Did anyone also notice that the mentally ill girl depicted drawing on the wall seems to be a Java programmer?
She wrote things like "Math.pow(x, y)" and "function place row".
Some people think Java programmers are all insane, so the point wasn't lost on me. Context is everything - also, pay-rate probably has something to do with it.. ;)
One of the first things I, as a European, thought after hearing speculation on mental problems of the shooter was the following: If they just focus on the mental health issues on the shooter and start stereotyping, ostracizing and discriminating mentally ill people a bit more, maybe even with some law that limits their freedoms, people in the US will be able to avoid their two big taboo topics: Healthcare (and, by extension, taxes) and gun control. I would absolutely hate to be right on this one.
HNers are mostly bright people. Right now there is a trending post on randomness and clusters on the front page and we mostly enjoy. Still why do we forget the science we are so proud of everything guns are mentioned?
Why is there no similar outcry for stricter car control? That could really save a lot of innocent kids lives as well as making the lives of all kinds of criminals way harder.
You'd also reduce the emissions of CO2 and the overuse of hydrocarbons.
Since cars are bigger and mostly are used on roads collecting most of them should only take a few years.
And thanks for the downvotes. I expect the explanations to become visible soon and to be well grounded in sitee policies.
I do not know why you wrote that in your reply to my comment. I cannot downvote, nor would I have downvoted you if I could. If you have a grievance, please reply to the appropriate comment (or your own). Is there an "explanation" or "site policy" I need to refer to in relation to my comment? Otherwise, please do not target individual comments, unrelated to your grievance, it is quite rude.
I'm not sure what your point is, because cars are already very heavily regulated?
To drive a car you need to pass a competency test, as well as be insured against accidents. Your right to drive can also be revoked if at any time you demonstrate that you can't operate one safely.
So uh, yeah. I agree with you, lets do guns like cars!
Driving cars on public roads is heavily regulated. Buying and owning cars is almost entirely unregulated, it doesn't require a license or insurance, so long as it is only driven on private property.
Any public use or brandishing of firearms, other than pursuant to self defense/defense of others, is a criminal act (with obvious exceptions like public ranges, public uninhabited land depending on State law, etc.)
[note: visibility does not imply brandishing, in the case of open carry]
Anyone who passes a simple safety test (simple enough that the bulk of the population has little problem with it) can purchase a firearm and use it (subject to safety regulations) in public.
With or without a license you can own and use a gun on private property.
There are certain quality regulations on cars/guns which apply to using them outside private property (i.e., if it's likely to burst into flames, you can't take it onto public roads).
There is no federal regulation, except for rules saying that a license in one state is valid in all other states (i.e., a Texas CCW license works in NY).
This sounds like exactly what the NRA regularly lobbies for. The only people who will argue against your proposal are gun control advocates (e.g., Bloomberg).
FWIW, I actually think stricter car control would be a cool idea, provided that we replaced highways with buses, trains, bike lanes, walkways, and the like.
It's my feeling that using the free market, which should be based on property rights, cars and roads would be "regulated" a lot more than they are now.
How many companies could operate with tens of thousands of people dying from using their products every year: cars and roads?
What advances in technology would have been required so peoples property rights were not trampled on with regards to pollutants from vehicles?
Well, lets look at it another way then. Why are people trying to restrict people's right to carry arms. As US citizens, it's their constitutional right to bear arms? Why doesn't everyone have access to a small nuclear arsenal? Why aren't all the gun lobbyists screaming about those rights not being given to them.
The reality is that that thought scares the living shit out of everyone and its become culturally accepted that there is a line in the sand on what types of weapons should be available to people. Perhaps the line for the US needs to be redrawn.
As has been shown in other countries (specifically, Australia where I live) when you reduce the availability of weapons that are designed purely for mass killing (our buyback scheme went pretty smoothly in 1996), the ability of people to do mass killing goes down. We have approximately 1/3 the number of firearm related deaths[1] (both accidental and not) than the US has of just homicides alone per 100k people[2].
Thats not to say guns aren't still available. They are. That's not to say people still don't get killed with guns, because they do. But the numbers just dont lie.
I don't know--most Americans who have guns are pretty attached to them. I don't think they'd willingly turn them in for cash, and then you'd still have the problem of 300 million guns or so floating around the market even if you nuked the second amendment. It's great that it worked for Australia, and other places, but America is unique in some very bad ways at times.
For example, the only way we ever had unions in the workplace in the first place is thanks to civilian weaponry. Leave guns to the national guard? Ha. In many cases, they were the ones shooting and killing the strikers. Given the current state of affairs, I wouldn't be surprised if such a thing became necessary again at some point. Unfortunately, sometimes the only way people (like the ones in charge of companies) will listen to you is if you have a way to keep them from killing you. It's not as common these days, but who's to say what the future will bring? I can understand why negating the constitutional right to bear arms makes people nervous. In the past, it was a way for many people to make sure their families were fed. For many people in the present, it's a way to make sure their families are safe in case the government fails us (again). In America, corporate interests run politics, not the people, and companies don't usually have your best interest in mind (just the bottom line).
Australia has a murder rate of 1/100,000. According to your source, the homicide rate of the US is 5.5 according to your source, and the non-firearm homicide rate in the US is 1.8 [2]. By contrast, the total homicide rate in Australia is only 1.3.
I.e., with or without guns, the US is a more violent place than Australia. Drawing conclusions about gun control without correcting for this fact is a fallacy.
Incidentally, how do you define a weapon that is "designed purely for mass killing"?
Mass killing is perhaps a bad choice of words, but you really shouldn't be allowed to own any kind of automatic firearms, silencers, military sniper rifles.
Nor should anyone be allowed to keep home any amount of explosive substances or explosive devices, unless for professional use, or any kind of chemical or biological weaponry.
Also, you could not own any kind of firearm if you have criminal record, poor eyesight, mental retardations and such.
No ownership is possible without having a licence issued by the government.
Those are basically regulations in Croatia for example.
I'll tell you what: when guns become necessary to get to your job in America and become as safe as cars, then we can think about regulating guns like cars.
True. If only the school system detected he was troubled and assigned him a shrink, as well as having the rest of the school system monitor him, then maybe this wouldn't have happened.
It was also illegal for him to purchase a gun, and the law prevented him from doing so. Additionally, shooting people (unless they tried to shoot or stab you first) is also illegal. Didn't seem to stop him.
Megan Mcardle has an excellent essay on why there is basically nothing we can do about incidents like this besides perhaps collectively rushing the shooter (like we currently do with terrorists on airplanes).
It's been really depressing to see so many reactions to the shooting phrased in that way -- that the problem is mental illness or bad care of the mentally ill. Mentally ill people are already stigmatized enough as-is, despite the fact that they're far more likely to be murdered than to be murderers.
People are already suggesting that the mentally ill be added to registries, much like the already-flawed sex offender registry. This isn't going to make life any better for the mentally ill, and certainly won't make anyone safer. It'll just make mental illness even more of a black mark on someone's record -- imagine being diagnosed for depression or autism once and never being able to hold a proper job again. People will be even more deathly afraid of being properly diagnosed and cared for, not the inverse.
Stop conflating statistically insignificant incidents with reality. The Sandy Hook lunatic wasn't even as deadly as a slow weekend in Chicago.
The only reason the occasionally mentally ill (you heard me) gunman gets press is because the UMC media can identify with the victims. The UMC media can also identify with the gunman. Unlike Chicago gangbangers, they've known such creepy kids back in high school.
In some sense, yes -- Autism is characterised (in part) by difficulty with "normal" social interactions, which can (and do) vary from nation to nation.
The issue here is very general one. The so-called common sense held by wast majority is just plain wrong. It is a just a consensus by ignorant public, and have nothing to do with more or less accurate description of reality, leave alone explaining any particular event.
This situation is so common, that people literally didn't know any better. Common sense about what things really are and how things works and why are naive oversimplifications and folklore at its best.
Common folks have no clue how, say, financial instruments works, or what software engineering is about, or what is mental disorders and Autism in particular. But everyone are cock-sure that they have an opinion and their opinion is the most accurate description of the reality.
99% of these talks are naive but emotional nonsense. Guns are not the causes. It is the same stupidity as to blame the pain for the cancer. Blaming autistic traits as the causes of some particular acts of people who "seems like autistic" is just as stupid as to blame food for obesity.
Yes, autistic individuals have much more pressure in society because they have very unpleasant, physical sensation of discomfort, comparable with pain or fear. We can do nothing with it, it just is. It is almost the same sense as of being overwhelmed by annoying, loud noise you have no means to escape.
It might be caused by mere presence of noisy, loud, annoying, hyper-active, rude and selfish people, it might be just forced conversation or forced eye-contact - each autistic individual has his own sources of causes of overwhelming annoying pressure.
It doesn't really matter how exactly it works, due to some inherent over-sensitivity of Amigdala or due to dis-balance in production or metabolism of some neuro-chemical substance, it doesn't really matter. The matter is that life is much less pleasant task if you are one of us.
The most interesting part is that most of autistic people don't even realize that they are somehow different from others, and that not everyone share the same feelings of being overwhelmed. It is very difficult realization, which requires lots of knowledge and intelligence. You're, of course, heard of it many times, but you probably thought that it is not about you.
So, like it or not, the cancer is society. It is that simple. How people threat each other (let alone how they threat Asperger and autistic individuals) is the cause of most troubles. Just what people are in general. The bell-curve is very real thing, and so-called ordinary people, en mass, is by no means a nice thing.
I do not try to say that this particular shooter deserves any mercy or special consideration. He is just like a sick animal - everything is too late. All I'm trying to say that do not talk about things you have no clue about. You may hear some shit about ASDs and event felt something like being overwhelmed by stress or depressed, but some people live all their lives under a constant pressure, source of which they didn't realize, having no idea that it is not the world around that is wrong.
World is the same for everyone. The hell is other people, you like it or not. Especially for autistic people.
Some idiots used an analogy with rabies, but, no. There are no microbes that produce toxins that rewires your brain so you have no control over it, so, you are not responsible for your actions. This is an instance of that naive oversimplification nonsense. It is all mental, and it accumulates in fullness of time, as chronic depression or constant agitation does.
By the way, most of accompanied mild, non-organic mental disorders go together. If you have physical discomfort being forced to deal with people, you likely have the whole bunch of personality disorders in their mild form. They are just artificial names of the same thing - consequences, effects, reactions to an overwhelming pressure.
btw, that illustration in original posting, with a girl in a corner is a good illustration of a common misconception.))
1. Autism is mostly boy's disorder. That picture is about clin...
I wasn't going to respond to this article, or even read it, or even really acknowledge the HN culture anymore on account of gems like this, but in all honesty: SRSLY?
___Autism is mostly boy's disorder. That picture is about clinical depression, which is women's trait, and it is just being shut in oneself.___
The loaded _gender-nomenclature_ of this patriarchal, advanced-capitalist polyarchy has become so freaking thick that I would find it laughable if scientific literature (STEMers) even distills 5% of it from shared knowledge 100 years from now.
___In a similar vein, Baron-Cohen and Hammer (1997) argued that, whereas individuals with autism have extreme “male brains,” with better spatial skills than social skills, those with Williams syndrome show the reverse pattern and, as such, may be characterized as having extreme “female brains.” ___
-- https://sites.google.com/site/drjonbrock/publications/the-ot...
Now looking at your statement, we have terms like "boy's disorder" contrasted with "women's trait".
What are you talking about? With Williams Syndrome we have "female brains" so with every reason to believe that they are alone in clinical depression. That is, by your grammar of reasoning. But what is more?:
___This view of Williams syndrome and autism as diametric opposites has, however, proven to be somewhat simplistic (Tager-Flusberg, Plesa-Skwerer, & Joseph, 2006). Despite their sociable and empathetic personalities, individuals with Williams syndrome are often reported as having high levels of social anxiety (Dykens, 2003; Udwin, Yule, & Martin, 1987). Children with Williams syndrome typically prefer adult company to mixing with their own age group, and have great diffi culty making and sustaining friendships (Einfeld, Tonge, & Florio, 1997; Rosner, Hodapp, Fidler, Sagun, & Dykens, 2004; Udwin et al., 1987). The two disorders also overlap clinically.___
-- https://sites.google.com/site/drjonbrock/publications/the-ot...
So what are you, in factual terms, please, sir, saying? What is going on here, where your post ranks highest, and you have express'd what seems to be unessential and obfuscating sexist language, in such a way as to talk about what is clinical; and current research says, quite simply, and quite exactly the opposite of what you theorize on with false knowledge; if indeed they clinically overlap, that is?
What does this have to do with gender equality? I'm talking about his "theorizing" and his "nomenclature". I am talking about his method and his "grammar." I am talking about the future state of existing true statements that may exist in our scientific literature in "the next 100 years." I am dealing with Popperian-style skepticism; this is philosophy of science. Please, understand. I want sense, from nonsense. That is a big issue to me, essentially since I just read his post with http://antijingoist.github.com/AlphaSymbolic/. And quite frankly, I'm not happy about it. All I see is a logical paradox. A sequence of linguistic markers, and his paradoxical blobs of AlphaSymbolic text is way to clear to me. It's way too eerily clear.
This human man is clearly using language in a way that is expected and fits along a normalized pattern that suggests "rational." However, his theorizing immediately leads to "explosion"; so it is a matter, then, of what content quantities of his exist which, in principle, say nothing. How much of any of this paradoxical language exists? And how did we get to a point in society where what he says passes off as passively authoritative? -- What are we filling the Internet with? -- Ultimately, when I reflect on Godel's proof, Candor's diagonalization, it all becomes too clear that our Western society is intolerant to difference; and this can undermine scientific progress.
I am concern'd with consistency and the stress of things like general internet ecologies (and hypermedia applications) on organic cognitive systems (like us). Because, quite simply, What is going on here? What is he talking about? Is it informational? Operational? Pragmatic? Dogmatic?
What does his content and its ilk engender in terms of rational, dialectical discussion with no obvious linguistic glitches that mislead and misinform.
And really, you nerds write like robots all day. I have to put up with that, and I cannot use expressive language?
You address none of my claims; the response I get is "butthurt."
What is this? That is what I am asking. Right now. This conversation; starting from "boy's disorder"; and then "butthurt" -- what is that? It's a mod-chic-Nietzschean way of saying "womanish." Did I fail to generate a proposition such that your internal theory of mind, or inner homunculus, do not perceive it?
[Edit:] Fascinating. 1 hour, 5 downvotes and a response later, still none the wiser. I even gave away a futuristic subplot for it. Low point.
It is not me, it is plain dumb statistics. Wast majority of cases of ASDs are reported in a male population, while clinical depression in female.
Baron-Cohen's argument sounds solid if you consider that women evolve non-verbal communication skill they use with babies, who cannot talk until of age of 2. All that communication is well-researched and documented. Autistic people have difficulties in communication, and no wonder that they are mostly men.
As of language usage, different cultures, well, tend to use a language differently. Most of world's cultures, by the way, does not believe in an gender equality and tend to name things, as we believe, they are. There are differences between men and women and they aren't just anatomical.)
Although people suffering from mental illnesses may statistically be more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violent acts, the disproportionate focus on the latter is not unwarranted.
People are afraid of unpredictability. They are afraid of irrational people doing irrational things, and many people with mental illnesses behave irrationally. That's the long and short of it.
That said, we ought to be careful in making ex post diagnoses of mental illness as a means of coming to terms with a tragedy. It is merely a figment of the collective imagination that a person of sound mind would not consciously take the lives of many others.
Conflating predictability with rationality appears to be a common failing amongst the supposedly sane.
Just look at the hysteria that flares up every time an event like this occurs. Guns are bad, gunmen are mad. Unless they're police or military, in which case they're obviously in perfect mental health and heroes to boot. Very rational.
Let me play devil's advocate. From what she's saying I'm drawing the conclusion that mental illness correlates with drug use which correlates with violence. The prevalence of mental illness in the population is small, so the proportion of the mentally ill among violent criminals is also small, but if mental illness is a predictor of violence then being more aggressive about institutionalizing the mentally ill would provide society a better return on investment with respect to preventing violence than policies aimed at the general population (such as gun control).
We're not just interested in the proportion of people with mental illness in the population of violent criminals. We are also interested in the proportion of violent criminals in the population of people with a mental illness. We find that very few people with a mental illness are violent. We find that people with mental illness are far more likely t be the victim of violent crime than the perpetrators of violent crime.
HN is the last place I would look for real understanding and incite on the affect of mental illness on our society.
HN is the first place I would look to see part of the problem and misconceptions about mental illness.
It seems the mental health of our country is failing as a whole. As the symptoms accumulate, in time, there will probably be a disease or syndrome named after it, with a little pill to "cure" it.
I have other opinions, but they are just that, opinions and as such I won't pollute HN with my ignorance. I prefer to judge myself (as part of this country's failing mental health) and not others I know little about.
Let's get back to tech, a topic where our opinions are more informed and the facts more easily understood.
People tend also to conflate mental illness with "things I don't like". For example, when the Sandy Hook shooting happened, people were saying, "What a whackjob", before they even knew who the perpetrator was, as if it were like "What an asshole". (Yes, I agree that he's an asshole, but no, I don't see reason to believe that he's literally the victim of a head injury.) It does seem likely that the man was mentally ill, but that's not all of the picture. The vast majority of people with mental illness would never do something like this, and not all mass murderers are mentally ill. In fact, as far as I know there are only two mental illnesses that positively correlate with violence. One is severe drug addiction, which is a different class of problem, and the other is psychopathy, and people with the latter tend to be above-average in social development, which is why Ted Bundy was so effective: he killed about 40 people before he was finally caught.
We've seen this equation of displeasure with mental illness in the fallout as well. The NRA are referred to as "crazy gun nuts". Well, they're not actually "crazy". They hold strong ideological beliefs that we dislike, and they're almost certainly wrong (in that the benefits of ubiquitous AK-47s do not compensate for the drawbacks, because the probabilities associated with the events that would make then beneficial are ridiculously low). They're not the same thing. These radicals are dangerously wrong and I'm glad they're on the fringe, but they're not "crazy".
I also take umbrage against the attempt to explain away evil using mental illness. It's like people don't want to admit that bad people or evil exist. Hitler was crazy, Adam Lanza was crazy, Ted Bundy was crazy. Well, I have no idea if they were mentally ill. They were, however, evil. Evil exists. It probably doesn't have a metaphysical platonic form (a Satan) and there's no evidence that it has any supernatural presence but, in the practical real world we live in, evil's a real thing. It's a part of our story as humans. You can't understand what we, as a species, are if you leave it out. In fact, to the extent that evil and "insanity" correlate, I would argue that the causal direction goes the other way: people who do evil things, especially if they're rewarded and become powerful, warp over time and eventually go nuts. It's not the other way around. Mental illness is painful and horrible and sometimes it makes people do harmful things but it does not make people evil. Killing 28 innocent people, mostly children, for no reason is evil. Adam Lanza may have been mentally ill but he was also an evil piece of shit.
Even more important is to stop branding people as mental ill!
Mental illness in our system is defined like we are all chicken. We are defined healthy if we lay an egg every day, have clean feathers and don't pull feathers of other chicken in our cage. But not the chicken are insane. The system is insane!
And the system became worse over the time. A lot of more people are now declared mental ill, then ever before. Especially children and the fear of the parents are exploited by doctors and pharmacy. Pharmacy drugs only try to hide the symptom, and often fail in even this. The result is more likely a drug addicted kid, who will later visit the doctor again, and again, like a junky visiting his heroin dealer.
the author appears to be really upset about the current debate in the US about mental illness. and I don't see why. the article goes on a long rant about how we should separate mental illness and violence, yet no half-way knowledgeable person would assume a mentally illness person to be automatically violent. why is the author so strongly trying to prove a moot point? you can't argue away the fact that most (if not all) mass shooting in recent history have been conducted by mentally ill people and mental illness is a major factor when individuals commit such crimes. the author just messes around with statistics and appears to forget about causation and correlation - it's obvious that the majority of mentally ill people doesn't exercise violence - yet the ones who did were in most cases mentally ill. we're trying to find a way to prevent these shootings. and we need to ask ourselves how we, as a society, treat mentally people - not because 50% of them might be violent, but because 0.0001% are.
what we really need to do is starting to make a more distinctive diagnosis of what the actual mental illness was and don't just conflate all forms of schizophrenia with psychosis, bi-polar mood and depression disorder, etc. under mental illness.
and a last remark on statistics (and sampling bias), and I believe we can all agree that:
P(violent|person is mentally ill) ~ P(violent|person is not mentally ill)
however (and I believe this is the source of the discussion, correct me if I'm wrong):
P(person is mentally ill|violent) >> P(person is not mentally ill|violent)
54 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadHere's the image upside down: http://i.imgur.com/d095a.jpg
Just like: InternalFrameInternalFrameTitlePaneInternalFrameTitlePaneMaximizeButtonWindowNotFocusedState
That's not part of a class API, it's a cry for help.
Too cheap?
"it's a cry for help"
I'll agree with this.
Why is there no similar outcry for stricter car control? That could really save a lot of innocent kids lives as well as making the lives of all kinds of criminals way harder.
You'd also reduce the emissions of CO2 and the overuse of hydrocarbons.
Since cars are bigger and mostly are used on roads collecting most of them should only take a few years.
But nobody seems to be interested, why?
Guns are useful, to move people around, only in selected locations.
And thanks for the downvotes. I expect the explanations to become visible soon and to be well grounded in sitee policies.
I do not know why you wrote that in your reply to my comment. I cannot downvote, nor would I have downvoted you if I could. If you have a grievance, please reply to the appropriate comment (or your own). Is there an "explanation" or "site policy" I need to refer to in relation to my comment? Otherwise, please do not target individual comments, unrelated to your grievance, it is quite rude.
(And by the way I haven't crossed the downvote threshold myself and it doesn't bother me. If anything it seems too easy to get downvote privilege.)
To drive a car you need to pass a competency test, as well as be insured against accidents. Your right to drive can also be revoked if at any time you demonstrate that you can't operate one safely.
So uh, yeah. I agree with you, lets do guns like cars!
Any public use or brandishing of firearms, other than pursuant to self defense/defense of others, is a criminal act (with obvious exceptions like public ranges, public uninhabited land depending on State law, etc.)
[note: visibility does not imply brandishing, in the case of open carry]
Anyone who passes a simple safety test (simple enough that the bulk of the population has little problem with it) can purchase a firearm and use it (subject to safety regulations) in public.
With or without a license you can own and use a gun on private property.
There are certain quality regulations on cars/guns which apply to using them outside private property (i.e., if it's likely to burst into flames, you can't take it onto public roads).
There is no federal regulation, except for rules saying that a license in one state is valid in all other states (i.e., a Texas CCW license works in NY).
This sounds like exactly what the NRA regularly lobbies for. The only people who will argue against your proposal are gun control advocates (e.g., Bloomberg).
I wasn't suggesting a straight find/replace of car with firearm...
If you actually don't want to regulate guns like cars, but instead want far more draconian regulations, why not just clearly state that?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail
How many companies could operate with tens of thousands of people dying from using their products every year: cars and roads?
What advances in technology would have been required so peoples property rights were not trampled on with regards to pollutants from vehicles?
The reality is that that thought scares the living shit out of everyone and its become culturally accepted that there is a line in the sand on what types of weapons should be available to people. Perhaps the line for the US needs to be redrawn.
As has been shown in other countries (specifically, Australia where I live) when you reduce the availability of weapons that are designed purely for mass killing (our buyback scheme went pretty smoothly in 1996), the ability of people to do mass killing goes down. We have approximately 1/3 the number of firearm related deaths[1] (both accidental and not) than the US has of just homicides alone per 100k people[2].
Thats not to say guns aren't still available. They are. That's not to say people still don't get killed with guns, because they do. But the numbers just dont lie.
[1] http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/australia [2] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm
For example, the only way we ever had unions in the workplace in the first place is thanks to civilian weaponry. Leave guns to the national guard? Ha. In many cases, they were the ones shooting and killing the strikers. Given the current state of affairs, I wouldn't be surprised if such a thing became necessary again at some point. Unfortunately, sometimes the only way people (like the ones in charge of companies) will listen to you is if you have a way to keep them from killing you. It's not as common these days, but who's to say what the future will bring? I can understand why negating the constitutional right to bear arms makes people nervous. In the past, it was a way for many people to make sure their families were fed. For many people in the present, it's a way to make sure their families are safe in case the government fails us (again). In America, corporate interests run politics, not the people, and companies don't usually have your best interest in mind (just the bottom line).
I.e., with or without guns, the US is a more violent place than Australia. Drawing conclusions about gun control without correcting for this fact is a fallacy.
Incidentally, how do you define a weapon that is "designed purely for mass killing"?
[3] http://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/homicide.html
Nor should anyone be allowed to keep home any amount of explosive substances or explosive devices, unless for professional use, or any kind of chemical or biological weaponry.
Also, you could not own any kind of firearm if you have criminal record, poor eyesight, mental retardations and such.
No ownership is possible without having a licence issued by the government.
Those are basically regulations in Croatia for example.
Actually he had all that: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732467720457818...
It was also illegal for him to purchase a gun, and the law prevented him from doing so. Additionally, shooting people (unless they tried to shoot or stab you first) is also illegal. Didn't seem to stop him.
Megan Mcardle has an excellent essay on why there is basically nothing we can do about incidents like this besides perhaps collectively rushing the shooter (like we currently do with terrorists on airplanes).
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/12/17/there-s-lit...
Arming the victims also seems to help once in a while:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachian_School_of_Law_shoo...
People are already suggesting that the mentally ill be added to registries, much like the already-flawed sex offender registry. This isn't going to make life any better for the mentally ill, and certainly won't make anyone safer. It'll just make mental illness even more of a black mark on someone's record -- imagine being diagnosed for depression or autism once and never being able to hold a proper job again. People will be even more deathly afraid of being properly diagnosed and cared for, not the inverse.
The only reason the occasionally mentally ill (you heard me) gunman gets press is because the UMC media can identify with the victims. The UMC media can also identify with the gunman. Unlike Chicago gangbangers, they've known such creepy kids back in high school.
Was I supposed to have? I certainly didn't. I imagined a lot of things, on a wide spectrum, but not that.
But simplifying is human nature. We'd be unable to make sense of the world otherwise (he said in a hilariously un-self-conscious way).
This situation is so common, that people literally didn't know any better. Common sense about what things really are and how things works and why are naive oversimplifications and folklore at its best.
Common folks have no clue how, say, financial instruments works, or what software engineering is about, or what is mental disorders and Autism in particular. But everyone are cock-sure that they have an opinion and their opinion is the most accurate description of the reality.
99% of these talks are naive but emotional nonsense. Guns are not the causes. It is the same stupidity as to blame the pain for the cancer. Blaming autistic traits as the causes of some particular acts of people who "seems like autistic" is just as stupid as to blame food for obesity.
Yes, autistic individuals have much more pressure in society because they have very unpleasant, physical sensation of discomfort, comparable with pain or fear. We can do nothing with it, it just is. It is almost the same sense as of being overwhelmed by annoying, loud noise you have no means to escape.
It might be caused by mere presence of noisy, loud, annoying, hyper-active, rude and selfish people, it might be just forced conversation or forced eye-contact - each autistic individual has his own sources of causes of overwhelming annoying pressure.
It doesn't really matter how exactly it works, due to some inherent over-sensitivity of Amigdala or due to dis-balance in production or metabolism of some neuro-chemical substance, it doesn't really matter. The matter is that life is much less pleasant task if you are one of us.
The most interesting part is that most of autistic people don't even realize that they are somehow different from others, and that not everyone share the same feelings of being overwhelmed. It is very difficult realization, which requires lots of knowledge and intelligence. You're, of course, heard of it many times, but you probably thought that it is not about you.
So, like it or not, the cancer is society. It is that simple. How people threat each other (let alone how they threat Asperger and autistic individuals) is the cause of most troubles. Just what people are in general. The bell-curve is very real thing, and so-called ordinary people, en mass, is by no means a nice thing.
I do not try to say that this particular shooter deserves any mercy or special consideration. He is just like a sick animal - everything is too late. All I'm trying to say that do not talk about things you have no clue about. You may hear some shit about ASDs and event felt something like being overwhelmed by stress or depressed, but some people live all their lives under a constant pressure, source of which they didn't realize, having no idea that it is not the world around that is wrong.
World is the same for everyone. The hell is other people, you like it or not. Especially for autistic people.
Some idiots used an analogy with rabies, but, no. There are no microbes that produce toxins that rewires your brain so you have no control over it, so, you are not responsible for your actions. This is an instance of that naive oversimplification nonsense. It is all mental, and it accumulates in fullness of time, as chronic depression or constant agitation does.
By the way, most of accompanied mild, non-organic mental disorders go together. If you have physical discomfort being forced to deal with people, you likely have the whole bunch of personality disorders in their mild form. They are just artificial names of the same thing - consequences, effects, reactions to an overwhelming pressure.
btw, that illustration in original posting, with a girl in a corner is a good illustration of a common misconception.))
1. Autism is mostly boy's disorder. That picture is about clin...
___Autism is mostly boy's disorder. That picture is about clinical depression, which is women's trait, and it is just being shut in oneself.___
The loaded _gender-nomenclature_ of this patriarchal, advanced-capitalist polyarchy has become so freaking thick that I would find it laughable if scientific literature (STEMers) even distills 5% of it from shared knowledge 100 years from now.
___In a similar vein, Baron-Cohen and Hammer (1997) argued that, whereas individuals with autism have extreme “male brains,” with better spatial skills than social skills, those with Williams syndrome show the reverse pattern and, as such, may be characterized as having extreme “female brains.” ___ -- https://sites.google.com/site/drjonbrock/publications/the-ot...
Now looking at your statement, we have terms like "boy's disorder" contrasted with "women's trait".
What are you talking about? With Williams Syndrome we have "female brains" so with every reason to believe that they are alone in clinical depression. That is, by your grammar of reasoning. But what is more?:
___This view of Williams syndrome and autism as diametric opposites has, however, proven to be somewhat simplistic (Tager-Flusberg, Plesa-Skwerer, & Joseph, 2006). Despite their sociable and empathetic personalities, individuals with Williams syndrome are often reported as having high levels of social anxiety (Dykens, 2003; Udwin, Yule, & Martin, 1987). Children with Williams syndrome typically prefer adult company to mixing with their own age group, and have great diffi culty making and sustaining friendships (Einfeld, Tonge, & Florio, 1997; Rosner, Hodapp, Fidler, Sagun, & Dykens, 2004; Udwin et al., 1987). The two disorders also overlap clinically.___ -- https://sites.google.com/site/drjonbrock/publications/the-ot...
So what are you, in factual terms, please, sir, saying? What is going on here, where your post ranks highest, and you have express'd what seems to be unessential and obfuscating sexist language, in such a way as to talk about what is clinical; and current research says, quite simply, and quite exactly the opposite of what you theorize on with false knowledge; if indeed they clinically overlap, that is?
Please see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-paraconsistent/.
This human man is clearly using language in a way that is expected and fits along a normalized pattern that suggests "rational." However, his theorizing immediately leads to "explosion"; so it is a matter, then, of what content quantities of his exist which, in principle, say nothing. How much of any of this paradoxical language exists? And how did we get to a point in society where what he says passes off as passively authoritative? -- What are we filling the Internet with? -- Ultimately, when I reflect on Godel's proof, Candor's diagonalization, it all becomes too clear that our Western society is intolerant to difference; and this can undermine scientific progress.
I am concern'd with consistency and the stress of things like general internet ecologies (and hypermedia applications) on organic cognitive systems (like us). Because, quite simply, What is going on here? What is he talking about? Is it informational? Operational? Pragmatic? Dogmatic?
What does his content and its ilk engender in terms of rational, dialectical discussion with no obvious linguistic glitches that mislead and misinform.
You address none of my claims; the response I get is "butthurt."
What is this? That is what I am asking. Right now. This conversation; starting from "boy's disorder"; and then "butthurt" -- what is that? It's a mod-chic-Nietzschean way of saying "womanish." Did I fail to generate a proposition such that your internal theory of mind, or inner homunculus, do not perceive it?
[Edit:] Fascinating. 1 hour, 5 downvotes and a response later, still none the wiser. I even gave away a futuristic subplot for it. Low point.
Baron-Cohen's argument sounds solid if you consider that women evolve non-verbal communication skill they use with babies, who cannot talk until of age of 2. All that communication is well-researched and documented. Autistic people have difficulties in communication, and no wonder that they are mostly men.
As of language usage, different cultures, well, tend to use a language differently. Most of world's cultures, by the way, does not believe in an gender equality and tend to name things, as we believe, they are. There are differences between men and women and they aren't just anatomical.)
This.
People are afraid of unpredictability. They are afraid of irrational people doing irrational things, and many people with mental illnesses behave irrationally. That's the long and short of it.
That said, we ought to be careful in making ex post diagnoses of mental illness as a means of coming to terms with a tragedy. It is merely a figment of the collective imagination that a person of sound mind would not consciously take the lives of many others.
Just look at the hysteria that flares up every time an event like this occurs. Guns are bad, gunmen are mad. Unless they're police or military, in which case they're obviously in perfect mental health and heroes to boot. Very rational.
We're not just interested in the proportion of people with mental illness in the population of violent criminals. We are also interested in the proportion of violent criminals in the population of people with a mental illness. We find that very few people with a mental illness are violent. We find that people with mental illness are far more likely t be the victim of violent crime than the perpetrators of violent crime.
HN is the first place I would look to see part of the problem and misconceptions about mental illness.
It seems the mental health of our country is failing as a whole. As the symptoms accumulate, in time, there will probably be a disease or syndrome named after it, with a little pill to "cure" it.
I have other opinions, but they are just that, opinions and as such I won't pollute HN with my ignorance. I prefer to judge myself (as part of this country's failing mental health) and not others I know little about.
Let's get back to tech, a topic where our opinions are more informed and the facts more easily understood.
We've seen this equation of displeasure with mental illness in the fallout as well. The NRA are referred to as "crazy gun nuts". Well, they're not actually "crazy". They hold strong ideological beliefs that we dislike, and they're almost certainly wrong (in that the benefits of ubiquitous AK-47s do not compensate for the drawbacks, because the probabilities associated with the events that would make then beneficial are ridiculously low). They're not the same thing. These radicals are dangerously wrong and I'm glad they're on the fringe, but they're not "crazy".
I also take umbrage against the attempt to explain away evil using mental illness. It's like people don't want to admit that bad people or evil exist. Hitler was crazy, Adam Lanza was crazy, Ted Bundy was crazy. Well, I have no idea if they were mentally ill. They were, however, evil. Evil exists. It probably doesn't have a metaphysical platonic form (a Satan) and there's no evidence that it has any supernatural presence but, in the practical real world we live in, evil's a real thing. It's a part of our story as humans. You can't understand what we, as a species, are if you leave it out. In fact, to the extent that evil and "insanity" correlate, I would argue that the causal direction goes the other way: people who do evil things, especially if they're rewarded and become powerful, warp over time and eventually go nuts. It's not the other way around. Mental illness is painful and horrible and sometimes it makes people do harmful things but it does not make people evil. Killing 28 innocent people, mostly children, for no reason is evil. Adam Lanza may have been mentally ill but he was also an evil piece of shit.
Mental illness in our system is defined like we are all chicken. We are defined healthy if we lay an egg every day, have clean feathers and don't pull feathers of other chicken in our cage. But not the chicken are insane. The system is insane!
And the system became worse over the time. A lot of more people are now declared mental ill, then ever before. Especially children and the fear of the parents are exploited by doctors and pharmacy. Pharmacy drugs only try to hide the symptom, and often fail in even this. The result is more likely a drug addicted kid, who will later visit the doctor again, and again, like a junky visiting his heroin dealer.
what we really need to do is starting to make a more distinctive diagnosis of what the actual mental illness was and don't just conflate all forms of schizophrenia with psychosis, bi-polar mood and depression disorder, etc. under mental illness.
and a last remark on statistics (and sampling bias), and I believe we can all agree that:
P(violent|person is mentally ill) ~ P(violent|person is not mentally ill)
however (and I believe this is the source of the discussion, correct me if I'm wrong):
P(person is mentally ill|violent) >> P(person is not mentally ill|violent)