If you go to the trouble of having a database, shouldn’t you search it?
I’ve been reluctant so far to place blame on the authorities in Santa Barbara who saw nothing amiss on a visit to Elliot Rodger after his parents had alerted them to an alarming video and asked them to check on their son. Hindsight is 20/20, and they probably get so many calls like this that they can’t spend a lot of time on each one. Even Rodger’s parents and therapists seemed to think he was only a danger to himself, not others, because he was so careful to hide his homicidal intent till his rampage began.
However, as we learn more, two things stand out that seem like obvious errors, and not just ex-post-facto either. The first is that, although police were told by Rodger’s parents that there was a disturbing YouTube video involved and they easily could have watched it, they apparently did not. And this despite the fact that, because of a prior case of petty theft Rodger had reported, they were sufficiently interested in him to send two extra deputies to his house. The videos in question—the ones the parents mentioned but the police didn’t think it necessary to watch—were not his final, especially chilling video, but rather records of Rodger “talking about his feelings of loneliness, being wronged by women who did not like him and wanting to ‘punish you all for it.'”
This seems like an obvious error/omission on the part of police, especially because Rodger had been involved as accuser in a rather odd case of petty theft (candles) earlier.
But an even greater error/omission on the part of police was this one:
With the toughest gun-control regulations in the country, California has a unique, centralized database of gun purchases that law enforcement can easily search. It offers precious intelligence about a suspect or other people officers may encounter when responding to a call…
Before a half-dozen sheriff’s deputies knocked on Elliot Rodger’s door last month in response to concerns raised by his mother about his well-being, they could have checked the database and discovered he had bought three 9mm semiautomatic handguns. Several law enforcement officials and legal experts on gun policy said this might have given deputies greater insight into Rodger’s intentions and his capability for doing harm.
The deputies did not check the database. They left his apartment after finding him to be “shy, timid, polite and well-spoken,” in the words of Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown. The deputies saw no evidence that Rodger was an immediate threat to others or to himself.
And yet apparently the officers’ behavior was standard:
Traditionally, law enforcement officers infrequently consult the DROS database when conducting what is known as a “wellness check” on people who may be suicidal but are not threatening violence.
“Wellness checks” are problematic. They can be dangerous, so police are involved, but police don’t really have the expertise (or, probably, the time; they spent ten minutes at Rodgers’ place) to do this well. It’s somewhat of a crapshoot, anyway, even for mental health professionals, and especially if a psychopath wants to hide his/her homicidal intent, as I believe was the case with Rodger. People who are not stark raving mad can often dissemble quite well.
There’s a further problem. Let’s say that police had checked the database and found that Rodgers had the guns. Questioned about them, he may have been clever enough to come up with a convincing cover story about them, too. After all, he seems to have owned them legally, and if police didn’t think him dangerous they wouldn’t think his owning guns was dangerous. And although he’d been in therapy for a long, long time, as far as I know he’d never received a diagnosis of psychosis or been hospitalized for such.
Would this crime have been prevented if police had watched the video and checked the database? Actually, I doubt it. As I wrote initially, my sense is that Rodger was an intelligent psychopath/sociopath with some other problems as well (perhaps Asperger’s, perhaps something else), and it was mainly the first characteristic that accounted for both his homicidal acts and his ability to cover up his homicidal intent prior to those acts. Even had police watched the videos and checked the database—and even if they had committed him for a short time—I don’t think it would have stopped him.
However, I believe they should have watched the video and checked the database. Or at the very least, one of the two. The fact that they did neither is disturbing. Why bother to have a database if you’re not going to use it? How hard could it be to look something up on a computer? For example, don’t police routinely check a database when they stop a person for a traffic ticket, to see whether the person has a prior violation? What situation would be serious enough in police’s eyes to warrant a gun database check, if not one they’ve already deemed of sufficient importance to send four deputies to an apartment?
Whenever you purchase a gun (in a non-private sale) you must fill out a federal form and answer a series of questions. one of which is ““have you ever been adjudicated as a mental defective or committed to any mental institution?” Neither of these would have excluded Rodgers, but California goes even further, and prohibits anyone from buying a gun if they have “communicated to a licensed psychotherapist a serious threat of physical violence against a reasonably identifiable victim or victims.” Psychotherapists in California are required to immediately report such threats to to local law enforcement.
So, I’d be curious to know whether Rodgers ever said anything to his many therapists which should have placed him on the excluded list.
Why have a gun database? Really?
So you know where the guns are when the time comes to confiscate them, perhaps in the aftermath of a natural disaster?
It has happened before, and it has been well established that gun registration is nearly worthless as a crime fighting tool. That is why the Canadian got rid of their gun registration system.
This only highlights Statism as the worst form of governance. Four or six (both #s cited) deputies employed by taxpayers perform a “wellness check” on a guy with three guns which he is entitled to own by the State’s own smothering law. Four or six! Must be stimulus money for their pay. The cops don’t use the gun registry paid for by taxpayers…because that is not why the registry exists. It exists as a) a registration hurdle for the hoi polloi and b) as a log for future mass confiscation of guns when Hussein or similar suspends the Constitution.
Neo, I see you now deem Asperger’s as a possible diagnosis for Rodger. After I raised the autism- Asperger’s issue, you chastened me because “they are quite different” or something similar. I checked- DSM-5 does away with Asperger’s, lumping it into the apparently unitary “Autism spectrum disorder” diagnosis. I’m doing OK as a non-shrink, thank you.
Don Carlos:
I believe you are forgetting what I actually said in that earlier thread about Rodger.
I had mentioned a dual diagnosis—Asperger’s and psychopathy—and agreed that that was a possibility for Rodger, but that the psychopathy rather than the Asperger’s was the primary cause, much as I wrote in this present thread.
Where I disagreed with you (and “chastened” you, in your word) was that I wrote that I thought you might mean Rodger was Asperger’s (rather than autistic).
Then you came back with:
And I replied:
That, as far as I can see, was the sum total of our exchange in that thread on the matter. But I will add here that I am well aware of the changes in the DSM, placing autism and Asperger’s on a single spectrum. However, I will add that I certainly don’t always agree with the DSM and in this case I think that, although the two do share certain characteristics, they are (as I said before) very very different. I was not speaking of the DSM classification, but of the older terminology and their definitions (Asperger’s isn’t even used in the new terminology, but I think it is a useful term that describes a phenomenon quite distinct from autism).
Sort of like—to use an analogy from your own field, an analogy that of course is far from perfect—the difference between skin cancer and lung cancer.
So I don’t just now deem Asperger’s as a possible diagnosis for Rodger. I deemed it one back in the older thread, too, as I indicated in this comment in that thread and particularly this one:
Lumping the 2 categories together into one in the DSM was a very recent and very controversial change—and, I think, a wrongheaded one.
OK, you’re the pro and I’m not! Agreed. Didn’t intend to have you root thru the digital record.
But the Rodger response matter remains before us.
The NRA (yes, I am a lifetime member) has long lobbied for funding to enable mental health professionals to communicate with the NICS database. Guess who has opposed this idea? The NRA successfully lobbied (about 10 or 12 years ago) for a law that mandates a minimum of 5 years in a federal pen for any felon found in possession of a firearm. Guess who has failed to enforce this law?
The left wallow in the blood of victims as they pursue their goal to totally disarm the people. Pried from cold dead fingers indeed. These people know not the unintended consequences of their agenda. Teach your children and grandchildren well and start them off young (age 6) with the basics of firearm training.
I am not expert, but I have spent 8 years working one on one with elementary students on the ‘spectrum’. The range of behaviors and potentials of autistic kids is very broad. Many are capable of functioning independently with assistance as the reach adult age. Those labeled asperger are usually highly functional and would appear, in a different age, as merely eccentric. Bottomline: no matter the ‘handicap’ the individual still must be held accountable for their actions.
Columbo was a fictive detective.
There is no chance that a line officer will have the psychological insight required.
Californians, who helped Fast and Furious, who helped cover up the arms being sold to AQ in Libya, now lecture us that we need to disarm ourselves, our children, our womenfolk because some demon spawn of a Hollywood director shot up some women.
Can you believe that? Think about it. Keep that in mind when they start spitting on you. Compassion isn’t the emotion we should feel towards them. Empathy and understanding aren’t the emotions we should feel towards them. They and their Yeeland death merchants selling guns, need a Purer emotion than that.