure the kid was devastated and his world was coming to an end, when the girlfriend’s parents demanded an end to the relationship.
This could have happened to a lot of families. I remember when my youngest sister drew a stalker (an older high schooler); he would call our home and hang up if any other family member (including my dad) came to the phone. We eventually heard he’d been killed in a car accident. Anyway, the calls stopped …
gvg
Supposedly the parents were estranged and that had been a stressor for the kid earlier. Seems odd the gun was there. Also mom seems to have gotten him treatment, it just didn’t work. thats the part we don’t talk about, not everything is fixable. Sounds like his mom is having trouble staying loving.
Note the mom says she would rather it was her that died than the other parents…..but she still has a daughter to live for. Also we have no clue what was going on that the girlfriend was telling him about her parents. She was going to the same school for troubled kids so I think it may have been even more of a mess than we know.
Obviously guns should be disposed of if you live with someone with issues, but he also took a hammer and a knife, which aren’t as easy to kill with but still indicate his intentions.
In the past we locked up people for mental illnesses that were just inconveinent, so we made laws trying to prevent that which is good but how do we do a good system for locking up the violently ill before they kill? Currently we expect family (who are amateurs ) deal with it until they can’t. If they don’t have family they end up shot or in regular jail. Really, how do we invent a fair system?
Kid sounds miserable too his whole life.
geg6
@Elizabelle:
I’m with the mean girl. ;-) I’m so sick of these people who take no responsibility for their kids and then come crying to the rest of us for sympathy when their horrible, spoiled kids do something like this.
And I’ve also lost my sympathy for the mental health arguments when it comes to guns. The asshole that killed my co-worker in the parking lot right outside my window would, I’m sure, be using that exact excuse to get sympathy for the murder he committed had he not done the right thing and shot himself in the head. He was an abusive, drunken, loud and proud Tea Party/Trump voting asshole their entire marriage and divorce and he would have played that up to the hilt, because that’s what he’d done to get away with the abuse all those years. At least his parents had the grace to stay away from her kids, parents and fiance in the aftermath and they did not even claim his body from the coroner. And they certainly didn’t go to the press and weep over their failures.
I’m over the whole thing.
Amir Khalid
@Elizabelle:
As I understand, the people most in danger from a gun in the home are the people who live there.
Emma
I have a friend who is a target shooter, as is her husband. Their guns are secured in a locked safe. Their kid clearly understands that she lays one finger on that safe and there will be major consequences. They also ask any family members/friends if they have guns and where do they keep them before they’ll allow their kid to visit. They have several family members they will not visit during holidays because they do not like the idea of alcohol and unsecured guns. They believe in background checks and closing the gun show loophole.
In their circle, they are considered radicals.
schrodingers_cat
@geg6: Me three. When it comes to making excuses for the perpetrators of these killing sprees, the double standards are astounding. I don’t remember anguished pieces by prestige media about the concern over the mental health of the perp, when he doesn’t belong to their demographic.
Betty Cracker
@LAO: Another heartbreaking article. It said prosecutors don’t believe charging parents who negligently allow children to access guns would work as a deterrent. Maybe that’s true. I had assumed the opposite — that if failure to lock guns in a safe were viewed as criminal negligence, people would get the damned message. But maybe I’m wrong. This quote was unsurprising:
Fucking sociopaths.
Elizabelle
@Aardvark Cheeselog: Yeah, the “too late in the day” sounds probable.
You may recall, also in Virginia, we had the case of Creigh Deeds’ son having a breakdown, and his father — a longtime Democratic state senator and former gubernatorial nominee (lost to Ferrari Bob McDonnell) — not being able to find a psychiatric bed despite numerous calls. (it finally turned out that at least five beds were available, but social services failed to find them, and there was no registry at the time.)
Anyhoo, young Deeds stabbed his father 13 times and shot himself to death. Creigh Deeds sued the state, but eventually dropped the case.
WaPost story from 2016: Va. Sen. Creigh Deeds sues the state, others for $6 million in son’s suicide
It’s the guns, though. Creigh Deeds survived his 13 stab wounds. Austin Deeds, and the Frickers, did not survive bullets.
Yes, mental illness and not enough (expensive!) services are a problem.
But it’s the guns.
schrodingers_cat
@Roger Moore: Many of these “lone wolfs” are just violently reenacting their group norms. Our president believes many of the things that the Austin bomber and this kid believe as do millions of Fox News and other RW outlet patrons. The current immigration crackdown is mainly the result of this paranoia.
trollhattan
@The Moar You Know:
Good insight. Agreed, as creepy as that scenario sounds. “Hey, fix the holes in the wall, replace the carpet, good to go.”
mainmata
I’m sorry but I now feel that anyone who has a documented history of serious mental illness should be automatically be part of a background check and denied gun purchase until a thorough mental evaluation has been done. This country is destroying its future to satisfy the atavistic lusts of the rightwing.
trollhattan
@Betty Cracker:
Our “blue” county keeps electing wingnut DAs who I suspect are protectors of the Holy Second in how they conduct their jobs. Current incumbent is a young woman who also heartily supports the death penalty. I think she’s a fucking ghoul, but maybe that’s just me.
Elizabelle
@Aardvark Cheeselog: Hmmmm. Now Virginia allegedly has an online registry of available psych beds. If it is available. (Per my WaPost link.)
So maybe the mom assumed they wouldn’t find one, or it was common knowledge there wasn’t one, but that was old conventional wisdom. I hope someone will follow up on that question.
Roger Moore
@marcopolo:
Family quarrels are much more likely to escalate to murder if there’s a gun available. Though in that case it’s quite possible the gun is owned by a domestic abuser who plans on using it that way and thus isn’t going to give it up.
mainmata
@Betty Cracker: 100% agree. Enough is enough. There is too little “personal responsibility” that goes with gun “rights” in this country as opposed to the pious and hypocritical intonation of personal responsibility about which the right lambastes the poor and working classes.
Betty Cracker
@Aardvark Cheeselog: I think part of the problem is that people (idiots) really do view weapons as freedom toys / penile extenders and honestly don’t comprehend the danger until some awful accident or crime happens. The reason I want such idiots to go to jail is to spread the message that failure to lock guns in a safe constitutes a degree of negligence so grave that it can send your ass to jail. Sort of like how drunk driving used to be be viewed as a tragic, random occurrence until perpetrators were prosecuted harshly.
nonynony
@Betty Cracker:
At this point I just assume that the NRA higher-ups actually want the outcomes they’re getting. They want kids to get murdered.
If it turned out that they were all members of some ancient Moloch cult that had figured out a new way to get sacrifices for their god, I would not actually be surprised.
The truth is even more terrible of course – they’re just selfish assholes who don’t care about the consequences of their actions.
Ruckus
@Aardvark Cheeselog:
The only way to stop a killer is with more guns.
This idiocy is the RWNJ standard answer. Regan started down this road in CA with his cutting back of any and all mental health because he and the other RWMJs didn’t want to pay for it and republicans have been touting this bullshit ever since. They don’t want a society, they specifically don’t want anyone but the conservative wealthy to have anything, any property, any life, they want anyone that doesn’t support their bullshit gone. By any means.
I’m starting to climb on VDE’s bandwagon. And not feeling bad about it.
Mike in DC
@Betty Cracker: Leaving a loaded gun–including those that don’t even have a safety switch–lying around unlocked and in plain view is the height of irresponsibility and anyone who does so should absolutely face serious consequences in the event something bad happens.
mainmata
@schrodingers_cat: In actual wolf society, the lone wolf is either a female driven out of the pack to find a new pack (to prevent inbreeding) or a male or female that doesn’t fit and ends up going alone living on smaller prey or carrion. I suspect it is the latter that gave rise to the original “lone wolf’ applied to humans.
geg6
@Betty Cracker:
Totally agree.
Would also love to see a requirement to have liability insurance for each gun and all homes with guns should have their homeowners insurance jacked up to the highest possible levels. And we have guns in our house. But we’re willing to pay (or get rid of most of them) to comply with the law. Neither of us measure ourselves by how many and what kinds of guns we have. And, to be clear, we only have hunting rifles and a small handgun. We use neither. I think the cricket bat we keep in the bedroom keeps us safer than the guns.
Ohio Mom
@Droppy: Is your 27 year old eligible for SSI? SSI gives you Medicaid, and allows you to work and earn money and not lose your Medicaid.
Or is he in that no man’s land of too high-fuctioni h for SSI but still not functional enough?
It is definitely hard out there for us autis parents.
bemused
I read the WAPO piece on new gun researchers joining the field to study the effects of our gun heavy country. Very encouraging. I know I’ve read that gun incidents lessened during the CPAC but I did not know that a Harvard physician and economic PHD student did a study that showed a 20% decline in injuries from firearms whenever thousands of gun owners gathered for NRA meetings. A stunning statistic but not surprised. The NRA and a small number of gun nuts owning arsenals of weapons have turned our country into a war zone.
MNGOP crackpot Rep. Mary Franson reposted a comment criticizing David Hogg calling him “Supreme Leader”. She then proceeded to post a quote by Hitler on indoctrination of the youth.
Ruckus
@Droppy:
We didn’t used to be at the point of medieval health care. We have regressed as a nation and a lot. That’s the conservative program, regression to shit. We are seeing the results of this bullshit experiment that conservatives have been pushing for ever but especially the last 50+ yrs. It isn’t working well at all, except for the uber wealthy conservatives who think it hasn’t gone far enough.
mainmata
@Frankensteinbeck: This is not actually accurate. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_wolf_(trait)
catclub
@Betty Cracker:
as in the stand your ground cases where the shooter still gets prosecuted, or the kid left in a car and dies cases, this law would be applied racially.
They would say for white people that they have suffered enough.
Ridnik Chrome
@The Moar You Know: I posted that quote because I honestly feel bad for that poor woman. Imagine being in a situation where you as a parent realize that your own child would be better off dead.
Jack the Second
I think if we started handing out at least small, but actual (not suspended) jail sentences to people who leave firearms unsecured that are later used for malice or employers who cover for shitbag employees like that president at the university where all those young women were molested, you could deter a lot of bad behavior. It doesn’t have to be much, 3 to 6 months, but if you’re a douchebag university president and you know a guy who got three months of real jail time, you aren’t covering for shit.
Roger Moore
@Aardvark Cheeselog:
This. For non-sociopaths, the terrible consequences of a gun getting in the wrong hands are enough reason to keep a gun properly locked up. Threatening to throw them in prison because of something bad being done with their gun won’t work as a deterrent because they believe it could never happen to them. Their toddler would never look in his parent’s night stand. Their teenager would never want to kill somebody. I think it’s still worth punishing them somehow, but “this could happen to you” PSAs are likely to have more practical benefit.
Gin & Tonic
@Ruckus: I happen to think the “deinstitutionalization” movement in mental health care came at least partially from a good place. The “state hospitals” that warehoused people with mental illnesses in the 50’s and 60’s were, no exaggeration, medieval. I recall a young TV guy in NYC in the early 70’s making quite a name for himself exposing some of that (and winning an Emmy for it, IIRC.) He later turned into a clown, but that doesn’t lessen the import of his work then.
gene108
@Nicole:
”
This was a theme in several T.V. shows aimed at kids, in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, such as “What’s Happening” and then that messaging stopped.
Betty Cracker
@catclub: I’m sure that’s true, and it sucks, but it’s not a good reason to let negligent gun owners off the hook. We should be addressing the gun carnage in this country AND reducing racial disparities in application of our laws. I don’t know what the demographics of gun owners are, but I suspect its mostly white people. I did read recently that only 60 percent or so of people who own guns and have children living at home keep their guns locked up. That’s outrageous.
Ruckus
@Aardvark Cheeselog:
This.
All the fucking thoughts and prayers don’t do shit after the fact. Thoughts and fucking prayers don’t stop the bullet in the first place. Cops prevent crime by being there in the first place, but they aren’t in the home to stop this type of thing from happening. The help this kid needed was BEFORE this happened. Every cop, swat team and tank in the world couldn’t have prevented this. Available mental health care might have. Not having a gun laying about would have.
Mary G
It is all horrifying, but a few things disturb me a lot. He called MLK “low IQ,” the same thing Twitler called Maxine Waters. Guess we know which websites the president has read.
The holes in the walls of his bedroom. Punching multiple holes makes a lot of noise. Why didn’t the mother know? Did she never even look in there? And WTF with the neighbor? She told his mom about the swastika in the grass, then she didn’t?
The mother is responsible and count me as another mean girl. I’d like to see her do time. Sounds like she had her head in the sand, hoping it would all go away.
The people I really feel bad for are the girlfriend and the sister. There may not be enough therapy in the world, but I hope they get a lot of it.
ETA: I see a lot of anger that these white psychos are labeled misunderstood, when a black kid like this is cad a vicious thug. The cops probably just would have shot him again.
feebog
@Jack the Second:
It’s happening in LA. We had two instances in two separate schools a few weeks ago where students were reported for threatening remarks. School administrators reported to LAPD, who investigated and made home safety checks. In both cases they found unsecured guns in the house. The parents have been charged and will be prosecuted.
SiubhanDuinne
@schrodingers_cat:
Yes, they are, and that’s exactly the point of the idiom. Here’s Wikipedia:
I expect other commenters have made this point as well; haven’t read through the thread yet.
trollhattan
@Betty Cracker:
Nawww, I heard that 90% of the guns and 95% of the gun murders are in Chicago. The rest of us need them in case Chicago’s border wall ever fails. Two time zones are not enough distance!
trollhattan
@feebog:
My kid’s HS has been in the news far too much lately. One supposed violence threat turned out to be from an ex GF spoofing a threat on a boy’s social media and the second, from a non-student kid who earned himself a visit from the cops.
None of the baby and child-rearing books included a chapter on this. I want a refund.
Ruckus
@gvg:
It can’t be done. No system that protects some will be fair to all. But a society has to look at this from how do we protect the innocent, how do we help those that need it so they aren’t an issue, especially a deadly issue for others. This kid killed her parents. As you said this girl was at the same school so had some sort of issues. Now she has no one to look out for her.
A system that protects society at large will place some restrictions on someone. Not letting drunks drive protects us all. We do that by making it harder and harder for drunks to get behind the wheel. It doesn’t always work of course but we at least make an effort. What effort do/did we make in this case and the ones that don’t make the WaPo? After the fact does nothing to fix the problem, like all societal problems. The problems are bigger than any one individual, they have to be addressed as a societal issue. But we aren’t allowed to do that with guns. Hopefully we’ve reached a tipping point and the HS kids will motivate enough of us.
Raven Onthill
@Elizabelle: “There are no firearms accidents.” — Jim Wright
gene108
@gvg:
The “until they can’t ” part is pretty big. We don’t put enough resources into mental health. At some point the option is getting a person on SSI, a Section 8 housing voucher, and hope they remain stable. But kids don’t qualify for SSI or a housing voucher or access to a group home. They are the family’s responsibility, until they are 18.
Ruckus
Don’t forget he had a hammer and a knife. The kid could have done a lot of damage even without the gun. Sure more difficult, sure a lot less likely but damage is real possible in this case even without the gun. No, there shouldn’t have been a gun in the house, but the real issue is that this kid has been very troubled for a decade and hasn’t been able to get enough help. Maybe he was unreachable, maybe for societies sake he needs/needed to be not out in it, would that have been fair for him? We lock up criminals who commit crimes for two reasons, punishment and to hopefully change their behavior for the better. It rarely works as well as we’d like in the case of violent crime but we are supposed to balance out the cost to society and to the individual. Maybe there is a way to help people like this kid and not be in jail. But we massively fail at this as a society right now.
MattF
So, his father was gone– but his father’s gun was in his mother’s house, unsecured. Sigh.
There’s a saying (Chekhov, I think):
True in real life too.
Aimai
@Elizabelle: she did not notice he was punching holes in the wall? I agree. I get the denial but that was culpable.
Mnemosyne
@mainmata:
So, basically, “lone wolves” are animals that leave or are driven out of the pack so they can find a mate and form their own pack. Maybe they all just need access to Tinder or eHarmony. ?
Mnemosyne
Also, I’ll bring up this equally depressing article from last year:
”The Online Radicalization We’re Not Talking About”
This kid didn’t “just happen” to stumble onto Nazi websites. There’s a whole online community, and they recruit.
Mnemosyne
@Mnemosyne:
Please to be released from moderation? I’m not sure what I did.
Shana
@Mary G: One small nit about your comment. An article in the Post shortly after the shooting talked about the swastika in the grass incident and said that several members of the HOA had discussed it and a representative of the HOA was going to talk to the parents but didn’t. I no longer remember if a smaller group of HOA officers had later decided against talking to the parents or if the member had chickened out.
Ruckus
@Betty Cracker:
Change the crime. Use drunk driving. Yes I know it is different. Or is it really?
We don’t say that a drunk can’t have liquor in their house, even though not drinking would at least solve the drunk driving issue. From home. We attempt somewhat to remove access to them drunk driving, say with a breathalyzer interlock. And still it doesn’t always work. You could start the car sober and then drink and drive till hammered. And of course liquor is widely available.
But drunk driving deaths are down.
I remember a guy we hired, long, long ago, from the UK. He got busted for DUI and was amazed at the cost for the lawyer, court, fines. He admitted that the laws in the UK on drinking and driving had kept him from this at all there, his understanding was we were quite lax in that area. He learned the hard way with nothing but monetary consequences. But here guns are just different, we don’t have an anti gun lobby, like MADD, of course we do have a pro gun lobby, looking to be funded in part by Russia, to keep up the death rate.
Mnemosyne
@Mary G:
I think the mom thought he was going to kill her and was desperately trying to avoid doing anything that would trigger him to do that.
She made really, really bad choices and probably needs a couple of weeks alone in a room with bars on the windows to think about what she did, but she sounds like she felt really trapped.
And it sounds like she has a second, younger kid? Where the hell was the dad in all of this? Was he insisting that the son was fine and it was all her fault?
JR
@Ruckus: truth be told we lock up criminals for one reason: to protect society as a whole. The outcome for criminals is not the overarching concern of the justice system save for how recidivism affects the main point.
M
Uncle Cosmo
O/T but will there be an open thread soon? I have an openthreadly RFI I’d like to post.
I just now heard about a recent murder-suicide in a well-to-do area near Annapolis. Apparently husband slit wife’s throat & then blew his brains out. I heard about this from the mother of one of the next-door neighbors who I’ve known since HS – her son saw the woman’s body & her daughter-in-law was watching as the man took his own life. Jeezus.
ETA: 11-year-old left orphaned. Jeezus ^ 2.
bemused senior
My sped preschool teacher daughter had her school on lock down yesterday, because a “homeless person” (analysis by appearance) went into a nearby Big 5 Sporting Goods and tried to buy a gun “to shoot up a school” over the weekend. This person was on the loose for a couple of days, and the police didn’t consider it a “credible threat”, but parents and school admins had a different view. They did eventually apprehend the guy. Haven’t heard what happened next. Lock down means doors and gates locked, curtains drawn.
catclub
OT:
I think I will answer that I am not one. Maybe there will also be a line where I can say if I am Spartacus.
Ruckus
@nonynony:
Think about it from a political perspective.
If the NRA is being funded, even in part by Russia, the question has to be why. What do they expect to gain? Funding the NRA likely wouldn’t get them any money laundering so why? Well think about them also doing all the cyberfucking with our elections. Why? To build and stir discord. Vlad knows that the only war he can participate in with us will wipe Russia off the map, along with the rest of the world. So that leaves unconventional warfare. Cyberfucking, pushing guns that we use to kill each other, saving him the trouble……… It is evilly brilliant, it gets him what he wants, as long as he doesn’t get caught no one even knows. Of course he backed the worst person in the world at keeping on the down low.
raven
@Uncle Cosmo: All threads are open threads.
raven
@bemused senior: Last year we were walking home on our morning walk. We cross a street that is close to the school and there was a homeless dude with a sign and he had a baseball bat leaning up against a tree next to him. I called the cops and they rousted him.
Mnemosyne
@raven:
Except Dave’s healthcare threads, but I think we get a little nervous that non-jackals will show up on those and not understand why we’re not talking about the thread topic.
raven
@Mnemosyne: True dat. . .
Aimai
@Roger Moore: thats wrong. People leave guns unsecured because they are not good judges of risk. Not because of sime moral or psychological deficit. You could absolutely reduce gun deaths significantly by changing the law and making it illegal and dangerous to the owner to have an unsecured gun.
Ruckus
@Gin & Tonic:
I agree 100%
But as I wrote above nothing we can do will be fair to everyone. Do we go all Stepford all the time or do we at least try to have a modicum of control? We had too much, now we have too little. We have to define society and what we think is reasonable and build around that. Too little mental heath, general healthcare, education and guns is not a reasonable position. The problem is that all of this fail is because of taxes. It takes society at large to fix these thing, IOW government, and to do that takes taxes. Conservatives don’t give a shit about society at large but they do care massively about taxes. It’s why we are where we are as a country. It’s why the fist and only thing this administration/congress has done is to give tax breaks to the uber wealthy. It is the only thing they will attempt to accomplish, reducing taxes on their owners.
eclare
@Uncle Cosmo: OMG. How tragic.
Yutsano
@Aimai:
Mnemosyne
@Aimai:
I think we could compare it to seat belt laws. People bitched and moaned about being “forced” to wear their seat belts, but they started complying once tickets were handed out and it cost them actual money.
People who don’t keep their guns secured should be fined at a minimum if that gun gets used, or even if it falls to the ground and goes off accidentally. Higher penalties for worse injuries or deaths. Make them calculate what they would prefer to spend money on — a fine or a gun safe.
Ohio Mom
@Gin & Tonic: An overlooked force propelling the deinstititionalizing effort was the development of psychotropic drugs. For the first time, it looked like there were effective medications that could control symptoms enough that it would be safe to let people out in the community.
Turned out that was overly optimistic. Some people were helped enough by meds and could manage on the outside, but not everyone was. That we never followed through in developing the needed community support system didn’t help.
An overlooked factor in the gun discussion is that the NRA pushed for a federal law prohibiting government-funded research on gun safety years ago.
You think of all the ways cars and driving have been made safer over the years because of research and regulation (remember when there was no such things as seat belts?), and then try to imagine how guns could have been made safer.
For starters, we’d have very specialized safety locks, and probably a much better understanding of how to identify potential mass shooters.
Knowledge is power and the NRA has ironically left us defenseless.
afanasia
Question re: article – what is “ironic” about anti-Semitic memes?
Gelfling 545
@geg6: In reading the mother’s responses, I don’t feel at all sure that the gun was left unsecured in a Freudian sort of way.
efgoldman
Never owned or lived with a firearm, never want to.
I caouln’t see leaving the car keys on a toddler’s nightstand, either.
Mnemosyne
@afanasia:
There is a group of idiot white boys — let’s call them “4-Channers” in honor of the online swamp where they hang out — who insist that they’re not really white supremacists, they just push white supremacist memes and imagery to piss people off. They claim that because they’re not white supremacists in their hearts, they’re only doing that stuff “ironically.”
However, I think Kurt Vonnegut had it right:
Ruckus
@JR:
You are correct.
I should have been clearer. We are supposed to lock up………
Look at time served in a lot of European countries for the same crime as here. It’s not 25 or 30 yrs as it would be here. Is their recidivism rate higher? Doesn’t seem to be. We are still beset a lot by our puritanical beginnings in this country that punishment is always the answer. It may be necessary for crimes but it seems to do little to stop more crime.
TenguPhule
@schrodingers_cat:
Male wolves rejected by the pack for one reason or another.
scav
Wonder if the usual media suspects will leap with glad cries upon this — Former MSU dean charged with sex crimes — rather more enthusiasically than they otherwise would. I mean, they don’t really wanna encourage those whiney wimminz, certainly not too soon after the last bout (they really aren’t the right sort of economically anxious) but at least this topic doesn’t involve the holy trinity of Guns, Russians or Republicans.
Ignoring the media angle, it is a horrifying story in its own right and I suppose rather encouraging in that certain mills are continuing to grind and to grind exceeding small.
efgoldman
@Mnemosyne:
Middle school and slightly older boys offend loudly and purposefully in various ways. These particular adolescents have chosen very badly. Can’t beat it out of them, but some adults, somewhere should intervene.
Interrobang
Call me a reprehensible person if you want, but part of me really wants to say this:
Dear well-intentioned white Yuppie parents of the world, including this guy’s:
Why didn’t you spend the time, energy, and money you spent on taking the kid to Guam (fucking Guam?!) and saxophone lessons into getting him into inpatient psychiatric care when he was young, before all this turned into a huge, unfixable problem? If I’ve ever seen a kid who needed to be on a ward where people will take good care of him — but also make sure he takes his meds and learns to behave like regular folks, this is it.
This is the kind of shit that “institutionalization is always bad” thinking leads to. I’m normally not a huge fan of carceral solutions (although it seems to me that the high-security residential school approach used for high-risk juveniles in the UK is a great model), but some people (like this guy, and the guy who stabbed my great-aunt 90 times with a pair of scissors) need to be kept away from society until we can be sure they’re safe to be around other people.
Mnemosyne
@efgoldman:
My dad always had guns while I was growing up — locked in a separate room to which he had the only key, and the guns only came out of that room when he was taking them out to the range for target practice or on a hunting trip. As soon as he got back, they went right back into that locked room.
When we moved out of that house years later, we were all shocked that he also had a handgun in the bedroom — locked in a box that was then locked inside a safe in the closet.
He got sloppier as his health declined in later years, but there were no kids in the house by then, and he would make sure everything was put away in the gun safe before the (older, not toddler) grandkids came by.
Mnemosyne
@TenguPhule:
According to Wikipedia, it’s often female wolves, too, and eventually they find each other and form new packs.
Turns out biologists weren’t as good as identifying the sex of the wolves they were studying in the wild as they thought they were.
? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?
@schrodingers_cat:
Would you still feel the same way if there were no double standards in how media cover these shooters?
TenguPhule
@efgoldman:
Has this hypothesis been tested enough?
TenguPhule
@Mnemosyne: Pack predators are more receptive to new females then they are to new males. Nature is not kind.
TenguPhule
In today’s “Are you fucking kidding me?!” news.
Donald Trump now wants the military to build and pay for his Border Wall with Mexico.
/Nothing matters anymore.
Ruckus
@Interrobang:
You are right.
But. How do we make sure that the system is not misused, that people that don’t truly need to be housed are not? Where is the line? Yes truly unhealthy people are fairly obvious but what about the marginal ones? Society failed them 40+ yrs ago and then went too far in the other direction. And now we house them in prisons after they do the thing we feared in the first place. I was involved 40 yrs ago in the mental healthcare field as a counselor and we all recognized that the answer then was not workable, and it’s only gotten worse over time.
Mnemosyne
@Interrobang:
One of my nephews was going down a very bad road in high school: pretty severe ADHD and mild bipolar disorder, smoking too much pot, refusing to go to school, starting to shove his grandfather around when he got mad (you know, just like he’d seen his abusive father do with his mother).
Luckily, the school district was able to recommend a good psychiatric boarding school in Montana that had both in-patient treatment and classes to get him back up to speed academically. The whole family got together to talk him into it (one of his maternal great-uncles had gone to a similar school in the 1960s) and he ended up doing really well there — not only did he get on the honor roll, he caught up with his credits and graduated on time.
BUT the family was very, very lucky that they lived in a small upscale city that had the funding to let him do this (the tuition was subsidized by the school district). And he was very lucky that this was an actual school/treatment facility and not one of those bullshit “boot camps” where people send their mentally ill kids when they don’t want to admit their kid is mentally ill. And it helped that he was having major issues, but he always had friends and wasn’t truly disturbed like the kid in the story.
So our family pretty much lucked out, and we know it.
TenguPhule
@Ruckus: Do we error on the side of the society or the individual?
Every system faces that question.
Mnemosyne
@TenguPhule:
Turns out that wolf “packs” are actually family groups, and the “alpha male” and “alpha female” are the parents of the rest of the pack. Genetic testing has proven this.
That’s why wolf pack members leave or are driven out — to avoid too much inbreeding and force them to form their own families.
Most of what you think you know about wolves and how wolf packs work is wrong.
TenguPhule
@Mnemosyne:
I don’t make the origins of the sayings, I just repeat what I’ve read.
Cheryl from Maryland
HuffPost published a different take on the family — especially that the mother posted images on Facebook of her son at a shooting range.
Here’s a link to the article.
schrodingers_cat
@? ?? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ? ?: I wish everyone was treated like a human being irrespective of their gender, national origin, religion, ethnicity etc.
Mnemosyne
@Cheryl from Maryland:
Yeah, not very shocked that Mom was, at best, casually racist. That would help explain why she wouldn’t think her son’s descent into Nazism was something to worry about until it was too late.
eric U.
I have been diagnosed with depression, and I’m pretty convinced it’s not really correct. But screw it, it would be better if people like me didn’t have guns. I could see a bolt action long rifle for hunting, maybe. My daughter suffers from bipolar disorder, and she really needs to be kept away from guns. The red flag laws that take guns from people who might use them need to extend to the whole household.
? Martin
@Interrobang:
A lot of the “institutionalization is always bad” thinking comes from people that have witnessed the institutions. A few months ago my daughter spent 3 days in one of the best rated ones here in CA, and within hours we regretted the situation. It was horrible and counterproductive.
That doesn’t mean that it needs to be that way, but that’s how it actually is now, and that reality does shape the conversation.
schrodingers_cat
@Mnemosyne: That’s why I don’t buy this lone wolf hypothesis. These individuals are absorbing the hate and paranoia from the society around them. They are just taking the hate to its logical conclusion. When are radio and TV hatemongers who fuel this hatred be held accountable, like radicalizing imams are?
Mnemosyne
@eric U.:
Okay, totally random and out of the blue question: have you ever been tested for ADHD? There’s a specific type of depression that turns out to be tied in with undiagnosed ADHD — the stress of trying to cope with it triggers a situational depression. This may be worth talking to your psychiatrist about (and if you havent been evaluated by a psychiatrist, make an appointment).
Adult ADHD is really under-diagnosed, so it’s worth getting a second opinion.
afanasia
@Mnemosyne: Thank you. How pitiful.
Gex
“She said white supremacist ideology, which emphasizes that whites are superior to non-whites, is abhorrent to the family and thinks the teen might have been exposed to such ideas online.”
Here’s what I’ve been saying. You can’t just not teach your kids to be racist. You have to actively teach them to be anti-racist.
Refraining from teaching them racist things is literally doing nothing. Sure, it’s better than teaching them to be racist. But it leaves a void that Internet is more than willing to fill. Teach anti-racism. It will inoculate your kids better against alt-right recruiting.
Mnemosyne
@Gex:
Take a look at the article I linked to in my comment at #80. Young white men are being targeted and recruited by white supremacists online, and most white parents’ bullshit attempts to stay “neutral” (ie quietly racist without using bad words in front of the kids) only manages to set them up for it.
When I was in junior high in the early 80s, we actually got anti-Nazi training in school. We learned about the concentration camps and watched “The Wave.” And this was in a public school.
Julia Grey
One huge problem in trying to create policy for situations in which mental health and its treatment figure prominently is that mental health treatment often doesn’t work.
We’re sitting around talking about this kid not getting “the treatment he needed,” and waving aside the fact that even the savviest mental health professionals couldn’t tell you what that needed treatment would be, or how successful it might be in drawing him out of his nightmare world.
Mental illness is a tough nut to crack and we have to stop pretending that we currently have enough knowledge to “fix” kids like this if we could just get him a psychiatric bed.
Mnemosyne
@Julia Grey:
Let’s say the ugly truth that is going to make some people really pissed at me: it’s possible that this kid needed to be someplace where he couldn’t hurt other people rather than being at home.
ohthatguy
So he had a mother and killed people? We should ban mothers