We're quick to profile for turbans and hoodies, but what about crazy? It's time we started profiling for that. We all have that one creepy guy in the office that we have pegged as the one to snap and gun down all of HR, but do we alert the authorities? Do we call the FBI? Nope. We wait until the news crew shows up and say, "Yeah, he was always a lil weird. Smelled like cheese."

We all have that one creepy guy in the office that we have pegged as the one to snap and gun down all of HR, but do we alert the authorities?

Really, though, what would you even report to the police? "Yeah...so...there's this guy I work with who's kinda weird...ummm...do you think you could come by and question him and ask him if he's going to murder a bunch of people anytime soon?"

I've met several people in life who have given me the willies -- to the point where, if they shot up a theater tomorrow, I wouldn't be surprised. I only reported one because I was able to document that he was exhibiting concrete stalking behavior (I, and several other women, had emails and phone records to prove it). The others? I'd have nothing to report beyond the fact that they're a little...off.

TL;DR: You often can't stop crazy people until they DO something crazy.

> It's time we started profiling for that.

As a creepy guy, I don't want you calling the FBI just because you don't like the way I smell.

I don't know if it was a serious comment, but Crid has a point. You cannot profile people just because you happen to think they're eccentric … or even creepy.

Is he creepy? Or just introverted? So, because the guy doesn't talk much and tends to keep to himself, that's grounds to call the FBI?

It would be a grisly piece of irony if your H.R. was blown away, but the "creepy" person wasn't responsible.

What's truly creepy is the willingness to point to someone and say "deranged psychopath" because happens to be a little different from you.

About this paragraph:

> Surely, others saw signs. Surely.

Two Shirleys... That's a lot of certainty. What's it worth in the practical realm?

What exactly was supposed to happen? Who precisely was supposed to take the steps that would have stopped this guy from opening fire on a theater full of people?

If there were failures in this guy's social weave, they were almost certainly intimate failures. This was a not a policy fuckup.

Accordingly, I'm not looking for government to do much to fix this. And I'm going to be pretty surely convinced that anyone who IS demanding a government response is more concerned with power than with kindness.

I hear ya, but, y'know, family dysfunction (and collapse) is one of the things that screws people up. These are by definition not the families we can count on.

This is not meant to be defeatist. Let's try to some comfort from the patterns in these Pinker tweets: 1 & 2.

There's got to be some kind of social interaction that can diminish these atrocities that doesn't involve government.

Whoops, here's Pinker #2, the bad news.

I've met several people in life who have given me the willies -- to the point where, if they shot up a theater tomorrow, I wouldn't be surprised.

The problem is that there are hundreds of thousands of willy-givers for every one that detonates.

Measures that go after the thousandths of a percent at the expense of everyone else never work.

Let's try to some comfort from the patterns in these Pinker tweets: [Despite Colorado shootings, US gun ownership is DOWN]

I greatly admire Pinker (his latest book , The Better Angles of Our Nature, is brilliant), but he clearly must have meant something other than what he tweeted; after all, a few days is nothing like enough time for the shootings to have had any measurable effect on gun ownership.

Where I live, everyone owns a gun. No permit is required to carry a concealed weapon in public areas. Outside cities and towns, it is as common to see open carry as not.

Yet the the murder and crime rates are quite low. How can that possibly be?

Do you actually realize the plain truth?

You cannot prevent a person from a first offense.

No one in political office will say that, because it tends to take power from officials and move towards individuals.

Yet the operative syllable in the term, "self-defense" is self, not "police" or "law".

Be an idiot. Rely on others to defend you. Vote away your entire life because an official makes promises.

> The problem is that there are hundreds of thousands
> of willy-givers for every one that detonates.

Yes, true. And most of us have run into a socially-mistuned willy-getter at some point, too... Some distracted cretin who wants nothing more from their neurology than a shivered feeling for which they can send the FBI storming into the life of a passerby.

> You cannot prevent a person from a first offense.

Well, Amy said "surely" twice.

If you were daydreaming of a complete reconfiguration of human nature, you might think of a planet where everyone takes a deep personal interest in the sanity of everyone else such that rages like this are contained and drained before the shooting starts.

But most people who have that fantasy want to do it from the top down, through government, with their own petty taste in the deportment (what people should smell like, how much conversation should happen in elevators, etc.) codified as law.

(Also, whether or not other people should have guns.)

I suspect a diligent researcher would find every single mass shooter turns out to have been weird, creepy, or somehow "off".

I suspect further research would find that only a tiny fraction of the weird, creepy, or somehow "off" ever get a gun and shoot a bunch of people.

Maybe someday someone will come up with a magic touchstone, but that day is not today.

Posted on a friend's Facebook: "If he was an Arab, he'd be a terrorist. If he were black, he'd be a thug. But he's white, so he's 'mentally ill.'"

Not sure about that. Most people don't have much trouble seeing Timothy McVeigh as a terrorist, despite the conspicuous shortage of pigmentation.

Radwaste has it right on the money, by the way: you cannot prevent a first offense.

Careful, Amy!

You're getting into Clayton Cramer territory!

If you're seriously deranged, and you spend some consistent time around some other people, there probably are some indications of mental problems.

http://www.amazon.com/My-Brother-Ron-Personal-Deinstitutionalization/dp/1477667539

The late Joel Rosenberg had a similar story about his brother with schizophrenia, that basically, they couldn't get him to stay in care, and the system was set up to respect "his rights", despite the clear and present danger he presented.

"I'm talking about his family."

Once I was practically dropping dead in front of my mom and needed to be hospitalized. I hadn't slept for days, and hadn't eaten for days either. I asked her to cook me some eggs, I didn't eat them, she left for work. I couldn't breathe.

Dunno, people just dont really give a shit when you've got the crazies.

"Most people don't have much trouble seeing Timothy McVeigh as a terrorist, despite the conspicuous shortage of pigmentation."

Fact-check: what political message was there?

Don't let the people selling fear make everything "terrorism".

"I'm talking about his family. If you're seriously deranged, and you spend some consistent time around some other people, there probably are some indications of mental problems"

I have a family member who, over the past three or four years, has lost his job, lost his home, struck out consistently with the opposite sex, expressed an interest in acquiring arms, alienated all his family members and former friends, joined a cult, and now routinely proselytizes about government conspiracies that pollute the air via commercial airlines.

All of which make me fearful that he might one day become violent. None of which constitute a sufficient imminent threat of harm to himself or others which would give me the grounds to step in to assist.

What Rad said.

We all have that one creepy guy in the office that we have pegged as the one to snap and gun down all of HR, but do we alert the authorities? Do we call the FBI? Nope. We wait until the news crew shows up and say, "Yeah, he was always a lil weird. Smelled like cheese."

You really think hundreds of thousands of so-called 'creepy guys' at offices are ready to snap like this? Hello, there are only a tiny handful of incidents like this a year, while your plan would literally involve turning hundreds of thousands of innocent people in.

"What's truly creepy is the willingness to point to someone and say "deranged psychopath" because happens to be a little different from you."

Treating people this way is also a part of what alienates them in the first place.

The girl with the green hair . . . is "different from" me

You know, I always wondered, had it not been for the near extinction bottleneck would mankind have more than the four basic hair colors and the three eye colors

@Amy - You're wondering if there were signs in advance:

http://www.abcactionnews.com/dpp/news/national/james-holmes-notebook-shooting-suspect-sent-notebook-to-psychiatrist-detailing-attack-report-says

Interesting that somebody would do that, i.e. risk being caught in advance, if they really wanted to commit such a massacre with criminal/evil intent ... 110% speculative now, but it's almost as if sending this was a kind of 'cry for help', as if part of him hoped someone would stop him and rescue him from going over the edge, and maybe the lack of response heightened a sense that he was not going to be 'rescued'. The notebook had just never arrived. But it seems a similar contradiction to the fact that he revealed when caught that his apartment was booby-trapped - as if part of him still didn't want to go all the way on that either. Frankly this looks like serious mental illness to me though, so who knows what went on in his mind.