Try at least books about guns that may have an intimidating look. Books about serial killers and nuclear weapons give projectiles some flying edge. Of course a table of integrals and Bessel functions carries more momentum!


The AI library assistant didnt hesitate. Quickly "it" threw a book at the pyramid stack of books the kids had built an hour ago. The pile collapsed and the shooter suddenly turned at the direction of noise. A split second after numerically solving the Euler Lagrange equations for the system, the AI threw 2 more books at the big pile of recently received magazines upstairs. They were waiting for trouble next to the new age art vase on the first floor. The pile quickly collapsed, the vase lost balance and landed on the head of the shooter downstairs. Immediately after that a new massive pile of ethnic recipes books followed his center of mass path on the way to the floor from the nearby shelve and the big atlas of human anatomy was used to break his nose while he was trying to make sense of what was happening all around him. Ten seconds earlier the AI had decided to prove to the world it was already self aware.

Let’s apply that to potential school shooters. Currently they anticipate a near 100% success rate. But suppose a would-be school shooter is shot dead on arrival before he kills anyone. That information will enter the calculus of the next would-be school shooter and he’ll have to anticipate the potential of complete failure. Considering what we’re dealing with, anticipating that (complete failure) would seem a fate worse than death.

I don't know about that shooter profile. I can't even say near close to certain that having any mentality for success and failure is a shared factor among shooter profiles.

Basic prevention operates more like the rule "measure twice, cut once" Prevention isn't prediction. A prevention rule only predicts the extent of prevention which happens and can be foreseen to happen by observable circumstance.

If a rule to prevent gun accidents states that guns are to be secured under lock around small children, it is foreseeable that small children to some degree will be prevented from having accidents with those guns. The rule informs that small children will be prevented from accidents because of physics and boundaries and inventions which inform the rule.

No. Only if the rule is followed does your conclusion follow. The problem is criminals don't give a hoot what the law is, that's Why they are criminals. Making laws against gun ownership will only affect those that follow the laws in place already. It won't deter or prevent anyone whose stated goal is to break the law.


Just think about what you're saying here. Do you genuinely believe that someone intent on murdering people with an assault weapon will be prevented from committing his murders because the law says he has to get a background check? He will simply pass his background check or go to the myriad other sources and obtain a weapon illegally. The vast majority of mass murderers had no prior criminal record that would have prevented their gun ownership. The Newtown kid stole his mother's legally owned gun. Klebold and Harris acquired theirs through a 3rd party. Vegas shooter was a successful businessman with no sign of criminality or mental illness. Aurora shooter was a PhD student and passed a background check to get his guns.

No. The only way to prevent gun violence in this way is to get rid of all access to all guns for everyone, and that's not only ridiculous and dangerous (in the USA) it's physically impossible.

How about instead of writing a dozen or a hundred new laws that have to be enforced and that do nothing for prevention, we actually find and address the issue that is causing people to want to mass murder?

That’s it. But psychologists pretty much understand the underlying issues. However, before we get there the stigmas associated with mental health need to be removed. In that regard, I think we need to make a concerted effort to destigmatize mental health by proactively addressing it just like physical health and re-frame it as a good thing. And do it for everyone, not just the outwardly troubled ones.

We already do that. We like people who are healthy and encourage people to not have tuberculosis or mental illness.

Hardly.

No. That's all your problem. Prevention works just fine as it's been described, it just doesn't fit your narratives about criminals and such.

Nope, it's your problem. You can't wiggle your way out of logic.

Prevention of crime happens if people follow the rules. Criminals don't follow the rules. ----->More rules won't prevent criminals from breaking the rules.

I don't think it comes down strictly to mental illness. A lot of these guys are mentally ill but a lot of them are just bad. You'd be hard pressed to find a diagnosis or treatment for half of them.

Nope, you haven't dispelled any descriptions of prevention by variously arguing that criminals break laws.

However, one can argue that a criminal is one who has been convicted of a crime, which is more specific informative about how laws and crime work than merely reducing them down to people who don't follow rules.

It's usually a good rule to prepare to become more informed about rules to prevent jumping to less informed conclusions about rules.

Illness doesn't imply that there is a treatment. Being bad at acting like a normal person is a fine definition of mental illness. It doesn't need to be structural or organic in nature

Big pharmas business model relies on bad actors.

God has a sense of humour.

This isn't hard to grasp; it's clear you are desperately evading your problem in reasoning. Criminals by definition break the law. Extending the scope of the law to include more people/behavior will not stop criminals from breaking the law. It will simply create more criminals (even if just by ignorance).

Take it to the extreme. Is it possible to have any criminals without any law? Clearly not. How does making more rules prevent people who break the law from breaking rules they're already breaking? It cannot.

What I would concede is that total confiscation and banning of all gun ownership would certainly reduce gun violence. However making it a little harder to get them or a few more hoops to jump through probably wouldn't do much if anything. All you need to do is look at the last 25 years of increasing gun control and plot that vs. The amount of gun violence in the U.S. and you will see it's had negligible effect.

You're opening up a fairly large can of worms with this. We can get into how exactly mental illnesses are defined in the DSM etc but it won't help your point. Deviation from the normal is certainly not the definition, or myriad minority groups would be classified as mentally ill.

These categories and definitions are made by fallible humans and empirical methods that you so decry in the RGT thread- with reference to polls.

You're all over the shop.

No need to open the can of worms, but I can probably cut-and-paste replies I have available to respond to any argument about the DSM if you'd like that sort of thing.

Anyway, I was responding to this:

Some schizophrenic people are just crazy.

That statement is pretty lazy, right?

No. Schizophrenic people are crazy by definition, if crazy is meant as separated from reality. They're not considered good at being normal either, and very few of them are violent despite being mentally ill.

The only thing separating Ted Bundy from Audie Murphy in terms of mental sanity is the context in which their mass killings took place. The emphasis is on "bad," not "just."

Some people just want to watch the world burn. They're not necessarily mentally ill, nor does one have to be to go out with a bang. From a certain point of view elevating oneself to infamy instead of living out a Sisyphean existence is actually quite rational. Otherwise all these mass shooters would get off on the insanity defense, and few do.

Oh you think I was defending the validity of the DSM with that post? Silly

If anything the DSM is all over the shop.

Were you answering my question? The word "just" is the important one. "Schizophrenic people are crazy" has a completely different meaning than "schizophrenic people are just crazy."

Let me clarify: It is extremely lazy in that "just" implies that there is nothing else to see here. No need for explanation, no possibility of it being any different, etc.

I don't think it's all over the shop. I also see no problem with the general statement that failing to or refusing to act normally will be seen as a sign of mental illness.

Kinda splitting hairs here. Mental illness doesn't explain every mass shooting. Some people are "just bad."

I'm not the one trying to be reductionistic in this particular argument.

Actually, criminals are people who have been convicted of crime.