General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Adam Lanza was crazy. Nancy Lanza was crazy. [View all]_Liann_
(377 posts)The mental health bar to lifetime gun possession is exactly what we need to focus on because congress is logjammed.
As the NRA-GOP keeps saying we need to ENFORCE EXISTING GUN CONTROL LAWS.
Any judge in the country can ban gun possession case by case, bad man by bad man, using the laws that we already have. No new laws need to try to slide past filibusters in the senate or the NRA-GOP majority in the house. We just need the legal profession and the psychiatric profession to work together on law enforcement for the public good.
Adam Lanza is dead. Nancy Lanza is dead. Any attempt to doctor the living by remote is unethical, but understanding human behaviors requires us to use the tools that we possess and the facts that are available. Dead people don't have the same rights as the living, and dead people who built the causal chain that led to mass slaughter of children are not going to be treated as gently as those who could have broken any link in the causal chain and those kids would instead be having a merry Christmas.
Understanding the "craziness" of each Lanza requires a different template. Even knowing where to look for the template is not known as widely as it could be for effective LAW ENFORCEMENT.
We can't enforce the laws that we have if we don't even know who fits those laws. We need to learn the DANGEROUS DEADLY KILLER types of mental illness which is not related in any way with most harmless or merely annoying types of mental disturbances. Smearing all mental illness with the crimes of the few is avoided by wider understanding what the killers look like, their symptom list.