Mass shootings - a few relevant links

Just a ready reference, I make no commentary other than that I consider these sources reliable. In no special order:

Mass Shootings By Country 2019

5 facts about crime in the U.S.

The real problem is mental health:

To Stop Mass Shootings, Read The Califano Report

Expert analysis has been ignored in order to use mass killings to generate support for gun control initiatives which have little hope of solving the problem. Many such attacks have taken place in "gun-free zones," for example.

Notably, Dr. E. Fuller Torrey has advocated bringing back coercive treatment for the mentally ill, since many mass shooters are schizophrenics. He is certainly not alone among experienced psychiatrists, although you would not know it from reading the mainstream media.

Psychiatrists realize that many patients simply cannot respond voluntarily to medication or psychotherapy. For them, there is no alternative but coerced treatment or institutionalization in order to protect them from themselves and society from their propensity towards violence. 

In addition, extreme political causes have historically attracted the mentally disturbed. Doestoevsky described the phenomenon of nihilist "mad bombers" in his novel, The Possessed (also known as The Devils).

It is truly madness to pretend such massacres are not obviously acts of the mentally ill.

Who really believes a sane person could target innocent schoolchildren, churchgoers, nightclubbers, or Wal-Mart shoppers for mass-murder? 

Roger Simon, "From El Paso to Antifa to LA: America the Insane"

Because of the sclerotic politics that we all have been living with since we were born, most of the discussion this week will be focused on gun control. It will be largely symbolic and almost entirely irrelevant. Ban AR-15s or not, people who wish to wreak havoc will have no trouble getting the weapons to do it. We've already seen that in places like Chicago and Paris that have stringent gun laws, yet have seen catastrophic gun violence.

The real discussion should be about mental health, not weaponry, but the former is far more difficult to deal with. Indeed, it's almost overwhelming. Ex post facto, almost all these mass murderers are easily classified as mentally ill, but only rarely are they interdicted in advance. Law enforcement agencies, school administrators and other authorities have been reluctant to take action to prevent the disturbed from acting out for fear of repercussions to themselves or simply out of lassitude. This is not only true for the potential shooters, but it also helps explain why nothing has been done about the tent cities turning our most beautiful cities into Third World cesspits. Or the government in Portland allowing Antifa to run rampant. No one wants to be an adult anymore.

We're going to have to learn unless we want these events to be the new normal — or rather continue to be the new normal.

Read the whole article.

Speaking of mental health, there is this about the Dayton shooter, also this.