Too many people with their minds already made up and don’t want to be confused by the facts….this happens too often and this situation is a lightening rod for this kind of thinking.

Our culture is a violent one. Best to let us have our guns but we will have to live with some restrictions. At the very least, we need to be prepared to keep our eyes open for others that pose a risk and to take action. If we choose to not go to the authorities we need to confront the individual asap.

The black panther party armed themselves with assault rifles and they carried them, openly. Ronald Reagan spoke vehemently against this practice and used the weight of the law against it. Go check out those facts. He selectively violated gun rights of our citizens and he was right to do this.

The biggest risk to our country is financial and I have contempt for both parties that avoid the problem. There is a point out there that will be the critical mass for violence that we have never seen in our life times.

I believe Holmes left the theatre alive because his mission was accomplished. He sat by his car, waited for police and surrended peacefully.

Now, what his mission may have been is anyone’s guess until we either hear from the psychiatrists at trial or there is a leak of some sort.

I also believe he is suffering from schizophrenia, but that he may be malingering in jail.

We’ll have to wait to see.

He really wanted to do this. For some reason.
Problem with stopping somebody before he goes off like this is the same thing as an armed citizen stopping a mass shooting. If it’s stopped, it doesn’t happen and you can’t prove it would have, especially in the case of the armed citizen because the perp may be dead.

way too simple…
not real world at all..

your premise is false…
people who train with weapons who intend to wear armor in a bad situation will train wearing the armor… they dont intend to murder people.

in this case, the facts do not align with your point… your assumption is that he was willing to be shot at…

and then your forget the costume effect. the idea that you look cooler and are dressed for the job…

of course. if we really want to analyse it correctly we should analyse it against waht was needed or not, not what was imagined needed.

a man with a shot gun in his underwear would have done more harm, and not been in any more danger than the man with the body armor, as it was a known gun free zone…

ie. if he went to a military base with armor on and started shooting, its a fair idea he was going with the idea that he would be shot at

when you dress up in body armor, and you go to a gun free zone, and you give up with out any fight or tussle as you sit in a parking lot waiting instead of runnng away… your not intending to be shot at. your just putting on your comic book movie costume

by the way, when an actor gets into body armor,grabs a machine gun, are they intending to be shot at?

the point is that your logical condition is only logical if you dont try to refute it or point out how it doesnt work

just as giving away my freedom to the fbi to save 20 people from gun death a year, while leaving themsubjected to a man with a gas can and two cherry bombs… is not workable either.

with a few parts, he could have made a 10 gallon gas fuel air bomb… for the price he paid for the armor, he could have made lots of them… not to mention that doing so would have made him very hard to find..

by the way, thats another point..

when the police show up, does body armor make it easier to focus on who did it, or does wearing kackis a tee shirt, and so on?

in other words, good thing he was wearing armor, it made it easy to know which clown out of 400 movie goers running in all directions was the clown to shoot at.

this is why mob hits, which have a lot more risk of the opponents shooting back, dont happen with body armor…

body armor is not as much of a plus as you think it is… at least not the way most wear it. cops get benefit because most criminals dont go to a gun range and practice with their illegal unlicense weapon. so at 8 feet, they cant hit the whole body, let alone the head.

i guess the point i keep trying to make is that your fellow men (and sometimes women) are a lot more clever at finding the idea you miss or knowing sometig you dont than you.

the more you know the more you know that these ideas wont work at all..

its just one level up from “lets remove all guns”

a man with a car driving through a country fair can do more than a man with a gun that has to accurately find limited zones that harm.

just pick any big street march or parade and zoom without stopping… how far can you go?

personally, i would rather have them spend months buying crap they dont need and potentially someone noticing, than they be smart enough to just go to a gas station, get a can, tape, and a bit of elbow grease and make a vastly more powerful indiscriminate weapon.

in a way, we are also missing the point that easy tends to attract more than hard

and to such minds, body armor, a cape, a rousing letter, and bright noisy flashing weapons is it..

but to a real murderer who isnt nuts? you start a cult, and get everyone to show up and drink cool aid.

jim jones was able to get 909 people to kill themselves with coolaid… 200 children.. and a few guns got the US government official trying to escape…

you see… no matter what you try to fix in this area, your going to leave an infinite bunch of alternatives, many of them worse and not used only because if you have a simple answer, why work harder to the other answer. but in the absence of that, you have no choice and so removal of the easy moves them to the worse and worse things

and ALL of these solutions are ignoring that the problem was caused by the priuor cultural social engineere progressive changes that destroyed family, moved owmen into labor causing children to be under educated in life becasue most of their real educastion in family was taken away.

it has nothing to do with ease of weapon availability… want to kill the person in the room? you have a gun if you bouyght and prepared it. but you can easily just pick up a chair and beat them over the head with it. no chair? kick them to death

we will only be safe from each other if we are made into quadriplegics and are arranged beyond spitting distance…

then, completely isolated and incapable of movement… we will still hurt each other saying bad things to each other…

that is…

your not going to find singular solutions to fix a problem that is not uniform, nor even exists without fading.. the crazy with the gun once stopped by his friend, may not ever try again… the person who is labled to potentially exhibit the transient act, may never ever do it.

and all that presupposes all manner of false answer michief, like spite and race hate, or other reasons to generate conditions int he problem. ..

this is why, we as a peoples have to learn that you ahve to accept imperfection in an imperfect world.

noise floor never is zero…

It’s analogous to gun control in Chicago, where gun possession permits are impossible to get, yet the black-on-black murder rate by guns is sky-high.

I would prefer a clear differentiation between “therapists”(MSWs, MS and PhD psychologists) and psychiatrists (MDs), the former having little of substance to do in the realm of acute psychosis.

Capn Rusty: you are attributing rational thought to Holmes, a clearly irrational person.

Someone going out the door with a weapon and wearing body armor is expecting to be shot at. Assuming the person is rational, that is a klaxon warning that he intends to do something that will cause the police or armed citizens to be shooting at him.

Banning the sale of body armor to individuals might be Constitutional. Without the armor, would Holmes have murdered?

If a therapist or a psychiatrist deals with a population of patients in crisis (suicidal, psychotic, etc.), there will be a lot of threats of violence to self or others. Some will be vague, some will be detailed. In-between those two extremes will be a large gray area. And most of these threats will almost certainly not be carried out.

The therapist cannot involuntarily commit everyone who speaks of violence. Instead, the seriousness of the threat must be evaluated. Involuntary commitment is not an easy process, and one doesn’t want to use it lightly (not just because of a threat of lawsuit, either). I tend to think (just as you do) that a therapist should err on the side of caution, but it is a very difficult decision to make.

In the Holmes case, the psychiatrist appears to have erred on the side of caution by reporting Holmes to the team, but somewhere the ball was dropped, either by her or by the team, or both. Or maybe the evidence just wasn’t strong enough to justify further action. At this point, we don’t know. Hindsight is 20/20; foresight—and prevention—is far more difficult.