7 Dead In Santa Monica, CA College Shooting

[filkertom]

Horrible. When the hell is this going to end?

This entry was originally posted at http://filkertom.dreamwidth.org/1624595.html. You may comment there or here, although LJ tends to have a livelier conversation at this time.

Comments

[gardnerhill]

Jeezus. Another white guy with issues who has to share his inadequacy with everybody within range. (The fact that they DIDN'T let us know the race of the shooter let me know right away this was another White Male Rampage.)

[kayshapero]

Good question. Maybe when someone shoots up congress? My daughter attends SMC. I shall be eternally grateful Victoria got out a bit late this morning, and then stopped to pick up cough drops en route - she arrived ten minutes AFTER this happened, and was turned away by the campus lockdown. She parks her scooter right where that character came on campus.

The campus is closed for the weekend whilst the cops do their thing, and while they're going to reschedule finals and such, I don't know if they'll be able to make room in the theater to reschedule the Theater Workshop final presentation, of which all four performances were to take place this weekend, and which they've been working on all semester.

[redaxe]

It ends when we get some reasonable licensing and control on weapons, with teeth in them. Which, as kayshapero says, is probably when someone shoots up Congress, or one or more of their families.

Sad, and disgusting, that there are people who'll argue that the price of THEIR liberty is OTHER people's kids lives.

[jedilora]

Gabby Giffords shows even that isn't true.

[redaxe]

But she was a Democrat, and so it doesn't count, don'tcha know. [/sarcasm]

::washes mouth out::

[gardnerhill]

And Gabby's a woman - the nonstop barrage of misogynistic "personhood" bills the R-whitedudes have been shovelling into the pipe since 2010 show exactly how much value they put on us FEE-males.

Now, if a bunch of white male Rs were hindered for 10 minutes from buying their fucking VIAGRA because the shop was cordoned off from a shooting? They'd change their mind on gun control right quick, 'cause it isn't real until it happens to THEM.

[alverant]

Do we even want to talk about how a guy in Texas shot a prostitute in the back of the head and got away with it?

[ravenclaw_eric]

It'll stop, or at least become vanishingly rare, after we lock up the crazies. I predict that in future times, our habit of allowing schizophrenics to wander the streets untreated will be regarded with the sort of horror we reserve for things like witch burnings.

[bayushisan]

I'm not sure if involuntary commitment is a good thing. I know that people need to get treatment, and I do believe that they should, but giving the government the power to commit someone to a mental institution could lead to that power being abused. In fact it WILL lead it to being abused because it always does. I honestly don't know what to do, but taking away a person's right to self determination seems like a bad idea.

[juglore]

During the eighties the good ole USA decided it was more important to save money than to treat mental illness. All the asylums were closed or defunded. Across America mental patients were dumped on the streets. And now we get to reap the whirlwind.

The government doesn't want to confine anyone for their safety or anyone else's safety. The government would have to pay for it. Until America decides that taxes and services are a good idea invest in body armor.

[ebartley]

The deinstitutionalization started decades before the eighties -- all the way back into the fifties in some states. It picked up steam as it went along (e.g. it started by making it more difficult to institutionalize people who clearly needed the help but didn't want it; flushing out current patients was a later stage.) Timing varied a lot state by state, since the majority of this was state bureaucracies and state courts.