this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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The passive voice in the second sentence is very telling. Who should have flagged him? Who should have taken steps to restrict his access to guns? Who had access to that information in order to put the pieces of the puzzle together, and take action? Our society and government doesn’t have a proactive mechanism to so. It is explicitly not the duty of the police. Our system is reactive; some private citizen could have petitioned a court of law, but who has the time, money, and interest to do it?
I mean, there are states that will deny someone a firearms license if they have been to a mental facility within a certain period of time. Even after that amount of time is up, you have to take a psych eval before being able to reapply for the license. So, the way I see it, what I'm saying isn't too far off from being implemented.
Yeah, it's not impossible, nor necessarily all that difficult. States just need to make it somebody's job, and set up a system that funnels them the information about troubled people, and gives them the resources and authority to act on it.
Good points, and I think there were many people along the way who could have flagged him and made sure he was monitored, especially since the guy had spent six weeks in a mental facility, and was living in a compound of gun hoarders, and had family who knew he was going through mental problems.
It sounds like the whole community knew, given the reports that everybody in town knew to avoid the guy. It's just our society and legal system makes it everybody's responsibility to deal with it, and near-impossible to actually do anything useful, which in practice means it's nobody's responsibility. Kind of like climate change, or car crashes.
And even more info on this guy was on the news today, saying some people knew he would eventually "become a mass murderer," and had warned about it long before it happened. Maine has among the loosest gun laws of any state in our nation, and now they are realizing what can happen when you don't regulate weapons and let them flow like water. And it's only the beginning of this mass murder craze - this will be the worst year in history for it.