Crazy people will always do crazy things. By definition. You can’t stop it. You can’t prevent it from happening. It’s part of living in a society with other people - a certain percentage of them are crazy, and a certain percentage of those will do crazy things. Sometimes they can be identified, but you can never identify all of them.
So, when a crazy person crashes a plane and kills himself along with 149 other people, stop whining about it and just accept that it was a crazy person doing a crazy thing. Calling it “murder” is misleading and further hides the point. There’s no point in asking questions, no point in acting like someone other than the crazy person was responsible. Stop trying to blame someone other than the crazy person. Stop asking how things like this can be prevented in the future. They can’t. What, you’re going to discriminate against anyone who has ever seen a psychiatrist? Not let them work? Not let them have jobs?
The one group of crazy people who we can identify ahead of time, and who are more prone to committing acts of harm to others are the religious people, but that type of crazy is absolutely privileged. They have a “god given right” to be that type of crazy. To even suggest keeping a vigilant eye on them would be “racist” and would violate their freedom of insanity, err, religion. So, don’t complain when the religious people go full faithtard and start killing to placate the voice in their head. It’s okay when that voice is god. If that voice were pee wee herman, they’d be normal, unprivileged crazy. But even then, normal, non-religion crazy people will still do crazy things, and while their craziness may not be legally privileged, it can’t be completely prevented, either.
So just accept that some people are crazy, and being harmed by them is one of the costs of living in a society with other people, which is unavoidable.
I’m not sure I should even dignify this with a response, but sometimes you can’t help yourself.
Two obvious things:
No, you can’t identify in advance all crazy people that might get an itch to kill or harm a bunch of other people. But you can identify some of them. That’s worth doing: it can prevent some disasters, even if it won’t prevent all of them.
We can do things that, across the board, reduce the violence that one person can inflict on others. For instance, otherwise comparable nations that have much more stringent gun control laws than we do have way fewer homicides. If nobody has access to a given means of inflicting mass carnage, then the crazy person doesn’t either.
Insanity is not omnipotence. Even if you cannot make them not want to do crazy things, that does not mean you cannot make them physically incapable of doing those things.
Some harm can be minimized or mitigated, but it cannot be stopped or completely prevented. Some crazy harm must be allowed and tolerated because it’s “religious freedom” (like genital mutilation or islam, we have to allow it or else we’re “racist”). But in most situations, everything that can be done to minimize the harm has been done. If once a year, on average, a crazy person pulls out a knife and stabs a random person in line at starbucks, there’s nothing that can be done about it - not within a free and open society. Even if we put more metal detectors in more places, it still can’t be stopped.
Stop trying to look for meaning and “why?” behind the acts of crazy people. Stop trying to go on crusades to stop it.
Frankly the only thing we can do to minimize it is invest more in mental health. But NOBODY wants to do that. Raise your taxes a few dollars to give poor people access to mental health? No way, just put them in prison.
I don’t think calling it “murder” or not should depend on someone’s mental state. A crazed, insane person shooting people dead with a gun has committed murder just as much as a sane, rational person shooting people dead with a gun. It’s murder either way.
I’m assuming you mean this in an A-Modest-Proposal sarcasm sort of way; that you’re criticizing tolerance of such violence, not condoning it, am I right?
Not with much statistical accuracy, as it turns out. And intervention is nearly always going to be at the cost of personal liberty. And it creates an exception that you reallly really need to think about and not just blithely embrace: for all other social responses to behavior, we’ve gravitated towards laws that punish people for what they did, and people are not subject to any consequences for what someone thinks they might do.
Agreed. Once we start playing games with the idea that some perpetrators some of the time did not act of their own free will, we’re down a seriously complicated rabbit hole. This very board is chock-full of threads both ancient and modern about free will versus determinism. Let’s measure everyone with the same measuring tape on this one: you do wrong things, we arrest you and you’re subject to the penalties. If that isn’t to your liking as a response to people doing wrong things, fine, change it, but change it for everyone, because everyone is in a context or situation where factors influence their thinking and behavior.
I don’t want to throw away the principle of excusing the seriously mentally insane from punishment. If they’re so badly off that they can’t tell what they’re doing, then they aren’t any longer responsible for their actions.
It’s already a pretty strict requirement to demonstrate in court. We should keep it.
You’re prepared to argue, then, that under general circumstances we are responsible for our actions?
What, exactly, does that mean? Are you saying that with the exception of the seriously mentally ill, none of us are reacting to stimuli that cause our behavior, that we are all of us always choosing our behavior, and doing so on some kind of rational basis?
Personally, I don’t tend to think of criminal justice in the sense of punishment (vengeance) so much as prevention of future/additional misbehavior. Some of that prevention, admittedly, takes the form of aversion, of the fear of consequences motivating people to not behave that way. (Incarceration and execution simply remove the offender from a situation in which they can offend again). One could perhaps argue that the seriously mentally insane can’t be motivated via aversion and the threat of consequences. If so, one should have that argument with the folks who run mental institutions, where inmate control is very very heavily geared towards behavioral training that uses unpleasant consequences to extinguish unwanted / undesired behavior.
Anyway… I don’t like it. I think that on balance, those of us who have been labeled “mentally ill” are better off if the law does not and cannot legallly treat us differently than anyone else, and I advocate that equal footing, and equal responsibility for our actions is the tradeoff on that.
I don’t see how you get from point A to point N. Obviously, we are all exposed to stimuli that affect our behavior. But those stimuli do not cause our behavior. I’m influenced by my environment, but I’m hardly enslaved by it.
The law presumes that most of us have enough self-control not to commit criminal acts. This is, in practice, a pretty good presumption.
I would prefer it if more people held this view. I’d also like rehabilitation to be a major goal of the justice system. Just warehousing the bad guys in dangerous, violent conditions, under a society of criminality, does more harm than good.
But the political will doesn’t exist in this country, only the animosity. Bummer.
