Guns and Crazy

We’ve passed the first anniversary of the Newtown school massacre. In this past year investigators have learned that Adam Lanza was not just bit odd or withdrawn. He was seriously warped and putting out flashing 90-foot neon signs that he was potentially dangerous. His mother kept buying him guns because, in her mind, an interest in shooting was the only “normal” thing about him.

I will say one thing in Nancy Lanza’s defense, which is that the United States health care system does not offer enough for people with severe psychiatric disease who need long-term, closely monitored care. That’s mostly because there’s no way to wring a profit out of the seriously crazy. Even if you have money and good insurance, sometimes the medical-care infrastructure you need just isn’t there.

10 thoughts on “Guns and Crazy

  1. WTF?!?!?!?!?!
    There’s a computer game called “School Shooting?”
    Satan needs another circle of Hell.

  2. CUND Gulag – It’s a joke. You liberals have no sense of humor. The author, along with the guy who came up with the paper shooting target of a silhouette of a hoodie and a guy with a can of juice in one hand and Skittles in the other, should be waterboarded til they laugh. Cause it’s all soooooo funny.

  3. You know, if guns had to be registered and insured like automobiles, there would have been lots of opportunities to spot some red flags. Probably with insurance more than registration, because military style weapons would obviously carry higher premiums. And then of course the insurer might notice at some point that they’re insuring a rather large arsenal, which would make me nervous if I sold gun insurance.

  4. there’s no way to wring a profit out of the seriously crazy

    Which is what happens when every last aspect of American life is forked over to the Blessed and All-Powerful Free Market.

    The linked piece is terribly sad, but does the best job I’ve seen of summarizing what the author calls Adam and Nancy Lanza’s “folie a deux.”

  5. ” Probably with insurance more than registration, because military style weapons would obviously carry higher premiums.” I don’t why insurance companies don’t jack up the rates based on having a gun permit. It’s a known, significant risk factor.

    • uncledad — unreal. The first thing I thought when I saw it was “Photoshop.”

      As for copyright infringement — if the stock photo that obviously was used as the flag was royalty free and he paid the download for its use, then there’s no infringement, I don’t think. It wouldn’t necessarily be plagiarism if he didn’t copy the entire graphic wholesale. However, some fool has bid almost $100,000 on a paint-by-numbers job.

  6. Interesting thing about the long term mentally unstable – the problem came about during the Reagan years, as I understand it.

    Liberals agreed that it wasn’t fair that someone who was weird but harmless was locked up long term. And conservatives agreed that we shouldn’t spend money locking up the weird but harmless. So it was agreed, stop caring for the long term mentally ill.

    Is this the whole story? I’m sure it’s not. But it speaks very poorly for our compassion as a nation that the biggest long term treatment facility for people who are mentally ill is the local (or state, or federal) lockup.

    Worst part (IMO) is that psychiatric drugs are a mixture of confusing and awful (and yeah, sometimes wonderfully beneficial, but even the beneficial can be confusing on the way to beneficial) that require care and monitoring and compassion to use correctly, but what a person is most likely to get (without good health insurance and a good social support structure) is a court-ordered shot of X_Antipsychotic in their butt every N days, with cops ready to bring them in if they forget (or if the side effects are intolerable to them).

    • Liberals agreed that it wasn’t fair that someone who was weird but harmless was locked up long term. And conservatives agreed that we shouldn’t spend money locking up the weird but harmless. So it was agreed, stop caring for the long term mentally ill.

      No, that isn’t what happened at all. You are way off base. Here is the story: It came to everyone’s attention that many big state-run psychiatric hospitals had become pretty nasty places, where the seriously ill were being warehoused but not well cared for. Hospitals were underfunded and understaffed, and often the only treatment patients got was being medicated to keep them docile. Here’s a New York Times article from 1981 that explains what was going on.

      Note that this situation wasn’t something that had just started to happen in the 1980s. I doubt there was ever a time that the seriously mentally ill could receive adequate and compassionate treatment from the U.S. medical system, and the private for-profit part of the system never provided much for severe mental illness, so it was state hospitals or nothing for most patients. The only advantage of the old days was that a person who had become dangerous could be committed easily enough, and then they were at least locked up somewhere and out of the way. Unfortunately people abused this system by getting people committed who didn’t need to be hospitalized but were inconvenient in other ways.

      Anyway, by the early 1980s a consensus had emerged from the psychiatrists that most of the patients in the big hospitals would benefit from being moved out of the big hospitals and into smaller facilities and group homes closer to their families, and some states started to do that. But by then the tax-cutting Reganomics mania had taken hold, and the big hospitals closed before there were new facilities to replace them.

      Please get your story straight. Thanks much.

  7. maha’s right, LHW, that’s how I remember it, too.

    And then the same people who were for closing down the mental facilities without building the smaller ones, were the same ones bitching about the homeless in the streets of our cities and towns – many of whom were mental patients who had been released.

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