Elliot Rodger

David, as our resident gun expert please tell us if I am correct that
most any idiot can get a semi automatic, or even a fully automatic with
a large mag if they put some time into it. My assertion is that a guy
who walks into a university with only a regular shoot gun either does
not really want to kill a lot of people, or they are a bad combination of stupid/lazy.

Am I right or am I right?

Guns and Mental Illness
JUNE 2, 2014
Joe Nocera

It is difficult to read stories about Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old man who went on a murderous spree in Isla Vista, Calif., last month, without feeling some empathy for his parents.

We know that his mother, alarmed by some of his misogynistic YouTube videos, made a call that resulted in the police visiting Rodger. The headline from that meeting was that Rodger, seemingly calm and collected, easily deflected the police’s attention. But there was surely a subtext: How worried — how desperate, really — must a mother be to believe the police should be called on her own son?

We also learned that on the day of his murderous rampage, his mother, having read the first few lines of his “manifesto,” had phoned his father, from whom she was divorced. In separate cars, they raced from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara hoping to stop what they feared was about to happen.

And then, on Monday, in a remarkably detailed article in The New York Times, we learned the rest of it. How Rodger was clearly a troubled soul before he even turned 8 years old. How his parents’ concern about his mental health was like a “shadow that hung over this Los Angeles family nearly every day of Elliot’s life.”

Constantly bullied and unable to fit in, he went through three high schools. In college, he tried to throw a girl off a ledge at a party — and was beaten up. (“I’m going to kill them,” he said to a neighbor afterward.) He finally retreated to some Internet sites that “drew sexually frustrated young men,” according to The Times.

Throughout, said one person who knew Rodger, “his mom did everything she could to help Elliot.” But what his parents never did was the one thing that might have prevented him from buying a gun: have him committed to a psychiatric facility. California’s tough gun laws notwithstanding, a background check would have caught him only if he had had in-patient mental health treatment, made a serious threat to an identifiable victim in the presence of a therapist, or had a criminal record. He had none of the above.

Should his parents have taken more steps to have him treated? Could they
have? It is awfully hard to say, even in retrospect. On the one hand, there were plainly people who knew him who feared that he might someday harm others. On the other hand, those people weren’t psychiatrists. He was a loner, a misfit, whose parents were more fearful of how the world would treat their son than how their son would treat the world. And his mother, after all, did reach out for help, and the police responded and decided they had no cause to arrest him or even search his room, where his guns were hidden.

Once again, a mass killing has triggered calls for doing something to keep guns away from the mentally ill. And, once again, the realities of the situation convey how difficult a task that is. There are, after all, plenty of young, male, alienated loners — the now-standard description of mass shooters — but very few of them become killers.

And you can’t go around committing them all because a tiny handful might turn out to be killers. Indeed, the law is very clear on this point. In 1975, the Supreme Court ruled that nondangerous mentally ill people can’t be confined against their will if they can function without confinement. “In California, the bar is very high for people like Elliot,” said Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, who founded the Treatment Advocacy Center. In a sense, California’s commitment to freedom for the mentally ill conflicts with its
background-check law.

Torrey believes that the country should involuntarily commit more mentally ill people, not only because they can sometimes commit acts of violence but because there are far more people who can’t function in the world than the mental health community likes to acknowledge.

In this, however, he is an outlier. The mainstream sentiment among mental health professionals is that there is no going back to the bad-old days when people who were capable of living on their own were locked up for years in mental hospitals. The truth is, the kind of symptoms Elliot Rodger showed were unlikely to get him confined in any case. And without a history of confinement, he had every legal right to buy a gun.

You read the stories about Elliot Rodger and it is easy to think: If this guy, with all his obvious problems, can slip through the cracks, then what hope is there of ever stopping mass shootings?

But, of course, there is another way of thinking about this. Instead of focusing on making it harder for the mentally ill to get guns, maybe we should be making it harder to get guns, period. Something to consider before the next mass shooting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/opinion/nocera-guns-and-mental-illness.html?_r=0

Torrey believes that the country should involuntarily commit more mentally ill people, not only because they can sometimes commit acts of violence but because there are far more people who can’t function in the world than the mental health community likes to acknowledge.

A March 2008 report by the Treatment Advocacy Center reveals that for every 20 public psychiatric beds that existed in the US in 1955, only one such bed existed in 2005.

According to data cited in The Shortage of Hospital Beds for Mentally Ill Persons, in 1955 there were 340 public psychiatric beds available per 100,000 U.S. citizens. By 2005, the number plummeted to a staggering 17 beds per 100,000 persons.

Studies have shown that between 5 to 10 percent of seriously mentally ill persons who are not receiving treatment will commit a violent act each year. Such individual are responsible for at least 5 percent of all homicides.

Give the mentally ill a bottle of pills and send them on their way, that is the American way now. SUPER CHEAP! And that is all that really matters right?

I dont think poverty would ever prevent getting a gun
anymore than it does to prevent getting heroin.
Crime always pays, often well.

The mental health system works.

If I am found to be not of sound mind, if this is where my ideas come from, then the collective has the right to look into the matter, and maybe force treatment on me or remove me from the collective.

Beside Elliot Rodger wasn't insane.

That's what they used to do in the Soviet Union. They locked political dissidents up in psych hospitals.

What he did was criminal

Not exactly the same as locking up Elliot Rodger 2 years ago after he said that he wanted to die and was clearly not mentally OK.

The primary treatment in psych hospitals is medication

Hospitals can provide medication, but it may not be the right type or dosage. And “treatment is about much more than medication,” said David Avery, a former director of inpatient psychiatric services at Harborview.

Group therapy, in particular, is key to recovery — so important that even the King County Jail offers it for mentally ill inmates.

If I am found to be not of sound mind, if this is where my ideas come from, then the collective has the right to look into the matter, and maybe force treatment on me or remove me from the collective.

That's what they used to do in the Soviet Union.
They locked political dissidents up in psych hospitals.

That's why we have to be very careful about protecting the civil rights/civil liberties of everyone, including the mentally ill--unless they are acting in a dangerous or harmful manner. Otherwise, depriving someone of their freedom, when they haven't violated laws, or committed crimes, is something the state can easily abuse.

Beside Elliot Rodger wasn't insane.

If he had survived his rampage, he'd be in a prison, not a psych hospital.

What he did was criminal, and he knew it was wrong, and he could have stopped himself from carrying out his plan, he chose not to.

He may have had problems, but he was also a criminal.
He knew what he was doing. He carefully planned, and carried out murders,
and he was quite aware of what he was doing.

His parents needed to get him out of that college and bring him home.

Group therapy, in particular, is key to recovery — so important that even the King County Jail offers it for mentally ill inmates.

this in a lengthy piece about how badly broken Washington states mental health system is

For as long as anyone close to them can remember, the parents had faced concerns about the boy’s mental health — a shadow that hung over this Los Angeles family nearly every day of Elliot’s life. Confronted with a lonely and introverted child, they tried to set him up on play dates, ferried him from counselor to therapist, urged him to take antipsychotic medication and moved him from school to school...

Simon Astaire, an author and agent who has been a family friend for over 10 years ...“He wasn’t just a little withdrawn,” Mr. Astaire said. “He was as withdrawn as any person I ever met in my life.”

Cathleen Bloeser, whose son knew Elliot from elementary school, described him as an “emotionally troubled” boy who would come over to their house and just hide...

He fled two high schools after begging his parents, in tears, to rescue him from what he described as a bullying environment. When he was a sophomore, a school administrator said, he suffered a panic attack — standing immobilized in the hallway — until a teacher went outside to ask his mother, waiting in a car, to come get him. He apparently never returned to the school.

The older he got, the more his parents worried about his future.

“They were concerned: Could he be easily taken advantage of? Could he be an easy target for some kind of a scam or whatever?” said Deborah Smith, a Los Angeles high school principal who encountered Mr. Rodger at two of the schools he attended. “Would he be able to navigate the world on his own?”

He seemed to have grown only more withdrawn after he left home for college....

Ms. Smith, the principal at Independence Continuation High School in Van Nuys, a small public school with intensive individual attention from which Mr. Rodger eventually graduated, awoke May 24 to the reports of the massacre and, later that Saturday, a text message from a teacher: “Did you see the news?” it asked. “That’s our Elliot.”

Mr. Rodger’s parents sent him to Independence as a sophomore, but it was already his third high school. He had begun at Crespi Carmelite High School, an all-boys Catholic school in Encino. In a 140-page account of his life that Mr. Rodger sent out by email right before the killings, he recalled bursting with excitement at the prospect.

But that turned to dread the first day his father drove him to school and he
spotted the “huge high school students” walking around. “I cried in the car for a few minutes, telling my father that I was scared to get out,” he wrote.

Before long, he withdrew from class work into World of Warcraft, the online interactive video game that had become his obsession. He waited for the halls to clear before walking to class. “They threw food at me during lunchtime and after school,” he wrote. “What kind of horrible, depraved people would poke fun at a boy younger than them who has just entered high school?”

His parents removed him at the end of the year, and sent him to Taft Charter High School, a 2,700-student public school in Woodland Hills. Almost immediately, he complained of being shoved against lockers and belittled by other boys in front of girls. Ms. Smith was working as a behavioral specialist for the school district and was assigned to help Mr. Rodger. One afternoon, she said, he was seized by an anxiety attack as he tried to leave school, stopping dead in his tracks in a hallway.

“He panicked,” she said. “He just couldn’t move.”

Ms. Smith said she did not recall ever seeing him at the school again. “We tried to get him to go back, but we were not successful,” she said. “It was too big, too overwhelming for him.”

He moved to Independence, a school of about 100 students with just three or four hours of instruction a day and a mission to help troubled children. The boy hardly spoke, spending even more time immersed in his video game; at home, he fought with his stepmother when she told him to get offline.

Ms. Smith, who became the principal of Independence the year Mr. Rodger was a junior, said he had displayed classic symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome: He was socially awkward, had trouble making eye contact and was very withdrawn, if very smart. “Sometimes at lunch, kids would encourage him to join their tables,” she said. “Sometimes he would. But even when he did, he would just kind of be present.”

His longest conversations seemed to be with one of the special-education assistants, with whom he would discuss World of Warcraft.

“He had this push and pull between his desire to engage socially and his fear of rejection,” Ms. Smith said.

In his last years in Isla Vista, Mr. Rodger had stopped going to classes and his life appeared to be conducted entirely online. There had always been World of Warcraft, but now there were posts on sites that drew sexually frustrated young men — including PUAhate, an online forum where participants ranted against “pickup artists” who had more success with women....

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/02/us/elliot-rodger-killings-in-california-followed-years-of-withdrawal.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3As%2C%5B%22RI%3A11%22%2C%22RI%3A15%22%5D

Asperger's Syndrome - Symptoms

Although there are many possible symptoms of Asperger's syndrome, the main symptom is significant trouble with social situations. Your child may have mild to severe symptoms or have a few or many of these symptoms. Because of the wide variety of symptoms, no two children with Asperger's are alike.

Symptoms during childhood

Parents often first notice the symptoms of Asperger's syndrome when their child starts preschool and begins to interact with other children. Children with Asperger's syndrome may:

Not pick up on social cues and may lack inborn social skills, such as being able to read others' body language, start or maintain a conversation, and take turns talking.

Dislike any changes in routines.

Appear to lack empathy.

Be unable to recognize subtle differences in speech tone, pitch, and accent that alter the meaning of others' speech. So your child may not understand a joke or may take a sarcastic comment literally. And his or her speech may be flat and hard to understand because it lacks tone, pitch, and accent.

Have a formal style of speaking that is advanced for his or her age. For example, the child may use the word "beckon" instead of "call" or the word "return" instead of "come back."

Talk a lot, usually about a favorite subject. One-sided conversations are common. Internal thoughts are often verbalized.

Avoid eye contact or stare at others.

Have unusual facial expressions or postures.

Be preoccupied with only one or few interests, which he or she may be very knowledgeable about. Many children with Asperger's syndrome are overly interested in parts of a whole or in unusual activities, such as designing houses, drawing highly detailed scenes, or studying astronomy. They may show an unusual interest in certain topics such as snakes, names of stars, or dinosaurs.

Have delayed motor development. Your child may be late in learning to use a fork or spoon, ride a bike, or catch a ball. He or she may have an awkward walk. Handwriting is often poor.

Have heightened sensitivity and become overstimulated by loud noises, lights, or strong tastes or textures. For more information about these symptoms, see sensory processing disorder.

A child with one or two of these symptoms does not necessarily have Asperger's syndrome. To be diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a child must have a combination of these symptoms and significant trouble with social situations.

Although the condition is in some ways similar to autism, a child with Asperger's syndrome typically has normal language and intellectual development. Also, those with Asperger's syndrome typically make more of an effort than those with autism to make friends and engage in activities with others.

Symptoms during adolescent and teen years

Most symptoms persist through the teen years. And although teens with Asperger's can begin to learn those social skills they lack, communication often remains difficult. They will probably continue to have difficulty "reading" others' behavior.

http://www.webmd.com/brain/autism/tc/aspergers-syndrome-symptoms

Adolescents with AS may exhibit ongoing difficulty with self care or organization, and disturbances in social and romantic relationships.

Despite high cognitive potential, most young adults with AS remain at home, although some do marry and work independently. The "different-ness" adolescents experience can be traumatic.

Anxiety may stem from preoccupation over possible violations of routines and rituals, from being placed in a situation without a clear schedule or expectations, or from concern with failing in social encounters; the resulting stress may manifest as inattention, withdrawal, reliance on obsessions, hyperactivity, or aggressive or oppositional behavior.

Depression is often the result of chronic frustration from repeated failure to engage others socially, and mood disorders requiring treatment may develop. Clinical experience suggests the rate of suicide may be higher among those with AS, but this has not been confirmed by systematic empirical studies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome#Therapies

Sometimes broken people need to be put away, for their good and for ours

That's the public mental health system, which is largely funded by Medicaid/medicare.

Elliot Rodger's parents didn't have to depend on the public mental health services--and they didn't use them. He saw a private psychiatrist, and private psychologists, and there are private psychiatric hospitals, had he really needed psych hospitalization. For those with money and private medical insurance, there is no problem getting mental health care, top-notch care.

One day in October, Rena Dubin got a call saying her 15-year-old daughter, Mia, who has Asperger’s syndrome and an anxiety disorder, had a panic attack so severe it caused her to run from her school building in Reisterstown, Md., and toward a busy road.

Confused and delusional, Mia was taken to Northwest Hospital in nearby Randallstown, the closest emergency room, where her mother hoped she would be swiftly transferred to a hospital that accepts adolescents for psychiatric inpatient treatment.

Instead, they waited. For nearly 24 hours, Mia lay on a gurney in Northwest’s emergency department. Finally giving up, the Dubins checked Mia out and drove her to Johns Hopkins Hospital. There, they waited in the emergency department for another day until Hopkins staffers tracked down an inpatient bed for Mia at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington.

“We just felt like we were in a holding pen,” Dubin, who lives in Columbia, said. “I was the one taking care of her in the ER, but the whole reason we brought her to the hospital is because we feel like we need help.”

The Dubins’ experience is an increasingly common one nationwide for psychiatric patients. The “boarding” of mental health patients in hospital emergency departments is a widespread problem that experts say is on the rise, in part because of cutbacks in inpatient hospital bed
,
,
.
Insurance coverage, which sometimes pays for inpatient treatment at only certain hospitals, further complicates matters. Heather Carpenter of Baltimore rushed her 15-year-old son to Medstar Franklin Square Medical Center in that city when he attempted suicide in May. But even though Franklin Square had beds available, he was boarded overnight because her insurance network included only hospitals with unavailable beds.

Data on the length of stays for each state aren’t centrally kept, but a patchwork of surveys and reports reveals a growing trend. A 2010 survey of 603 hospital emergency department administrators by the Schumacher Group, an emergency-room consultancy, found that 56 percent of emergency departments are “often unable” to transfer behavioral patients to inpatient facilities in a timely manner. More than 70 percent of administrators reported waits of at least 24 hours, and 10 percent had boarded patients for a week or longer. In 2007, 42 percent of hospitals surveyed by the American Hospital Association reported an increase in psychiatric boarding.

And for the longer term, his parents should have tried to find a residential treatment program, for adults with Asperger's, to try to help him prepare for a supported independent living program he might have been able to manage.