re: #202 Political Atheist

If whatever makes a man willing to kill like that is not a mental illness in the books, psychology has some important work to do. IMHO.

Reducing the number of killers should go hand in hand with making it more difficult for them to be killers. I don’t think I’m distracting anyone from anything worthwhile to assert this.

I pay no attention to those trying to make a distraction. I try to deny them that via deliberately ignoring them. Their media/meme/partisan resonance means nothing to me as far as analyzing how to keep this from happening again goes. To me everything relevant is on the table.

Distortions & deliberate distractions are highly relevant to understanding who the liars, extreme advocates and partisans are. They are utterly irrelevant to the actual facts and circumstances of the shoot.

Yeah. Here’s the deal: know how the are terms people unacquainted with firearms use that (a) show they don’t know what they’re talking about and (b) make people with greater familiarity cringe?

Mentally Ill is the equivalent in psychology/psychiatry. It’s a loose generality. The different being that guns are an assembly of standardized parts with a clear set of features and the human mind is a giant black box in which nucleotides and fatty goo creates impossibly convoluted networks of sensory data and impressions…each of which is unique such that our vague notions of neuroanatomy periodical get blasted out the water.

There is no magic bullet on violence coming from craziness. “Sane” and “Mentally Ill” people do horrific shit for terrible illogical reasons, but it doesn’t come from mood disorder or delusional thinking; it comes from lack of empathy, lack of critical thinking, the elevation of ego and identity over sense of connectedness, the need to maintain a tribal identity by excising the “other.”