Rash of Gun Killings Who's to Blame? Since Virginia Tech Massacres, U.S. & State Mental Health Institutions Still Broken:By Marc Chamot
UPDATED April, 3 2009: Well, was Marc Chamot right? This issue is being questioned once again at this moment after today's New York shootings that left 13 people DEAD.
Tragedies Reveal Legal, Health Care Lapses "As authorities work to secure the site of a deadly shooting rampage in Binghamton, New York that claimed the lives of more than a dozen people, questions concerning the tragic incident continue to mount. In the days to come, one question will be paramount: Why?
In 2007, following a number of unrelated shootings, ABC News investigated the possible causes of these tragedies. That report follows.
All have that same theme of alienation and isolation," said Beverly Hills-based forensic psychiatrist Dr. Carole Lieberman. "Many of these shooters have been picked on by their peers or felt 'out of the loop."
Motive sought in murder-suicide that left 6 dead Another apparent murder-suicide in an upscale neighborhood of Silicon Valley that left three children and three adults dead, it had the police searching Monday for a possible motive and sorting out the relationships between the suspected gunman and his victims.
A woman in her mid-30s managed to escape from the house where officers later found five bodies in a "very horrific" scene, police Capt. Mike Sellers. She was hospitalized in critical condition with multiple gunshot wounds, Sellers said.
What’s going on with all of the killings in America? Is it the sad state of the economy really to blame for the mass killings going around our country lately? Anti-gunners must be having a field day with all of these gun related killings that is becoming almost a daily occurrence. Anti-gunners are probably saying, see? I told you so; this is what we’ve been talking about all along. Americans shouldn’t own guns, they can’t handle their guns and they are killing far too many innocent people.
I will tend to see it their way, and they may have a pretty good argument about guns, but then there’s another problem going on in America that may not all be gun ownership’s faults.
Yes, we all have been talking about the chaotic economical situation that could be the root cause of these mass shootings, but that’s not all of the reason.
The truths of the matter, the real jerky problem folks, and these are the real cold hard facts; we’ve truly got a country FULL of NUTCASES. Just plain and simple, we’ve got nutcases galore roaming around! People that should be locked up in mental institutions, instead they are plainly walking about, and guns don’t mix with crazy people. When you get a nutcase with a gun, all you get is a match with a powder-keg and a bunch of dead people.
The mental health institutions in America are totally broken, and a prime example? Is the state of California, a place where lunatics have more rights as a person than does any of his victims? Mentally disturbed people are just roaming “Free” across America. Back in the forties to sixties we had sanatoriums and active mental institutions, our politicians in government, including former governor Ronald Reagan have made sure they would shut them down.
Ronald Reagan, our beloved former Republican American president, yes, as governor he SHUT down all California sanatoriums and mental institutions, he thought that “it was just wrong holding people against their will!”
If the Virginia Tech Massacre wasn’t enough to show us, the realities in how mentally disturbed some folks really are, who are roaming amuck in America. Like the Korean born Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer, who happened to be the real poster child for the reason to be putting these people behind bars or locking them up in a mental institutions.
But Washington and other states have not done a DAMN thing to address the crazy bins, the loonies and their problems, the havoc that they are causing on American society since the Virginia Tech massacre.
These politicians should have been picking up these crazies and locking them until they were cured or dead. These politicians figure that the lives of people being killed by these crazies are small in comparison, to the heavy costs of money and freedoms for these mentally disturbed people.
Shootings, murder-suicide raise broader question: Is violence linked to recession?
By Patrik Jonsson Patrik Jonsson
Atlanta – Four Oakland, Calif., police officers shot down. An Alabama man is strolling around a small town with a rifle, looking for victims. Seven elderly people shot dead at a North Carolina nursing home. And on Sunday, six people, including four kids, died in an apparent murder-suicide in an upscale neighborhood in Santa Clara, Calif. The details in all these cases are still emerging. In most, the exact motive has yet to be determined – or may never be fully understood.
On a broader level, however, such incidents may be happening more often because an increasing number of Americans feel desperate pressure from job losses and other economic hardship, criminologists say.
"Most of these mass killings are precipitated by some catastrophic loss, and when the economy goes south, there are simply more of these losses," says Jack Levin, a noted criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston.
Direct correlation between economic cycles and homicides is difficult to prove, cautions Shawn Bushway, a criminologist at the University at Albany in New York. But an economic downturn of this breadth and depth hasn't been seen since data began to be collected after World War II, he also points out. "This is not the average situation," Mr. Bushway says.
Still, criminologists do say that certain kinds of violent crimes have risen during specific economic downturns. The recession in the early 1990s "saw a dramatic increase in workplace violence committed by vengeful ex-workers who decided to come back and get even with their boss and their co-workers through the barrel of an AK-47," Mr. Levin says.
And in the midst of this downturn, one study released Monday in Florida finds a link between domestic violence and economic tragedies like job loss and foreclosures. The Sunshine State saw an almost 40 percent jump in demand for domestic-violence centers, an increase related to the state of the economy, the study says. George Sheldon, secretary of Florida's Department of Children and Families, calls the situation "the worst I've seen in years," according to the Associated Press.
The potential link between murder-suicides and the economy is an area of study for the Violence Policy Center in Washington. "We've been looking at this issue of whether there are more murder-suicides … [and] a pattern is starting to develop that may point in that direction," says Kristen Rand, legislative director at the center. "Between the Texas Tower shootings in the 1960s until the McDonald's massacre in 1984, it was extremely rare to see these types of mass shootings. Now we're seeing them much more often, and they do seem to happen in spurts."
To be sure, the gun-control debate is heating up, especially after the recent Alabama shootings where a man killed 11 people, including him, using semiautomatic, military-style weapons. Gun-control advocates point to gun proliferation as a major cause for the loss of life, especially when families turn on themselves. That appears to be the case in the Santa Clara shootings.
"Studies have shown over and over again that a gun in the home is more likely to be used against a family member than an intruder," says Juliet Leftwich, senior counsel for Legal Community against Violence in San Francisco.
But the root cause of the violence goes deeper than gun ownership, some argue. "Social isolation is a huge factor" in a country as large and transient as America, which places big emphasis on personal results, Levin says. "If you look at where many of these mass killings have occurred lately, they're in states that have lots of strangers, transients, and drifters, who don't have support systems to get them through tough times," he says.
In the incident in Oakland, which occurred March 21, a parolee shot two officers during a traffic stop, then shot two others during an ensuing manhunt. The parolee also died. It was the biggest single-day, gun-related loss of life for law enforcement in the US since 1993.
Unless Senator Dianne Feinstein is willing to give up her powerful seat as chairwoman of the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee, this would be her decision to make, and only hers, and unless there is a Democratic urgency for her to come home and win the gubernatorial race for the Democrats she’ll probably stay in Washington.
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