The American social safety net fails again. At least this time it was mostly contained.
Condolences to those who will remember him.
No shit. We had plenty of guns when I was a kid (52 now), even AR-15s and the like, and this wasn’t a normal thing until after Columbine.
I’d hold off on my manifesto, :), but mental health has taken a nosedive in this country. It’s far, far worse than kids can imagine. Fox News, Facebook, the internet, etc. has poisoned our collective brains and discourse.
I’m 38, and yeah it’s seriously fucked. I keep saying this and people still want to plug their ears and scream “it’s the guns!”.
I’m a prime example, I have ADHD and hardcore insomnia, and I got laid off a few months ago, my health insurance just ended. In order to see a psychiatrist it’s gonna cost me $300 out of pocket for the visit, and then generic Ambien is like $120 for 60 pills. I got letters that say I could get health insurance via the COBRA Act of 1985, but it’s SEVEN HUNDRED AND THIRTY DOLLARS A MONTH. Healthcare.gov keeps playing commercials that say “enroll now and you can get health insurance for as low as $10/month!”. I went on there to look and it’s only available for 2024 right now and they want to know your income for 2024. I put in 80k and they said I wasn’t eligible, I put in 40k and it said it was gonna cost $350/month.
My dad is 73 and he constantly has to fight with insurance and the pharmacy to get his Ambien as well.
It’s absolutely ridiculous.
Losing your insurance/job is one of those situations that they’ll enroll you early
I get your trying to help but you’re missing the point
Ah thanks for the info, but it will still probably be less to pay out of pocket. The shrink’s follow up is $200 and the Ambien will be $120. IDK how much I can get the premium down to, and even then there’s the deductibles.
If you aren’t working, put in zero as your salary.
That’s what I’m thinking, but the question is “how much will you be making in 2024?” not “How much are you currently making?”
You can’t know the future, what if the economy craters? If and when your salary changes, you update it then.
Exactly, it’s a dumb question, no one really knows how much they’ll be making in the future, but it’s not like 2024 is far away.
That’s brutal, and I’m very sorry to hear that. No one should have to struggle to find help, especially for stuff like that.
I think this whole system is stupid, even from a business sense. If you want quality labour, “happy employees” are the way to go. If you prevent people from getting much wanted/needed help, you’ll have a lot less of those “happy employees”. You’ll also have fewer taxes being paid, less money being spent, fewer people attending events and buying non-essential things, etc. The current set-up makes no sense to me. Instead of imporving anything, let’s just keep continuing to make things worse and then complain that society is getting worse. That will totally fix things. It hasn’t worked for the past couple of decades, but it will totally magically change tomorrow. Assholes.
I hope things get much better for you and your father soon. Y’all deserve MUCH better than this.
Thanks 😊 The problem is that they have no souls and conscience, and only care about money, so I don’t think anything will change this unless we go with public/socialized healthcare but that will never happen because “socialism” is “the worst thing that could happen” according to some people… my dad is against it because he “doesn’t want to help pay for some low-life’s healthcare which he has worked his ass off to pay into” 🤦♂️
If you aren’t working, why are you putting in any salary?
But… what about the shareholders? What about about their return on investment?
/s
almost 10% of your income!? fuck the “hyper socialist” Germany has 6% from my taxes
They took about 30% of my yearly income for local (I lived and worked in NYC for 7 years), state, and federal taxes for the past few years! I may get about 5% or less of that back in my tax return.
Best country in the world! 🤑
this wasn’t a normal thing until after Columbine.
Things that are relatively new, circa Columbine
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the 24-hour news cycle
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rage-farming as a genre of syndicated media (think: Limbaugh, Hannity, InfoWars)
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selling fear becomes huge moneymaker for opinion programmers (Limbaugh, Hannity, Carlson, etc)
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politics as a staple on social media comment threads
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offshore groups (like troll farms, etc) posing as domestic political actors, targeting particular demographics
Ready access to guns is of course a problem, but it’s probably made worse when all those folks with ready access to guns are bathed in fear and loathing 24/7 by millionaires making lots of money telling them things to make them or their families afraid or angry. Just a thought
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If it puts your mind at ease at all, crime (violent and otherwise) had been on a decline from 1993 until 2016 and while it has risen since 2016, it still hasn’t hit pre-'93 levels last I saw. Furthermore despite what you’d expect, those AR-15s are responsible for less than 500 (all rifles) of our 60,000 gun deaths, which is 0.833333333333% of our gun deaths. In fact, mass shootings account for less than 0.2% of our gun deaths per year. So, I mean “any is too much” yes, but it isn’t near as bad as it seems. source
The vast majority of mentally ill people are not violent. The idea that mental illness is largely responsible for the prevalence of mass shooters contributes to the stigma already attached to mental illness.
Know what did happen shortly before Columbine? Reagan dissembled our mental health infrastructure.
I was a teen in the late 80’s. Hell, I thought homelessness was a normal thing I simply hadn’t heard of until MTv started flogging it.
And if the mass shooting didn’t start post-Columbine…? LOL, we didn’t have that word in our lexicon.
FFS, we used to able to buy shotguns in the auto parts store. But suddenly, guns and “easy access” are the problem?
Why don’t you folks start a fight you have a chance of actually winning? Shut down the right-wing propaganda, hard, yesterday.
And while we’re at it, I’d kill for a solid study on how many killers, including suicides, are left/right politically. We both know how that’s gonna play out.
I am saying that something else started it. Mental health care has been terrible for way longer than Columbine. And youre going to have to explain why there was a decade and a half gap between Reagan and this mass shooting. Dont get me wrong, Reagan was a real piece of shit but I don’t think mental health or the lack of it is the major cause. Easy access to guns OTOH…
Mass shootings pre columbine were more rare but weren’t unheard of. Mostly they were belltower or highway sniper style incidents or postal related as they were severely overworked at the time.
Also, while mass shootings were more rare, not only could you get one at the hardware store you could order a full auto directly to your door with no background check or even ID for a while.
Just to add.
Up until 2000, the NRA was actually a big supporter of gun control. At that point they switched to being pretty much zero tolerance for any gun control, and even trying to dismantle gun control.
One could apply the same logic you just did to blame mental health regulations to blame this instead.
They became a lobbying group for gun manufacturers and their shareholders.
Did you miss a century of mental healthcare development?
Its the guns. It was ALWAYS the guns. There was a significant increase in the number and severity of mass shootings after the federal assault weapons ban sunsetted. There is significant amounts of evidence that easy access to guns results in much higher homicide and mass shooting rates.
My high school school had a 1970s state championship banner for rifle shooting up in the gymnasium. It might even still be there.
I’ll fucking remember him. Kid realized he was going to harm a lot of people and avoided it.
Sounds like America shouldn’t be selling guns until Republicans have finished curing mental health issues.
but if we stopped selling guns, how would we cure those mental health issues?
Sucks that he got to that point, but props for not going through with his plan.
This is almost uplifting. Like, it’s terrible the man was suffering so much, but it’s admirable that he chose the better of the two options he was giving himself. That probably makes me sound like a terrible person.
I don’t think that sounds terrible at all. We can all agree, I think, that we’d rather this whole situation not happen at all, but of the two cases, one with one dead by their own hands, and another case with who knows how many dead at the same person’s hands, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with saying you’re happy it was the former and not the latter.
Terrible would be saying he deserved it. Or putting someone in that position. Or a variety of other things, but it’s not being relieved at a lower death toll.
“His” plan
Had he gone through with it, we would be hearing how he “was on the FBI’s radar”.
I didn’t kill a bunch of people today, either, so props to me, too, I guess…
You probably weren’t at the end of your mental and emotional rope, with what seemed like no other outs. Context matters.
You don’t know me. McDonald’s fucked up my nuggets order this morning so now I’m a man without anything to live for
Not the nuggies!! Any response to that is warranted
Car bomb McDonald’s!
fbi has entered the chat
A message saying, “I am not a killer, I just want to get into the caves,” was written on a wall of the women’s bathroom where the man was found lying on the floor, according to Garfield County Sheriff Lou Vallario. Nearby, officers found a handgun and explosive devices, some real and some fake, he added.
Geez :(
Why was he hanging out in a womens bathroom?
I think that’s the least concerning part of this story
Charles Whitman — Texas Sniper. Killed 14 people in 1966. Autopsy found a brain tumor pressing the amygdala, which presumably caused uncontrollable “fight or flight” response.
And with the effortless access to firearms provided in the US, choosing the “fight” option was easy.
First off, 1966 was a different time worldwide for firearms possession.
But for my real point, a continuous “activation” of fight or flight will always result in fight being the option, because all the running in the world hasn’t helped to that point.
While thats valid comment for the main post, for the Whitman case, he was in the military. Even with strict laws he would’ve still had easy access unless we’re talking drastic changes of having military personel not having general firearm access.
That’s a pretty big possibility, hardly would call it a presumption. Either way, humans are too frail and unpredictable to have limitless access to such killing machines.
Probably had nothing to do with a tumor:
Whitman’s father was raised in an orphanage in Savannah, Georgia, and described himself as a self-made man. His wife, Margaret, was 17 years old at the time they wed. The marriage of Whitman’s parents was marred by domestic violence; Whitman’s father was an admitted authoritarian who provided for his family but demanded near perfection from all of them. He was known to be physically and emotionally abusive towards his wife and children.
This dude in Maine had tried to get a silencer. Wonder how much worse it would have been if everyone didn’t hear the reports and start running.
This dude in Maine had tried to get a silencer. Wonder how much worse it would have been if everyone didn’t hear the reports and start running.
Hard to say. It’s not like the movies. With the firearm he had (.308 with ~14-16" barrel), a silencer/suppressor only brings the volume down from “instant tinnitus” to “still loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage”. It’s far from silent. I’d never thought about it until now but I wonder if a silencer/suppressor could have increased surviveability. When people heard gunshots at volumes they would expect, they might be less disoriented. Verses the muzzle flash and concussion that comes from what he was shooting (basically a semi-auto flash bang).
Hmm, wonder why they are illegal in the first place then. Oh yeah it’s so other people can hear the report.
They aren’t. Suppressors require a $200 tax stamp and background check to purchase in the US. The only illegal part is possessing one without paying that tax.
Illegal without a permit.*
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Probably had nothing to do with the tumor
BRUH, this was his suicide note:
I do not quite understand what it is that compels me to type this letter. Perhaps it is to leave some vague reason for the actions I have recently performed. I do not really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I cannot recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts. These thoughts constantly recur, and it requires a tremendous mental effort to concentrate on useful and progressive tasks.[43]
In his note, Whitman went on to request an autopsy be performed on his remains after he was dead to determine if there had been a biological cause for his actions.
People in the 60’s didnt just say “do an autopsy on me” unless something was severely wrong. There was little to no public understanding of neurology, the general public wouldn’t even think to guess that a brain tumor could play such a role.
And not like Whitman suspected it a little bit; before the incident he went to many doctors for help. This was his note in his journal
“I talked with a Doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt overwhelming violent impulses. After one visit, I never saw the Doctor again, and since then have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail.”
He talked to friends about it and nobody would take him seriously because they just saw him as a respectable person with overblown concerns. His case is part of Neurology classes in Texas universities!
None of this constitutes medical evidence. It reads to me like bullshit conjured up after the fact to assuage a scared public by saying that there was something physically wrong with this man, when in fact he just wanted to hurt people because he was fucked up from years of trauma.
What would consitute medical evidence?
Modern gross pathology of the brain.
The weapons found on Medina were ghost guns, which do not have serial numbers and therefore cannot be traced. His clothing had patches and emblems that gave the appearance of Medina being associated with law enforcement.
“In 2021, $68,000 in fines were levied against the park, where a 6-year-old Colorado Springs girl was killed on one of the rides over that Labor Day weekend.”
Why include this? Word count?
The girl who died was one of my neighbors. It’s been a hot topic in Colorado.
What are the hot positions on the hot topic?
Hot topic for mourning attire?
Definitely a tragic event, but yeah it seems kinda irrelevant
The good ending, I suppose?
No. Good would have been getting him the help he needed before this.
Jesus, that poor guy had some issues. I wish he could have gotten the help he needed rather than going down this road.
When someone’s mind allows them to believe the options are to either commit a terrorist attack or to off themself, it sounds like cult behavior more than mental health to me
why not just suicide at home? like, why get all dressed up in tac gear, then off yourself in a relatively public space? oh sure, mental illness, but… why not just stay home?
Could have meant to kill a bunch of people and go out in a blaze of “glory” then had second thoughts and just skipped to the end.
oh sure, mental illness, but…
There is no “but” to mental illness; Mental illness is by-defintion doing things that don’t make sense, often the person performing the actions doesnt even understand why they are doing what they are doing (when extreme mental illness is involved). Motivations can be anything from visual hallucinations to “I dont know, I felt like a passenger while my body was doing things”.
Saying “ok, but like y tho” is misunderstanding how mental illness works.
