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Notes -
I recently had an experience with a regular at work that left me in a bit of a dilemma. It has some worthy CW meat to chew on, particularly in regard to some recent events, so I thought I'd share it here.
Let me tell you about Hassan.
Hassan is not his real name, though his real name is similarly classic Arabic. Hassan is an American black guy. Nothing he has said in the years I have known him implies Islamic faith, but the name suggests maybe his parents had interests in that direction. Hassan is tall, in quite good shape, and fairly handsome - a bit like a Temu Young Denzel. As I mentioned, he is a regular, and he seems to like me in particular, so I usually end up chatting with him for a while whenever he comes in. The last time I encountered Hassan he mentioned his desire to leave Jersey for the south (possibly the Carolinas), something he's mentioned on numerous prior occasions. He has issues with New Jersey that we'll get into later, and thinks the south would be a more welcoming environment. But this last time he added that if he were in the south, he could get a gun (he pantomimed a holstered pistol on his hip as he said this), so that he could "be a man" and "take care of business".
And the reason I found this concerning is that Hassan is a textbook paranoid schizophrenic.
The very first time I met Hassan he spent 15 minutes telling me that the government snuck into his apartment while he was out and planted listening devices in the walls. He frequently expresses concern that "they" are out to get him, a nebulous shadowy they who mess with his Social Security Disability payments, try to steal his money, try to lure him into doing bad things, sabotage his employment efforts, and try to take advantage of him sexually.
More on that last bit in a moment.
Talking to Hassan, all of this comes out in a non-stop stream of consciousness type exposition that has never even caught sight of a filter or a reality check. It's as though every thought that occurs to him is taken as literal Truth, and never subjected to any kind of, er, sanity checking.
That said, Hassan is actually quite functional. He lives by himself, handles his own bills and money, cooks for himself. These are accomplishments he is very proud of, that frequently come up during his expositions. He will start by telling me how the people at the Social Security office are stealing from him (AFAICT, that was either taxes or a garnishment of some sort), then veer into reciting all the vegetables he eats because he knows how to eat healthy, he cooks for himself, but these people they not eatin' right and it causes problems, mental problems in they head they be havin' mental problems because they don't eat right, not like him because he eats his green beans, real food that he cooks for himself because he knows how to eat right, act right because he learned it in school, third grade, food pyramid, he learned that here in Jersey in school, third grade, and these other people should have learned it but they not acting right, that’s just Jersey, lotta bad people in Jersey, obsessed with money, takin’ from you, takin’ your money.
Just imagine that sort of run-on sentence going on for 45 minutes.
"Acting rightly" is a very serious concern for Hassan. He is deeply worried about people plying him with drugs, or otherwise enticing him into criminal behavior. He recently managed to get a job at a bakery, but he noticed his boss was sniffling and rubbing at his nose, so Hassan flatly told the man to please not offer or force Hassan to do any coke.
He was fired shortly after for some reason. "They" struck again. Jersey, ammirite?
So, we have a man with an internal filter that is severely misfiring at best, with consistent delusions of enemies out to get him, telling me he wants to get a gun to "be a man" and "take care of business".
I consider myself to be a strong proponent of the Second Amendment, but that conversation made me consider the merits of having a chat with my local police department.
Awkwarrrrrrd.
As that thought occurred to me, it wasn't conceived as a hostile action. Five seconds before that moment I would have happily told you that Hassan was the very model of "Oh, yeah, he's crazy but he's harmless." As my brain first traced that hypothetical report, it was largely directed by concern for Hassan himself. He travels on foot throughout the county, often in bad neighborhoods, but that's always been the case. Has something changed? Is he being threatened? If I were to take that info to the police, it would be in the hopes that they would be forewarned, and able to help him.
And, contrary to popular belief, I honestly believe they'd try, because I've seen it before. Someone called the cops for a wellness check on Hassan, and they caught up to him when I was there. Three of them showed up, because this is a small, safe town with little for them to do, and they earnestly tried to just check and see if the man was alright.
Hassan responds poorly to wellness checks. On another occasion, Hassan was trekking around on a hot summer day, on foot and hauling his old lady luggage cart. A much more successful black man (judging by the car) paused to ask Hassan if he needed some water. Hassan yanked out his gallon jug of water from the luggage cart thing and shook it at the interloper, yelling "You need water?! You need water?! You need water?!" I had a young second-generation Hatian kid working for me at the time, and he thought it was the funniest fucking thing he'd ever seen. He was wandering around the place for weeks afterward, randomly muttering "You need water!" to himself and cracking up.
It was worse with the three cops. Hassan was yelling and agitated and scaring other customers, and I ended up sort of forcing myself into the situation and just aggressively treating him like a normal customer to keep him calm until the cops left (Hassan responds very well to being treated with normal, respectful courtesy. Imagine that.)
You might think it was so bad because of the obvious racial element of three white cops stopping an erratic black man and trying to grill him with questions, but it's actually because one of Hassan's persistent delusions is that The Police want to enter a homosexual relationship with him and he has no interest in doing so. It's not even like specific officers. Just "The Police" in general. All of them, I guess. Hell of a polycule. And it sounds funny, but it's probably actually very sad. Hassan has told me that his deceased father was a police officer, and the interest in a relationship from the cops came from when he was a young man. I suspect that the start of this was his dad's old buddies trying to watch out for the son, but their interest and attention being filtered through Hassan’s delusional paranoia.
Or maybe someone tried to molest him. I don't know, and I can't exactly take his interpretation at face value.
So the optimistic thought of the cops trying to help Hassan while being mindful that he may be armed lasted until the instant it occurred to me that they might try to frisk him, because that could well end in Gay Panic Tragedy.
But really, what right do I have to red flag the man? He has never done anything wrong that I've ever seen. Hassan would walk ten miles out of his way to avoid the appearance of having accidentally stolen a quarter. He might honestly be the most scrupulous person I've ever met - and if part of that is fueled by paranoid delusions, then his paranoia is remarkably pro-social and it might be that this world could do with more of it. By what right should a man that is pathologically righteous be stripped of the right to self-defense?
Well, because his IFF functionality is broken. Because his current modes of behavior may be "pro-social" because his only move when he encounters anything that strikes him as sketchy is to leave. But it's not like the man is powerless now. He's above average in height, and fit enough that I assume he's still doing Presidential Physical Fitness Testing daily, just like he was taught in third grade. If he was inclined to strike at perceived enemies, he could certainly do so by hand. A gun expands effectiveness, it won't add intent where none existed before.
Unless it puts the idea in his head. He's been paranoid and talking about moving to the south for years. Why the gun, why now? Was it a random conversation? Was it the violence on the news, in the air? Hassan strikes me as too focused on daily life for that. It takes nearly 100% of his mental bandwidth to get through his day to day. But I only see slices of his life. If a 3rd grade teacher told him that good citizens watch the news, how susceptible to social contagion would he be?
The final thing that dissuades me from taking a stroll to the station is the fact that we live in New Jersey. Hassan is never going to buy an illegal gun - in the tiny chance that some ne'er-do-well offers him a sale, he would assume he was being set up, freak out, and flee. And if the state that requires fingerprinting and a background check and two character references and a psych history and a sign-off by the local PD and assorted other rules so strict they won't let TheNybber buy a gun... well, if they give Hassan a Firearms Purchaser Card to buy a gun with his Permanent Disability For Psychological Issues money then we have much more general problems. And it's not like a warning like that would carry across state lines, even if the Free Carolinas would take a warning from the People's Republic of Jersey in the first place.
So I'm 99% sure it's a totally moot point. But it raises interesting questions. At what level of non-functionality should people lose rights? Should they, if they've never done anything wrong, in spite of the non-functionality? When I look at things like mass shooters, I will decry playing the partisan blame game when I think the person's thought process is sufficiently disordered - roughly at the level of "GPT2 playing madlibs". Is that a level that justifies preemptive action? If no, does such a level exist at all? If yes, where is the line?
The recent boat guy with the bullet in his brain who thought the "LGBTQ white supremacist pedophiles" were trying to kill him for narrowly avoiding their previous assassination attempts? That dude seems like he might just be broken hardware in a way where blaming any kind of software is just irrelevant. But before the attack he was just filing unhinged lawsuits and expressing wild conspiracy theories (unless there is an LGBTQ white supremacist pedophile cabal, in which case we again have much bigger problems). Is that something a man should have his rights stripped for? If so, is that meaningfully different from believing that, say, the police kill 10,000 unarmed black men per year? Or that Obama is a gay Kenyan married to Big Mike? Even broaching the topic feels wildly ripe for abuse.
Is this whole topic a can of worms best left unopened?
This is the part of Uncomfortable HBD Facts that is very underdiscussed: Blacks More Likely to have paranoid schizophrenia.
There's a ton of results in this vein, and his Arabic name makes me suspect that his parents were into Nation of Islam stuff, Yakub doctrine and all that, which is of course schizophrenic throughout (very funny though), so it might be hereditary for him, on top of direct schizophrenia-promoting nurture.
But I don't think the beancounting method really explains the problem. Many, many, many more Blacks who don't get any diagnosis and generally function well buy into this zany conspiracist bullshit. In the limit, the whole narrative of Black existence under the yoke of Systemic Racism and mass slaughter of unarmed black men by the police in the US is a giant conspiracy theory with clear paranoid motives, and spotlight cases like Nick Cannon going off about melanin, people buying into Jussie Smollett hoax, Candace Owens spiraling into even crazier hypotheses about secret societies behind Macron's wife being a man, "black scholars" with mind-bogglingly idiotic and racist doctrines propped up as real intellectuals (I like Kobi Kazembe Kambon a.k.a. Joseph A. Baldwin, read it up), etc. etc. all add up to a general schizophrenic-paranoid tone in the Black community. Except – wasn't it Whites (and Jews, but in any case, the well-off, educated non-Black demographics) who championed the doctrine of systemic racism? Aren't Whites also buying into many of these hoaxes and libels today?
Unless you exaggerate greatly, Hassan sounds like he has quite a low IQ on top of his "schizophrenia". Mentally, he's close to an 8-10 year old White or Asian kid.
And I think this is the elephant in the room. There is simply not enough capacity to suppress delusions induced and exacerbated by the information environment. There is no clear separation between delusions and sincere confusions, Hassan won't have a mature enough epistemology to distinguish things that he pathologically overfixates on from things that just kinda legit sound right, even if you pump him full of antipsychotics. This is the ground zero of Black American Madness, along with smarter people than Hassan who also have a more profound illness and/or higher ego strength so they keep it together and spread their nonsense around. Then there are borderline cases who are relatively gullible and either propagate the message or simply do not push back, like that smart and non-insane Black guy once did for another celebrated Guggenheim scholar, Ibram X. Kendi:
Well, Clarence then probably got a normal job and never achieved prominence as a thought leader for his people. He wasn't exuberant enough to be made a champion.
…and then comes everyone else, who is simply overwhelmed by moral blackmail, the volume of second-hand "corroborating evidence" and plain emotional confidence. And here we are.
In short my thesis is that a small (large relatively, but still amounting to fractions of a percent of the total population) difference in the rates of paranoid schizophrenia, compounded by significantly lower IQ, creates a critical mass of self-propagating cultural madness in the Black community, which lowers general epistemic standard to rock bottom and then spills over to the broader society, warping the entire default narrative of what it is about. And now we're training large language models on this oeuvre, which seals the bubble of the consensus reality. I bet if I feed this exchange to any frontier LLM, it'll rebuke me harshly with the usual tut-tutting routine about how systemic racism is totally real and Scholars say so.
Regarding your actual question: I think paranoid schizophrenics, no matter how "functional" for the moment, certainly can't have guns. This isn't hard.
I've been increasingly wondering at what point you have an IQ low enough, that you develop paranoid delusions in response to a society you can't possibly comprehend. If you've ever interacted with a particularly stupid person, many of them have this obnoxious personality trait of treating everything they don't understand like a personal attack.
I wonder at what point the IQ required to participate in society hits such a threshold that maladaptive mental illness in response to it increases.
I especially wonder at what point the various dark patterns of our society cause this to happen to me.
I read this off a comment talking about the Sherlock TV show done by the BBC - stupid people think that smart people are wizards. They literally can't understand them, and when they try it's like a smeared caricature of a psychic precognitive superhuman. When Sherlock enters a room, he intuits the correct sequence of events from an incredibly spurious and thin bit of evidence. From the stupid viewpoint, smart people are magic guessing all the time.
It is not, in fact, magic, but rather a systemic way of thinking that is orderly and (ideally) well reasoned. But a stupid person might go 'what makes your magic guess better than mine, huh?'
If you can't understand people's reasons, you sure as hell can't understand their motivations. It's easier to believe that your enemies are malevolent cackling pedophiles than to understand them as agent-actors with self-interest and multiple motivations. And when a smarter person disagrees with you publicly for reasons you can't understand, you lash back in narcissist ego-defense. People don't like being made to feel stupid even if they are and will lash out in comically disproportionate ways.
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