OK, so my last idea was not well received

[HereSince1628]

20. this replies deals with "Many of -THESE- had -SOME- indication of -MENTAL ILLNESS-

Well, just what THESE are you talking about? There have been just shy of 300 mass shooting in 2015, ~45 of them are shootings on school campuses Pre-school to University. Does a mass shooting in grade school reflect the same motivations and issues as a shooting in a university? Probably only at a superficial level of analysis. Are you aware that 70% of "these nearly 300 mass shooters" for 2015 are unknown? How do you make meaningful matrix-like profiles to strip people of their rights when 70% of 'these mass shooters' are flying under the matrix?

We ought to be careful about generalities/stereotypes that aren't.

SOME indication...indication of WHAT to Whom? Every year in the US ~25% of Americans have -SOME INDICATION- of having a mental disorder. Just looking at that we ought to expect that by the time someone reaches the age of 10 there is a better than 8-% chance they have or had something that shares an indicator a mental disorder. Mental illness isn't like a staphylococcus infection, there are no tests...only indications...symptoms usually considered as suites of symptoms so that a diagnosis is based on a group of 'indicators' and their relative importance to the distress or dysfunction of the afflicted person. What seems like an 'indication' to a person who is an uneducated person with prejudices and fears about deviance or opposing political positions may not be an 'indication' of anything. Or the thing considered an indicator might really be an 'indicator' if it was severe/significan enough and present among other criteria and indicators, but the uneducated prejudiced person may not have the capacity to make even a half decent evaluation of the significance of the 'indicator. With 67 million or so people having some mental illness each year, and with depression being by far the most common, it would be most remarkable if -every- murderer above the age of 10 DIDN'T at some time express an 'indicator'. The presence of an indicator is a bullshit measure for the matrix you are trying to create. It's about as useful as saying every mass shooting was done by a human being.

We ought to be careful about insights and understanding we don't have.

There is no single category of mental disorder. There are MANY disorders. They fill up diagnostic manuals hundreds of pages long.
Generally speaking they get diagnosed because they cause they are significant enough to cause dysfunction and distress that in turn results in seeking of help. But the great majority don't make a person dangerous. In my scores of decades of life, I've never heard a significant risk of violent behavior associated with psychologically based ED, or insomnia, or agoraphobia, or fetishtic transvestism. What I have heard is that FOR PERSONS WITH SERIOUS MENTAL DISORDERS social violence is only elevated by a couple of percent over baseline for the general population of undiagnosed persons (I'm forced to say undiagnosed, because of the previous paragraph... most people have experienced mental disorders but dismissed/denied them and never seek assistance). The baseline for violence in society is about 5% per year, research has shown the risk for persons with -serious- mental disorders is just shy of 7%. Now when you poke around the internet about rates of violence among the mentally ill, be careful you aren't looking at rates of violence within correction institutions where rates of violence are very high for both mentally ill and mentally well, because violence is common in threat filled environments.

Creating a matrix so that there can be prior restraint is a dream of Science Fiction. And it's mostly built on social acceptance of bigotry against the mentally ill.

Believing that persons with mental disorders are the major cause of the gun violence problem is ridiculous on it's face, even if some gun violence almost surely results from psychological dysfunction. It's a hand overplayed. And the overplay is mostly a way to hack-up a fast rationale that meets with our existing bigoted attitudes about the mentally ill. It works because even our liberal icons, say like "sexy liberal" Stephanie Miller, propagate the use of bigotry and stigma against persons with mental disorders. It's that widespread stigma that leads to consequences of discrimination against the mentally disordered that include national unemployment rates around 80%, many times the rate of occurrence of Axis 5 scores for Global function that should result in occupational impairments.

IMO focusing on mental illness is pretty much an expression of fear, the same sort of fear that people encounter when they read stories of gun violence. And people's reactions are basically the same...they want protection, that drives many of the people to buy guns for self-protection and it drives most people to express their ignorance and fear of mental disorders as prejudice and discrimination.

In 2015



















An indication that was noted by a mental health/social worker is probably differ