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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: geode00 who wrote (227755)	4/19/2007 12:02:19 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I don't think you can really take that away from this. IMO what this tells us is that in our atomized society people like this will fall through the cracks. It happens. Nothing will ever prevent every deranged person in the US from going on a murder spree, but since it doesn't happen often, I think it's a risk we can put up with- and we don't have the resources to make sure every lonely person who is determined to take people out with them when they kill themselves, is stopped- but the good news is, such events are rare, and when they occur I find it hard to blame anyone involved too much- because it's hard to prepare for every rare eventuality, and it's not even practical to do so. Again, it's all about risk assessment. That's not to say I don't think students need more mental health assistance on campuses. I think they do. I had a very good friend whose son began to experience severe mental illness while at UC Berkeley, and it took years for her to find him the services he needed. He suffered a great deal between the time of onset of his illness, and the time when he finally had his life somewhat controlled. The mentally ill are not ideal poster children for help, since they often resist care, and most of the time they aren't cute and cuddly- but that's no reason not to try that much harder to help them. The more help we give to the mentally ill, the less likely these types of incidents become- although again, they are already rare. My father was shot in a mass killing at Cal State Fullerton. He was shot by a deranged man named Edward Allaway (sp?). The last i heard the man was trying to get out of the mental hospital- he was found not guilty by reason of insanity, if I remember correctly. But here's what I remember - my father refused to join the other people who sued the university. He said, and I agree, the university could not have expected a crazed janitor to come in and start shooting librarians. My mother was upset with his decision, but my father was a highly principled man, and he wouldn't give on this one. I think he was right. While we want institutions to have contingency plans for events like these, and we want the mentally ill to get support, I don't expect every institution to catch every mentally ill potential killer, or to rise to the level of security of an airport, which is designed to secure the people passing through it. These institutions are designed to educate- they are not high security areas, nor do they really need to be, if we look at the odds of something like this occurring (but as I said, by all means have a decent plan- I'm not arguing against that.) Anyway, I don't think it's typical that everyone's a criminal and a suspect. I think it's more that we assume everyone is going about sane and minding their own business- and most of the time that's a safe assumption.