> I Couldn't help but think the cops
> could be this nice because they knew
> that this guy was unlikely to be armed
> cuz, you know, people don't have the
> right to give their 9-year-olds machine
> guns over there.

1. "Couldn't" shouldn't be capitalized.

2. The Second Amendment as popularly interpreted means Americans can have guns if they want... More on this anon. I promise.

3. The first time I saw the spelling "cuz," it was actually "'cos," was in a fan magazine for the Jackson Five, which would have been fifth grade, which would have been circa 1969. The editors had presumed that all their fans were illiterate. That was actually a pretty good wager, but some of us were mostly (in retrospect) more impressed with the basslines of those tunes rather than the clothes of the singers themselves. (This is the guy who played it on the record, but this girl, forty years later, is prettier.) (Note the riff at 1:43 on both clips.)

3. Have 9-year-olds with machine guns been a problem in our culture? Maybe they have... Perhaps it's just me who can't recall a single bad incident with a nine-year-old who was misusing machine guns instead of listening to gifted jazz musicians on bad pop records. But it seems more likely that our Facebooker was [A.] in the mood to be childishly sarcastic about something, or that [B.] she's the sort of person who'd rather be afraid of things (guns) than people (criminals).

It's EASY to be afraid of things. They never argue with you when you condemn them or express your fears, the way people will.


Sweden is not a member of NATO. Sweden spends far less than 2% of GNP on defense.

Putin is turning Russia into an asshole again, with consequences for energy, commerce, and comity.

Who, seriously, do you think will be expected to pick up the pieces when fascism comes to Europe? …Again? Before Swedes mock American violence, they should demonstrate sufficient familiarity with deadly force that you and I need not be concerned on their behalf.


The Founders weren't illiterate. I think the ambiguity of the 2nd Amendment is to remind us to think carefully about who in the world cares most dearly about our individual well-being.

And that would be ourselves.

Say it with me now, and feel it in your bones: Nothing, nothing would do more to kick-start the entrance of democratic India into the 21st century, defending their women from a culture and legal system tolerant of RAPE, than convenient access to handguns.

I seriously believe that. I love the mentally ill too, but I hate asshole authorities even more.

Guns.

This is such hysterical bullshit at the end.
Police misconduct is in no way related to the individual right to bear arms, and this idiot's hyperbole ignores that, no, even in the USA, a minor may not legally possess a machine gun.

Had this been on point, it might have mentioned that a person with a history of mental illness cannot be compelled to say so when buying a gun from a dealer in the USA -- or, as is likely, that those committing horrific acts of violence in the USA shared the political views and background of the writer.

She's right all the way up to the point where it becomes about guns. That bit is just nonsense.

Here in Switzerland, members of the militia (which covers a lot of households) take their military weapons home. Lots of people hunt or shoot for fun. Nonetheless, police are not scared of talking to people on the streets. Anyway, anyone could have a knife, or a rock, or just use their fists and teeth.

The police may be nicer in Europe because they don't view themselves as some kind of military force. In the US, it seems that every podunk little town has it's own military-grade hardware and its own SWAT team. Of course, they want to use them. Crazy...

Yeah, but you can't just waltz into the Migros and buy a gun. The guys in the army have been trained. And they need their weapons, they're the army.

What do guns have to do with psych wards and mental illness?

Most of us will just bite your dick off while blowing you not shoot a cop. Statistically speaking of course.

Too bad about dragging guns into the post.
.
"I Couldn't help but think the cops could be this nice because they knew that this guy was unlikely to be armed" because he was wearing only tight pants, which did not have an apparent bulge of even the size of a jackknife.
.
And the first on scene may well have known the man, this is unlikely to have been his first escapade.
.
And they took him directly to a mental health facility" I am not sure many police here can do so without some sort of paperwork, but can and do request such.

"I am not sure many police here can do so without some sort of paperwork"

I've never had to go to the psych ward but from what I've heard through the grapevine it's pretty hard to get in, including if the police are called by your relatives to put you in the looney bin.

One woman i knew used to bite her husbands face off in public and the police told her husband it was either jail or he drop the charges.

However if you do openly and try to kill yourself they'll make a spot.

I've seen cops in the United States handle mental illness, including those with intimidating behaviors, with tremendous tenderness.

Found this on a Hungarian blog.

It has nothing to do with the cops. There isn't a place to put mentally ill people in aside from jail and they don't like doing that.

"Yeah, but you can't just waltz into the Migros and buy a gun. The guys in the army have been trained. And they need their weapons, they're the army."

Oh, criminy, this, still?

You can't waltz into any dealer in the USA and get one; I think you don't need {name thing you want}, need is not a factor here; try to think about the American militia, if you can get past the fog of thinking defending the country is someone else's job.

And try to think who the Constitutional owners of this country are. All leaders reserve for themselves the possession of arms.

If you really believe that the majority of cops are bullies waiting to tase, cuff, and the beat you, then do you REALLY don't want them to have the ability to TAKE YOU TO THE PYSCH WARD. Where THEIR doctor decides WHEN/IF you can leave.

How do you even have a conversation about things w/a person this stupid. (You can't. They shut down mentally.)

Cops can take you to a hospital and have you involuntarily confined there at your expense till a mental health hearing. These are usually pretty informal. A judge gets called in and talks with doctors and possibly the patient for a first hearing. These are also fairly quick in Texas. Usually 1-2 days delay. The truth is that they don't want to send you to a public facility. It is all cost to the state and there is far more demand than they can supply. You get a voluntary (i.e. you have to ask for it) judicial review every month. The doctors want you out of there as fast as possible without them getting blamed for whatever crazy thing you do next.

A far bigger issue than guns is our driving culture. When you are walking a beat and everyone is a pedestrian you talk to the cop. You get to know them and they get to know you. When everyone drives you never talk to each other. Cops can go weeks without talking to a non-problematic civilian.

A far bigger issue than guns is our driving culture. When you are walking a beat and everyone is a pedestrian you talk to the cop. You get to know them and they get to know you. When everyone drives you never talk to each other. Cops can go weeks without talking to a non-problematic civilian.

Posted by: Ben at September 8, 2014 6:06 AM

And this is also exactly why, winning a war ( and the peace afterwards) requires *boots on the ground* and not *jets and drones flying over the place taking out targets*.

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/938

Sweden apparently has a lot of crime and violence problems not completely in line with this little anecdotal piece about a mentally ill man.

Yes, Sweden DOES have a lot of crime and violence problems. And, as that Brussels Journal piece notes, they are overwhelmingly caused by a single group: Immigrant Muslims.

Hint: when you immigrate to a new country, you're supposed to blend in to the local culture. And not set up ethnic enclaves where even cops and firemen fear to enter.

Religion tends to be pernicious, but Islam especially so. Almost to the point where it could be considered a mental illness. Which brings us full circle on this conversation. . . . (grin)

This post is nothing more than a bunch of snarky unearned moral superiority bullshit.

The police in our fair land deal with seriously mentally disturbed people daily. The gigantic majority of these contacts do not result in the use of force or anyone going to jail. Generally the police act with kindness and compassion. Often in the face of people with iPhones and just itching for a confrontation so they can get their 15 minuets of YouTube fame.

No one 'gave' that nine year old girl an Uzi. She was being closely monitored and trained. Accidents happen. That isn't meant to be flippant just a statement of fact. I drove to work this morning knowing that there was a chance I'd be killed in an accident. I survived.

Correlation is not Causation.
I've been having fun playing around with www.nationmaster.com seems to be a nice site for comparing lots of stats on various countries. Not everything, but a lot.
For example guns per 100 people,
USA 89
Switzerland 46
Sweden 32

So it's not like Sweden has no guns, just fewer.

"9 year-olds with machine guns..."

One must differentiate between automatic weapons and semi-automatic weapons.

An automatic weapon = machine gun. You depress the trigger once and a steady stream of bullets continue to leave the barrel until you take your finger off the trigger. Aside from the military and maybe some police, maybe 1 % or less of the population own automatic weapons. It is a tightly regulated market, Gun stores open to the public do not carry automatic weapons in their inventory. Special permitting and long waits are usual in buying one. Being denied purchase rights is normal.

A semi-automatic weapon is a gun where one must depress the trigger each time a bullet leaves the barrel. Police routinely carry semi-automatic weapons on their waists. These guns are available in gun stores and require a background check; depending on the state, the check can be a complex process ( New York ) or simple (Texas).

No minor can legally own an automatic or semi-automatic weapon.

Man oh man, is she ever right. Those northern countries take CARE of their mentally ill and NONE of them can have guns, so there's no massacres.

For instance, that Brevik guy who slaughtered 70 people in Norway. That actually never happened because America is gun crazy.

This logic is impeccable and cannot be refuted.

leaving the gun thing aside...

What kind of mental facilities are actually out there for the police to use, and what mandate do they need to put you there?

Having seen the local police do sweeps of the homeless living under bridges here locally, they have a remarkable restraint.

But not every cop is like that, and EACH SITUATION is different...

so again we have one nice datapoint, about a nice policeman in Sweden, and it tells us NADA.

I still remember an article (possibly discussed here) of European misconceptions when they actually visit the US, though I can't find it at the moment.
A few come to mind.
Didn't see any shootouts- from the media many in Europe think everyone is armed 24x7 and we see gun fights every single day.

This place is bigger than I thought- They are used to countries which are a bit larger than a state. And keep hearing about LA and NYC thinking they are a short distance from each other.

Car culture- Cars everywhere, but much of that goes with the size of it.

"And keep hearing about LA and NYC thinking they are a short distance from each other."

You have to keep in mind when people think of the US they think of those two places (based on movies). I asked my friends what other place they knew and they said San Francisco, Las Vegas and once in awhile I get Florida.

Sometimes when people visit they think they can see all those places within 2 weeks.

We don't have "psychiatric hospitals". We did away with them when we did away with group homes for children. What we have is hospitals, and we expect them to fill the need. Hospitals are equipped to save lives. They are not set up to restrain mentally ill people who are forcibly Baker Acted.

http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/dangerous-patients-can-walk-out-of-some-hospitals/973859

Flbeachmom,

Texas has Austin State Hospital, which to my knowledge only does involuntary mental health. I've known a few people who went though there and while they try their best to get rid of all their patients many are there more or less for life. Loony bins still exist, but there are not as many and they try desperately to stay out of the lime light.

The problem is, can a person picked up 300 miles away reasonably be taken there, on no notice and a police sergeant's say so?

I stated it too generally, saying there isn't help for the mentally ill. There are hospitals, as you say. There just isn't infrastructure for emergency mental health issues like in the story.

In contrast, if the man had a broken leg, it's obvious where to take him. That infrastructure exists.

This is the same country that gave us Wallander, the very model of a depressed cop.

We don't have "psychiatric hospitals". We did away with them when we did away with group homes for children. What we have is hospitals, and we expect them to fill the need. -- flbeachmom at September 8, 2014 2:01 PM

Most larger hospitals have psychiatric wards that they don't typically advertise. They generally have enough beds to do a 72 hour hold for evaluation. Then they see where the person falls for insurance and such. They know all the full up hospitals and can get them transferred if needed.

Bradley: Here in Switzerland, members of the militia (which covers a lot of households) take their military weapons home.

Nicole: Yeah, but you can't just waltz into the Migros and buy a gun. The guys in the army have been trained. And they need their weapons, they're the army.

One would think that if a "well-regulated militia" was irrelevant to the right of the people to keep and bear arms, that term wouldn't have been used in the Second Amendment, that the Second would've just said "The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." But "well-regulated militia" is there.

While I'm sure no one here agrees with Justice Stevens in his dissent in District of Columbia v. Heller, he sees "well-regulated militia" as integral to the amendment:

When each word in the text is given full effect, the Amendment is most naturally read to secure to the people a right to use and possess arms in conjunction with service in a well-regulated militia. So far as appears, no more than that was contemplated by its drafters or is encompassed within its terms. Even if the meaning of the text were genuinely susceptible to more than one interpretation, the burden would remain on those advocating a departure from the purpose identified in the preamble and from settled law to come forward with persuasive new arguments or evidence.

I'm leaning more in the direction of flbeachmom. Yes we have hospitals with psych wards but they are not equipped to deal with the massive influx of people. It's pretty common to get denied because of lack of room during emergency situations and people get stuck in limbo.

You have to basically to do a very public display of suicide to get in or violently attack more than one person.

Cops often look the other way even if they think you need to be put on psychiatric hold. It's got nothing to do with them there isn't any infrastructure to deal with the issue and the laws are iffy.

We did away with the real mental institutions/hospitals which we need back. There are some around and it's extremely hard to get into them and it's basically a death sentence of poor care.

In modern psych wards there is generally very little evaluation and the strategy is pump with pills and dump back on family because they need the beds ASAP.

If you want a good account at how hard it is to get admitted into 72 hour hold you can look at the blogs of various parents with violent schizophrenic children and teens or spouses of bi-polars. Many call the cops on their family members and they are still not admitted.

So I guess somebody in America did give a weapon to a kid who couldn't handle it. And I feel bad for being wrong about that....


Part of what's going on here is the compelling nature of our media, television especially.

TV news in the United States came from a commercial context unseen in most other countries. VERY few nations had a newspaper marketplace as intense and pandering as the United States had in the 19th century... Not many places had as much literacy as we did.)

And when reportage moved to broadcasting, all the commercial hucksterism, sexual titillation, and bullshit drama was present in the product from the start.

We're Americans— There's never been a culture so enchanted with trade and commerce. Everything that happens in an American child's life after those first two nipples comes with a lesson: Caveat Emptor. Manipulative sales pitches don't offend us... We'd been filtering these sources for generations anyway. So pompous news anchors weren't a problem over here: A TV show that began with bombers flying over our capital and busty girls in swimsuits didn't necessarily soften our emotions for a narrative caress. As we developed the video technology and the orthodoxies of the medium, the rest of our social infrastructure was along for the ride... We already knew better than to trust everything we were hearing about our own communities.

I don't think Europe has that kind of built-in bullshit detection... The rest of the world certainly doesn't. When they see a news report with all our music and 3D graphics and pissed-looking reporters screaming "Scandalous death in the United States!!!," they're moved by it in ways you and I are not. They think a renegade truth-teller has finally punched through the facade.

They never see reportage like that in their own countries. They don't have the mercantile/showbiz infrastructure...

And more to the point, they don't have the 1st Amendment.

So little Suzy Suckface from Anycity, South Dakota stands out there in the rain wearing a tight-titty blouse with a dickshaped microphone at her sternum for a "Satellite!" report in bad lighting after a school shooting, and the rest of the world has no way to calibrate their response. (You and I think how she probably stopped at Denny's on the way home for Grand Slam breakfast or something. We know that there are a LOT of schools in America, and that children are safer in those schools than they are anywhere else in the world.)

The people of other countries, with no comparable sources in their own cultures, will assume their own schools are wonderfully safe places....







I doubt it.

Ok, Sweden might not be the best example of a country with historically low literacy.

But still.

"One would think that if a "well-regulated militia" was irrelevant to the right of the people to keep and bear arms, that term wouldn't have been used in the Second Amendment, that the Second would've just said "The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." But "well-regulated militia" is there."

Yes, there has been a lot of argument over that comma. Historically the "militia" was not only state run, but was composed of all able bodied males old enough to bear arms.

The feds can regulate the transfer of firearms between states via the interstate commerce clause, but not the ownership of firearms within the state. That pesky tenth amendment getting in the way again.

Now if you want to argue, based on the Constitution, and legislative history, that the right to own and carry weapons should be reserved to white male property owners, over the age of 18, be my guest.

Oh, and Stephens is an idiot. Not just in his dissent on Heller, but also many other cases.

JD, militias were defined as ad hoc, usually volunteer, on rare occasion drafted, impromptu military units comprised of average citizens using personal weapons.

Not professional soldiers using government provided gear.

Infact the militia was being called on to fight the official government.

So one could just as easily make the argument the founders wanted everyone well armed to overthrow the very government they set up should said government become too overreaching

flbeachmom: "We don't have "psychiatric hospitals". We did away with them when we did away with group homes for children."

We do have psychiatric hospitals. I work at one - it's locked; you can't just leave. The company I work for owns 200 of them. They're called "behavioral health hospitals" or "behavioral health centers". They're psychiatric hospitals where seriously mentally ill people are treated. But there aren't nearly enough of them and it's not easy to get in.

There are group homes for children. I think they're a little like what used to be called orphanages. Many of the patients on my unit go to them. There aren't nearly enough of those either.

Most of the psychiatric hospitals and children's homes are private for profit (like the hospital I work at) or non-profit. There are also two state psychiatric hospitals in this state. Those aren't good places to be. There is one state facility for children. That's not a good place either.

In this state a cop can't take someone directly to a psychiatric hospital. The person is taken to an emergency room to be evaluated. Referrals are made from there.

"There are group homes for children. I think they're a little like what used to be called orphanages. Many of the patients on my unit go to them. There aren't nearly enough of those either."

People in this country fail to realize that there are hundreds of thousands of children in this country who are either so seriously mentally ill, or they have such behavior problems that they cant be adequately supervised in a normal family home, or foster care.

These kids are scary dangerous, and they need a completely controlled environment, not someone handing them a pill every day.

There is a huge myth out there that all mental illness is manageable, with the right meds. It just isn't true.

There's a myth out there that psychiatric medications, including antidepressants, do more harm than good, that their risks far outweigh their benefits, and they shouldn't be used (kind of like the myths about vaccines).

The truth is psychiatric medications, especially antidepressants, work wonders for most of the people who use them. With medications, counseling and/or case management most serious mental illnesses can be managed quite well outside of an institution. Most people with serious mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression, have never needed to be institutionalized or even treated in an inpatient setting.

Most people with serious mental illnesses, including children and adolescents, are no more of a threat to others than anyone else is. But sometimes their unusual behavior scares the hell out people who don't know any better, enough that they want them segregated from the community and even institutionalized - kind of like the way a little boy who points his finger and says "bang" in a public school scares the hell out of school officials and police, enough that they want him expelled from the school and even institutionalized.

There definitely are mentally ill people out there, including kids, who are scarey dangerous and capable of committing horrific crimes like school shootings, theater shootings and mass murders. They're about as common as... school shootings, theater shootings and mass murders.

There are many people confined in institutions, with serious mental illnesses, who could be managed adequately outside of the current institutions, and many outside of the institutions who could be managed better. But it's very expensive, and there are higher priorities, like screening passengers at airports, subsidizing green energy, fighting the war against drugs, and supporting a military presence in 150 different countries.

Ken R you've summed up my view perfectly as a mentally ill person.

Thanks.