The solution remains the same: regulate guns, not disabled people.

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The last sentence of this article seemed more worthy as a title than the actual title.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/08/16/...-institutions-mass-shootings-perry/index.html

CNN)On his way to a rally in New Hampshire on Thursday, Donald Trump unveiled his latest musing — to incarcerate the vulnerable. This time, he's coming for people with mental illness, suggesting that the United States build more mental institutions because of mass shooters. Worse, it's all too possible some Democrats are going to help him round us up.

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David M. Perry


Standing before his helicopter, Trump told the press, "We're looking at the whole gun situation. These people are mentally ill, and nobody talks about that. I think we have to start building institutions again, because you know, if you look at the '60s and the '70s, so many of these institutions were closed, and the people were just allowed to go onto the streets."

None of this is true. First, we don't need to build more institutions. Second, the deinstitutionalization to which Trump refers — a process begun in the 1960s of systematic closing of state mental facilities and, ideally, accompanied by the creation of alternative means of support — may have created many new problems, mainly due to the lack of that second part, creating alternative supports. The pathway forward isn't to recreate the savage asylums of the past.


Third, the truth is that people talk about mental illness, especially after mass shootings, because it's politically easier to regulate the bodies of disabled people than the weapons used to kill.

For example, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently proposed creating a national mental health database, something he's already done in his home state. Not only is this a violation of civil liberties, a federal registry of those Cuomo considers at risk of future crime, but there is no evidence of an easy causal linkage between gun violence and mental illness except, as journalist S.E. Smith has written, when it comes to suicide. In fact, the idea that mental illness is a principal cause of gun violence has been debunked by emergency medicine experts Dr. Megan Ranney and Dr. Jessica Gold, and Kathleen Flaherty, a Harvard-educated lawyer and survivor of involuntary commitment who is now executive director of the Connecticut Legal Rights Project.


It's not mental illness, it's hate and guns


What's more, deinstitutionalization is not associated with gun violence either. Around the world, many countries have moved away from asylums, yet only in the US is gun violence surging. Mental health registries and asylums won't make America safer from gun violence. Pouring resources into asylums does nothing to address the untreated mental health issues of vulnerable populations or close the mental health access gap between white and non-white communities. Meanwhile, mentally ill people will continue to be much more likely to experience violence than to perpetrate it, even as we are stigmatized as future mass shooters.

But what registries could do is provide a convenient tool for locking people up in Trump's new asylums. I have clinical depression and an anxiety disorder. In my worst moments, I've experienced significant disassociation and hyper-mania. I've never acted violently against myself or others, but I've been at risk of self-harm, especially that one cold night in a Minnesota February, temperatures plummeting down below zero, where I almost launched myself out the front door to "take a walk," which at the time seemed like a rational choice.

As a white man, I will never be as likely to suffer state-sanctioned violence as people from marginalized communities. Still, I can easily imagine a bad sequence of events that gets me put on the kind of registry that Cuomo is proposing, then gives Trump and his kind license to strip away my rights and even freedom.


Trump suggests opening more mental institutions to deal with mass shootings


Progress away from the bad old days of asylums, the institutions Trump is lamenting having closed, has not been linear. The great wave of deinstitutionalization in the 1970s and 1980s was not accompanied by adequate community supports. The rise of mass incarceration since the 1990s, along with continuing gaps in mental health support, has led to both homelessness and the use of jails and prisons to incarcerate people with mental illness, especially those of color or from other marginalized populations. But just locking people back up in asylums isn't the answer.

Well-managed inpatient psychiatric hospital care is an important component of a robust mental health support system, but only when paired with programs like supportive housing, universal mental health care, and access to assertive community treatment (daily, individualized, care inside a person's home and community that focuses on long-term sustainable life success as well as directly treating active mental health symptoms). That robust web of support won't come cheaply, but it will almost certainly be more just, more effective, and likely much less expensive than building new psychiatric prisons.

In the wake of mass shootings in California, Texas, and Ohio, I argued that we cannot arm and armor our way to a safer society. We also cannot incarcerate disabled people and expect to be safer, let alone a more just society, even if we use euphemisms like "institutions."



The solution remains the same: regulate guns, not disabled people.
 
People that don’t own or like guns are more than willing to give them up. And it’s far easier to get rid of something you don’t care about than come up with real solutions. Because regulating people that are not the problem makes so much more sense than regulating the people causing the problem only.


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What’s the percentage of theses worthless shooters that were in anti-depressants?
From what I’ve read, unless their motivation was isLame, most of them.
 
Regulating people is as bad as regulating guns. The corruption is too deep. The slippery slope just as slippery. Don’t like their political views, off to the “institution” for you buddy.

Just take care of your people, be there when they need you, be the man.
 
What’s the percentage of theses worthless shooters that were in anti-depressants?
From what I’ve read, unless their motivation was isLame, most of them.

Close to, if not at, 100%. Either on them at the time, or off them when they should have been on them. But you can't just limit it to anti depressants, any of the psychotropic brain chemical altering drugs can have adverse side effects that lean towards violence and homicide. You have some folks willing to talk about it. And a lot of folks that are not willing. FYI, for years the military refused to accept anyone on these drugs.

Regulating people is as bad as regulating guns. The corruption is too deep. The slippery slope just as slippery. Don’t like their political views, off to the “institution” for you buddy.

Just take care of your people, be there when they need you, be the man.

What if I told you all but one of the young men perpetrating these shootings came from single parent homes, or homes where bio dad was absent? The lack of "manning up" runs deep in these kids history. But hey, who needs man? I don't need a man! A woman can do anything a man can! Well, actually they can't. They can't be a man. And these guys need real men in their lives. I'm starting to believe that masculinity is more likely to become toxic when it's only raised with femininity. It takes a man to raise a man.
 
What if I told you all but one of the young men perpetrating these shootings came from single parent homes, or homes where bio dad was absent? The lack of "manning up" runs deep in these kids history. But hey, who needs man? I don't need a man! A woman can do anything a man can! Well, actually they can't. They can't be a man. And these guys need real men in their lives. I'm starting to believe that masculinity is more likely to become toxic when it's only raised with femininity. It takes a man to raise a man.
100% completely agree
These women that don't need nor want a man in their life full time that keep men around is pretty toxic to kids. I can't imagine having a parade of men coming through to bang mom and you know it happens just as often as dad's just not being around. My ex wife's mother was that way until she got prego and married an abuser. She had never even told my ex who her father was until she was a senior in high school and she reached out to him he told her I never knew she had a child and I don't want you to be part of my family now. Women can talk bad about men all they want but imo they can be way more toxic and influential than any man on a kids life.
 
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Full disclosure. Dad left when I was 11. Messy divorce. He came around off an on, mostly off, until he passed a couple years back. I had 4 men in my life when he wasn’t; an uncle, a friends dad, a teacher, and eventually a step dad. It helped. But it wasn’t the same. It took all 4 to teach me parts of what a man should be.


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Full disclosure. Dad left when I was 11. Messy divorce. He came around off an on, mostly off, until he passed a couple years back. I had 4 men in my life when he wasn’t; an uncle, a friends dad, a teacher, and eventually a step dad. It helped. But it wasn’t the same. It took all 4 to teach me parts of what a man should be.

In all fairness (and Im not trying to single you out), but there's a lot of dads that are still in the picture that are pieces of crap and dont raise their kids or teach them to be a man

I agree that boys should have men in their lives to look up to, learn from
But simply because the bio dad is still there doesnt mean it'll work out well, and, for that reason, I feel like it's an invalid claim to bring up how these guys were in single family (mom) households.

But that's just my opinion.


As for this - yeah, some folks need help. Some need a LOT of help, getting places for these people to seek it without the social stigma is, in my opinion, a decent thing.
 
In all fairness (and Im not trying to single you out), but there's a lot of dads that are still in the picture that are pieces of crap and dont raise their kids or teach them to be a man

I agree that boys should have men in their lives to look up to, learn from
But simply because the bio dad is still there doesnt mean it'll work out well, and, for that reason, I feel like it's an invalid claim to bring up how these guys were in single family (mom) households.

But that's just my opinion.


As for this - yeah, some folks need help. Some need a LOT of help, getting places for these people to seek it without the social stigma is, in my opinion, a decent thing.

I spent 6 years working with this type kid. I can count the intact biological families on one hand with fingers to spare.

I have said for a long time I was better off with my dad not being around. But I had stable men in my life that were around. But a sub is still a sub. Even good ones don’t fill that void a dad leaves.

But in a lot of cases the men that leave would make sorry dads too. Men need to heal themselves before they can build good men.


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