Wrong issue

[tagryn]

The issue up for debate in the wake of the VT shootings isn't so much gun control, though that's the script the media are following, but whether mentally disturbed persons should be required/forced to take medication to moderate their condition. There's reports Cho (the shooter) was on some kind of meds, but no clarification as of yet what they were. From what I've read, though, he was such a loner that probably nobody will ever be sure if he went off them or not.

However, it sounds like he'd been plotting this out for months, based on his gun-buying pattern, so I don't know if the psychotic-break scenario works, either.

Comments

[jilara.livejournal.com]

When I have my psychotic break, they'll point to the fact that I've been buying guns for 30 years, so obviously was plotting for a looong time. [grimace]

Seriously, though, you can't use buying patterns to predict these things. And sometimes, medications can actually bring about the change, by removing the inhibiting factors in the person's psychology. (This is supposedly what happens when people on antidepressants commit suicide after starting to take them.) Every case is different. I wonder what the premeditation factor is in when he bought the locks and chains for the doors?

[tagryn]

Which reminds me of the old Bill Cosby joke: "Some people say they take drugs so they can ampify their personality. But what if your an a$$hole?"

What I meant by the timing is that AFAIK he bought one of the guns used in the attack, waited the required period, then bought the other one recently. I could be wrong about that timeline, however. The videos that NBC received also point to careful premediation.

I think some of the media hand-wringing is because the realization that there are psychopaths and sociopaths walking around isn't a pleasant one, so trying to find "solutions" is a natural workaround. On the other hand, sometimes it *is* schitzophrenia...the field of understanding brain chemistry is at best an inexact/incomplete science at this point IMO.

[jilara.livejournal.com]

Wackos can plan and premeditate with the best of them.

And (sigh) all of the descriptions of this guy took me back a little too vividly to a stalker I had, a couple decades ago, a gun enthusiast who wrote rambling letters to me railing against "cute little boys" and "bitches" and said it wasn't his fault he'd been involved with "women who wanted to be beat up and raped." He offered to kill a drug dealer "or other scum" to "show the sincerity of his affection." (The cops told me to come back after he'd hurt someone. Fortunately it never came to that, because people *did* intervene in his case.)