Arrest for suspicion of dementia?

Just to throw in a voice of dissent

I'd like to point out that the pro-active method of 'arrest for suspicion of dementia' treads dangerously close to a lot of legal and cultural toes. What happens when a theoretical cop arrests some theoretical grad student from the local art academy waddling around in public in a dirty diaper while making clucking sounds as a method of "performance art" and the theoretical city gets sued for 8 million dollars for violating first amendment rights? I'm just pointing out that there's a chance of honest mis-application that would make cities shy away from such a law.
Additionally, there's a chance for abuse from the top down as well if the authorities should decide that head-banging rock n' rollers, cheek-pierced hipsters, or just hazel-eyed people need to be scooped up and evaluated.

We all wish that the police officers in California had made a different call when they were interviewing the kid, but we're all only human. The police didn't think that the kid was crazy when they talked to him, so even had they been enabled to 'arrest for suspicion of dementia,' it wouldn't have helped in this scenario.

Unrelated thought:
What would interest me would be the impressions of his roommates. Were they at all worried before this kid went off? Too late to tell now, but it always seemed that I ended up accidentally knowing more about my roommates than either of us ever wanted to know. Has anyone looked at their facebook pages, tweets, etc to see if there was a general impression that their roommate was losing his marbles?
 
That imaginative college student "performing" art is a huge stretch there doofus. A really huge stretch.

There have been at least 61 mass murders in the U.S. since about 1982, about the time the last mental hospital closed.
Now can someone tell me how many mass murders occured in the U.S. in the 30 years prior to 1982??????
So are are mass, public, murders, rates going up or down?
I don't know, ergo the question.
I became a police officer in 1972, thus became very much more aware of crimes like mass murders, don't recall these horrific crimes from 1972 to 1982.
Not to say that's correct, I just don't recall events such as these in that time frame, not so many of them anyway.

(double naught: yes, 4 OR more is correct, I miss quoted)
(if victims are family then I'm guessing it's not public murder, don't know)
So are posters here saying that mass, public murders are going DOWN in occurances, that such crimes have little to do with dangerously mentally ill persons being free to buy weapons and committ murder?
My thoughts are that there are corrolations between the dangerously mentally ill being free in society & free to committ mass public murders.
Note these are thoughts, feelings, suppositions, not facts. I'd like to see some statistics.
I don't see a corrolation between mass public murders and the availablility of firearms.
Firearms have always been available, more available prior to about 1968 than post 1968.
"Gun control laws" are more strict now than ever before in our culture.
 
"Gun control laws" are more strict now than ever before in our culture.
Click to expand...

I'm not so sure about that...... prior to the tidal wave of CCW laws, it was not legal for pretty much anybody except for LEOs to Carry ....... Now the vast majority of Americans are able to get a permit to go about their business armed.
 
Let me refine what I said a little.
Being able to purchase firearms has gotten much more restrictive.CCW is a relatively new phenominum.

Re:Grant Duwe. People need do a bit more reading. Perhaps one might conclude that Duwe's opinions are in the minority & his statistics are questionable.

A post or two back I asked if anyone had statistics on the 30 years PRIOR
to about 1982 on the number of mass, public, random, murders.
Has anyone found evidence to support the claims that mass, public, random, murders have always been with us on the scale we've seen in the past 30 odd years?
Note that mass, public, random murders do not include murder of an entire family.
That kind of murder has always been with many societies for various alleged reasons.
 
jeager106:
That imaginative college student "performing" art is a huge stretch there doofus. A really huge stretch.
Click to expand...

ohh, I don't know. I just made that example up off the top of my head, but just now I googled "performance art and diaper" and there's a few doozies in there already. What about Gaga and her meat dress? If it weren't first done by a celebrity on TV, I might be a little spooked by sitting next to someone wearing that in public. Well, no. Probably I'd still be spooked by that in real life.
As usual, Shakespeare was right:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
- Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio

Point being: There's crazy and nowadays there's a lot of people who are just trying to get attention and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.

Trying to control outcomes is always fraught with unintended consequences. Sometimes those costs are colossal, sometimes merely managerial. Maybe society would be willing to pay the monetary and social costs of enacting a law that enabled police officers to "arrest for suspected dementia" but recent history shows that this society isn't.

Scary thought for the day:
Maybe, deep down, a lot of people find these occurrences of monstrous and/or bizarre behavior to be the best form of 'reality entertainment' from which they don't want to be deprived.
 
From http://spectator.org/articles/59521/there-really-epidemic-mass-shootings

Josh Blackman in The American Spectator said:
The truth, simply put, is that mass shootings —as horrible and nightmarish as they are — are very rare, constitute a tiny sliver of homicides, and are not becoming more frequent.

...

Further, contrary to what the zeitgeist may suggest, mass shootings are not on the rise. Prominent criminologist James Alan Fox has found “no upward trend in mass killings” since the ’70s. Take campus statistics as an example: “Overall in this country, there is an average of 10 to 20 murders across campuses in any given year,” Fox told CNN (and roughly 99 percent of these reported homicides were not mass shootings). “Compare that to over 1,000 suicides and about 1,500 deaths from binge drinking and drug overdoses.” Mass shootings on college campuses lag far, far behind many much more prevalent social and mental health problems.
Click to expand...

(That article goes on to discuss why people "feel" as if mass murders are becoming more common, when they're really not.)

Here's another. From CNN in 2012:

CNN 2012 article said:
Each mass killing provokes a flurry of public shock and a frenzy of media attention -- and often soul-searching about whether they represent a broader descent into gun-fueled violence.

But are such attacks on the rise in the United States?

Not according to professor James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston who has been studying mass murder for the past three decades.

Despite the huge media coverage devoted to them, crime statistics show that there is no upward trend in mass killings -- defined as having four victims or more, not counting terrorism -- since the 1970s, he said.

...

Fox suggests that any sense that mass killings are on an upward spiral has more to do with the vagaries of human memory than actual facts.

"Since we tend to remember the ones that happened more recently, rather than the ones before, we often get the sense that three things make an epidemic," he said.

"They are rare events, and everything that is rare is difficult to predict."
Click to expand...

pax
 
Sadly, after tragedies, the knee jerk reaction is to agree that the evil gun did something awful.
Do we think that the people that were parents of the murdered children at SandyHook will ever understand that the shooter was mentally ill & his mother bought him a gun, it wasn't the guns doing! He shot his mum first.
Click to expand...

I believe you have been drinking too much kool aid from the 2A fountain. Even most liberals don't blame the gun, but access to guns.
 
I would have to disagree. One position in criminology, public health, psychology, sociology is that exposure to guns primes aggressive thoughts and ideation. That leads to shooting behavior. So in that vein - the gun is evil and did cause the event. The evidence however is mixed. It seems not to be a factor with the vast majority of the population but might occur with those with underlying mental illnesses driving them to violent behavior.

BTW, we don't do liberal vs. conservative. Plenty of folks on both sides who like or dislike the RKBA. So we are gun or antigun in our discussions.
 
Glenn, You are right that whether or not one is conservative or liberal isn't truly indicative of attitudes towards guns, but to many pro gunners the appear to be same from what I have noticed here and elsewhere. Also, as you say, only some social scientists believe that exposure to evil guns proximately causes a homicidal predisposition. To pigeonhole people in antigun and pro gun to me seems to simplistic, although there are those that think you either have to ban all guns or have a god given right to carry fully automatic weapons.
 
The problem is trying to make a continuum into a dichotomy. Pro or antigun aren't absolute 0,1 categories. Look at the OC debate for instance.

However, the categorization is somewhat useful. I was trying to steer us away from the use of liberal and conservative as being perfectly predictive of gun attitudes. Thus when we get someone ranting about liberals or using worse terms - it isn't useful.

That's all I was attempting to do. I've seen an OC advocate of AR weapons in Starbucks denouncing very strong RKBA advocates as commie Fudds. Oh, well.
 
This thread is a little baffling. The murder rate is half what it was in 1972. The OP says there were less "mass murders" in 1972 then today because he does not remember them. Offers this as a strawman argument for locking up the mentally ill.

Let's jog the memory banks:

Mark Essex 1972. He killed nine people including five police officers and shot 13 others during his killing spree, including a total of ten police officers, something of record of that day. This is stunning oversight by a police officer and I find it amazing he does not recall it. Especially considering how Essex was taken out by the combined efforts of air mounted Marines and huge numbers of NOLA police officers. He was about as looney toons as any spree shooter out there today.

But there is no shortage of them. If we just look at where five or more people were killed in one swoop I can bring in a few dozen examples from the 70s.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top