Oh, please tell me more about how conservatives try and try and try to improve the way we deal with mental health issues, both on a policy and a personal level. Because on a policy level, I saw a concerted effort last year to remove mental health services as an essential benefit from health insurance policy. And a lot of social programs that may have helped avert problems were gutted. Did I miss some concerted R effort to funnel money into mental health issues?
On a personal level,I don’t know many conservatives that take a compassionate interest in befriending mentally disturbed people. They DID put their poster child in the White House - maybe that is what you are referring to.
Ive done way more as a private citizen than most people. Way more than you have, I imagine. I visit with the disabled vets in my neighborhood. I’m actually pretty good at derailing the PSTD episodes if I’m there when they start.
I fostered a young man with socialization problems for several years. I mistakenly thought that if he had love and security he would find a path through this world. But he would not take medication. He would not seek counseling - he was convinced I would get to the counselors and conspire against him. He didn’t have friends because his friends alway did horrible things to him. One of them reached out and took a French fry from his fast food meal. Another one “ looked st him funny and was thinking bad things about him”.
I finally had to throw him out, mostly because he was using my home as a place to isolate and refusing to get help. Now he has all sorts of professional counselors working with him. These counselors call me on occasion. They seem to be as vexed as I was.
And I had absolutely no help or resources when he lived with me. And I tried but he was a legal adult and I wasn’t family. When the problems became serious I spend days bouncing around between police stations and courthouses and service agencies to no avail.
I still take him out for a meal on occasion but he gets nervous if I pick the restaurant. He thinks I might be conspiring with them to poison him.
Sorry for the digression, but the reasons that disturbed people socially isolatate is not a lack of effort on the part of the community. They don’t go on shooting sprees because liberals are too good to be friends with them seems to be what you are implying.
If your experiences are different from mine, please tell me about them. I’d like to know all the details about how YOU reached out to the mentally disturbed and averted tragedy. How many people did you reach out to and what did you exactly? Did they become stable immediately once you provided community and support or did it take time? Did they see your efforts in the same way you did or did their mental condition cause them to misinterpret them? Because I tried for a long time and I couldn’t do it but you’re making it sound really easy.
In the UK pretty much every facility and organisation of any kind is gun free, we are well known for it. We also have nut-jobs and underclass criminals so I’m at a loss to understand why we don’t have a comparable pro-rata level of atrocity.
There’s something I’m missing here but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
I think I have identified the problem. Classrooms on lockdown at Highline Community College after reports of gunfire. This is 2700 miles across to the opposite corner of the country from Parkland FL.
Clearly the problem is: schools. Just too many of the damn things.
[Moderating]
“Take it to ATMB” seems pretty coherent, to me. I can see that it might not have been clear if Loach was acting as a moderator when he posted that. I hope this note removes any ambiguity. If you want to argue against a mod ruling, do it in ATMB. Any more posts about it here will result in a warning.
[/Moderating]
"But the “Bad guys"TM will always be able to get guns.” Tell that to Jeffrey Neville. Do you know who Jeffrey Neville is? Probably not. Jeffrey Neville is the Flint police officer stabbed in the neck by a terrorist at Bishop international airport. Turns out that this terrorist tried to buy a gun and didn’t pass the background check. Officer Neville and god-knows-how-many others at that airport are alive today because the gun laws worked.
How many others have been saved by gun laws. We don’t know and we don’t know their names, we never will. Anymore than we can know the names of people saved by airbags or seat belts. But we know his name and you will hear it every time I see somebody say: "But the bad guys will always be able to get guns.
I am loving the kids who are not sitting by as the rightwingnuts tweet their thoughts and prayers. One of them even told “fucking piece of shit” Trump that she didn’t want his condolences.
I’ve seen several of these kids going off on Republicans in the wake of the shooting at their school.
Yes. One guy, and he never got to the shooter. Imagine what the result would have been if the teachers had responded. The one guy that got shot while physically shielding his students - imagine what the result might have been if he had been armed and took out the shooter.
It’s time to live in the real world, people. Gun and ammo control is NOT the answer and never will be. Having the media not turn incidents like this into a circus is a big step forward. Training and arming the staff is a bigger step.
As long as we’re playing the correlation implies causation game I’m saying the reason for Minnesota’s low crime rate is the rapid influx of Somalian, Bosnian and East African refuges to the Twin Cities area during those same 50 years.
More Muslim immigrants = less crime. Scientific fact.