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I think mental health in general is overrated when it comes to predicting or stopping future shooters. If someone intended to actually do this, presumably they would change their behavior to fool doctors. They would act as normal as possible. Other problems include false positives and the presumption of innocence. You cannot just revoke people's rights for being weird.
This is a such a handwave assumption. Why presumably? Is that what, you, a rational and logical and goal oriented person would do to maximize their chance of success?
Do you think that people who decide to shoot up their school/workplace/whatever are cold logical calculating people who sit down to gameplan how they're gonna min/max this to maximize their chance of success?
Fuck no, presumably they're sloppy and retarded and our systems are just porus as fuck and that's why it almost always comes out that they murdered the family dog and everyone pretended otherwise or the FBI knew about him but was distracted or whatever.
They take the time to write manifestos . it's clearly premeditated . the average hooter in terms of IQ is not dumb. covering their tracks would not be as hard as you're making it
I agree it doesn't seem that hard. Yet we see that most don't do this... So?
Like if you actually wanted to do a good mass shooting idk why you wouldn't just take the extra effort to go to a Manhattan subway station at 8:45 am. It would be fish in a barrel.
Yet instead they graze a few people at the local Walmart and get flattened by a dude concealed carrying
Maybe they're more interested in being the Designated Bad Guy and attacking symbolically (or having specific grievances that cannot be resolved in anything other than the current semi-targeted fashion) rather than wanting to rack up serious body count.
Nobody who can elaborate on how has anything to gain by doing so, and as soon as you become able to elaborate on how, you are now one of those people who has nothing to gain.
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You could like take your gun and attack a big vehicle and then have them divert course right into a big crowd of civilians or something. It'd be a national tragedy. At least.
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Yeah... or whatever. Say, was there ever a follow-up on that whole "Buffalo shooter was a group chat with a 'retired' FBI agent" thing? No?
I was hoping someone would take a shot (no pun intended) at the illustrious FBI lol
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I see lots of comments about needing better mental healthcare, but is the baseline treatment there really such that we can choose an arbitrary person with a mental illness and "fix" them? There are quite a few around here that know better than me. I've always assumed no on the basis that there are plenty of examples of people, even from families of means, not getting better. I get that addiction and tendencies to violence are hard, but it seems like we'd have figured it out by now if it was just a few pills and some therapy.
I wonder if AI would give us the tools to really handle this, either directly with models or on the basis of understanding and aligning complex unknown neural systems. But that has its own draconian failure modes to worry about: the Ministry of Love would, uh, love such tools.
There is no reliable way to "fix" someone with violent tendencies of this nature. Therapy and meds work, as do positive life experiences and other holistic measures, but it's far from an exact science. Even round-the-clock intensive care over several months is no guarantee - I once crossed paths with a man who had received such care only to find out he murdered someone afterward. The psychiatric facility was not found to be liable, because it was well-documented that they did everything they could within the capabilities of modern mental health care.
In an isolated world without any negative externalities, ThomasdelVasto's suggestion to pump people with antipsychotics is legitimately effective. They are quite good at mellowing people out in such a way that they're not going to be able to do much wrong, especially commit violent crimes. However, there are significant ethical concerns involved in doing so, and there is not enough social will to just blast potentially problematic people with mind-numbing substances if they display traces of violent behavior. We could do it, but no one wants to. At significant doses, they're effectively a chemical lobotomy.
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Can we fix them? No
Can we make them somewhat better? Maybe/Sometimes
Can we make them not dangerous? Yes* (*there may be some side-effects and we may need to force medication compliance, possibly in an in-patient setting, though long acting injectables are underutilized; also, has a lobotomized person ever shot up a school? a more targeted ablation may really be the best option for some)
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