President Obama says, "We don't have a monopoly on crazy people."
NAMI says nothing. Typical.
I say there's apparently no monopoly on bigotry.
“We don’t have a monopoly on crazy people.” – Barack Obama.
Apparently President Obama doesn’t know what it is like to be a member of an oppressed minority.
He doesn’t seem to know what it feels like to be the part of a group of people who are blamed for every violent action that makes the news. People who don’t actually commit most of those acts of violence. He doesn’t know that on any given day more people are murdered by assailants who are not mentally ill than were killed at Virginia Tech. And not only are we more likely to be the victims of violent crime than its perpetrators, we are ten times more likely to be the victims of violent crime than everyone else.
Let’s change one word in what Mr. Obama said.
“We don’t have a monopoly on black people.”
Look at Nigeria, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The black people there are killing each other by the hundreds, thousands, and millions over religious and ethnic differences. In the United States the same thing is expressed as Bloods versus Crips and East Side versus West Side. In the 1990s it was Tutsi versus Hutu in Rwanda and Burundi. In the US it was Tupac versus Biggie Smalls.
The United States has the best justice system in the world. Our juries are comprised of citizens vetted by qualified attorneys who attended first-class law schools, lawyers just like the President and the First Lady. Our prisons are full of black people for a reason. George Zimmerman was acquitted for killing Trayvon Martin because black people are as prone to violence as crazy people.
The solution to all the violence caused by black people is simple. Put all their names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and anything else useful in tracking them in an FBI database, accessible to anyone so they can’t buy guns at gun shows. Or get jobs. Or rent apartments in my neighborhood. Some people suggest we preemptively round up all the black people and put them in jail, or camps, or send them back to Africa, or just kill them. That seems pretty extreme, but how much violent crime do they have in Sweden or Iceland? White people haven’t gone to war with each other over ethnic differences since the 20th century. Muslims don’t count, because they’re worse than the blacks.
I sure as hell am glad I never ran into a crazy black person like Wesley Willis. He would have killed me with his keyboard. I don’t know how he found the time to make so many records when he must have been killing more people around Chicago than all the drug dealers there.
Have I spewed enough hate for you, Mr. Obama?
I’m not in the least surprised you can’t associate the fear, hatred, violence, stigma and degradation directed at the mentally ill with the exact same thing directed at African Americans, Muslims, immigrants, homosexuals, Mormons, people receiving some form of government assistance, or anyone else not considered ‘real Americans’ by whoever defines themself as a ‘real American.’ Why? Because the mentally interesting are less than human. We’re the one group everyone can agree is lower than undocumented terrorists who have entered this country illegally to steal the jobs of domestic terrorists.
I don’t have a problem with being called “crazy.” I self-identify as “batshit crazy.” Politically correct “person first” bullshit isn’t going to make things better. It’s not the terminology that hurts, it’s everything else.
Let’s examine things a little closer.
In referring to mass shootings, especially at schools, Mr. Obama also said, “We get a new one every week it seems.”
There have been 74 shootings at schools since Sandy Hook. I could find instances of ten, count them, 10 people with either a history, or after-the-fact diagnosis, of a mental illness of some kind who were the shooters, attempted to harm people at a school, didn’t use a gun, or merely threatened violence at a school. Incidents in the last two groups weren’t included in the 74 incidents that made it into whatever sources are used by the media outlets quoting that figure. Doing really bad statistical analysis by including the people who didn’t use guns or didn’t do anything in the group of crazies who shot or shot at students, that means 13.5% of the most recent school shootings were committed, or potentially committed, by lunatics. The generally accepted figure bandied about is one person in four will have some form of mental health issue in their life, so using even more bad statistics – just like politicians and most media outlets like to do - that’s not even meeting random chance probabilities. We. Aren’t. The. Problem.
OK Mr. Obama, let’s replace “black” with “crazy,” and do a little editing, in part of what I wrote to show you how your bigotry will just make things worse for us.
The solution to all the violence caused by crazy people is simple. Put all their names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and anything else useful in tracking them in an FBI database, accessible to anyone so they can’t buy guns at gun shows. Or get jobs. Or rent apartments in my neighborhood. Some people suggest we preemptively round up all the crazy people and put them in jail, or camps, or just kill them. That seems pretty extreme, but how much violent crime caused by crazies do they have in Germany?
You don’t think people have seriously suggested that we get rounded up and put away, or even systematically exterminated? Think again. Granted, preemptive imprisonment is a far more popular idea.
Jesus didn’t have a problem with us, and got pissed off at people who did. Including his disciples. Matthew 17:14-20. That’s not a particularly obscure passage. Give it a read, Mr. President, and rethink your bigotry.
Where’s NAMBLA NAMI? How come they haven’t posted anything about what President Obama said? Isn’t fighting bigotry and stigma supposed to be their job? Oh, wait. They’re totally into perpetuating the myth that mental illness = violence. No, really. Killing lots of people is just something crazy people do. They just keep using the same press release, with a different town, shooter and body count. They don’t expect any better of us. We’re now nothing more to them than a reason for their existence as a professional fundraising organization.
Slate article from May 2014 that expands upon the point I made in my essay from December of 2012.
From the Slate article How to Stop Violence by Laura L. Hayes
We are a culture awash in anger.
Violence is not a product of mental illness. Nor is violence generally the action of ordinary, stable individuals who suddenly “break” and commit crimes of passion. Violent crimes are committed by violent people, those who do not have the skills to manage their anger. Most homicides are committed by people with a history of violence. Murderers are rarely ordinary, law-abiding citizens, and they are also rarely mentally ill. Violence is a product of compromised anger management skills.
In a summary of studies on murder and prior record of violence, Don Kates and Gary Mauser found that 80 to 90 percent of murderers had prior police records, in contrast to 15 percent of American adults overall. In a study of domestic murderers, 46 percent of the perpetrators had had a restraining order against them at some time. Family murders are preceded by prior domestic violence more than 90 percent of the time. Violent crimes are committed by people who lack the skills to modulate anger, express it constructively, and move beyond it.
From my essay
Guns and Mental Illness - No Easy Answer
Even though we are not much more violent than normal people, just perceived as such, the mentally ill are a convenient scapegoat to explain the inexplicable. The only proof most people need that someone is crazy is the fact they killed a lot of people. Most people can’t accept a motive that doesn't involve voices in someone’s head. It doesn't matter if the shooter survived like Anders Breivik, or it was obvious from his history like Wade Page. Racism and idiocy aren't enough, so crazy has to be involved. When Bruce Pardo dressed up like Santa and, on Christmas Eve 2008, killed his ex-wife and almost all of her family with a homemade flamethrower, the overwhelming rage many people feel when you combine a messy divorce with severe financial problems apparently were not motive enough. Add shame and failure to the mix and the same can said for
every family annihilator who kills a bunch of people he feels were responsible for getting him fired, his family, and himself. Mental illness is the only acceptable explanation because people are afraid to confront the fact that humans are inherently violent creatures; that our hands evolved to use fists as weapons as well as to hold other tools. They are afraid to confront how easy it is for the veneer of civilization to slip away; that anger and alcohol disinhibit more effectively than an abnormal psyche or neurological architecture. They are afraid to confront how a neighbor, coworker, family member, spouse, partner, or they themselves could be just a couple more drinks or one more bad performance review away from being the next person to go on a killing spree. It’s far better for the mentally interesting to be the sin eaters than to face that possibility.
Still, the unknown motive is the worst of all. It’s better to have some reason, any reason to explain what happened. Otherwise the universe is a random, uncaring place that could have already sent a gamma ray burst our way that will destroy all life on Earth just as easily as someone can send a message in the blood of the innocent while neglecting to tell anyone how to read it.
Propublica has an interview with Dr. Jeffrey Swanson, a professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine. Finally, a voice of sanity and reason from the psychiatric profession makes it to something approaching the mainstream! Here are some rock-hard numbers that the mainstream press with preconceived objectivity utterly hate:
Mass shootings are relatively rare events that account for only a tiny fraction of American gun deaths each year. But when you look specifically at mass shootings ― how big a factor is mental illness?
On the face of it, a mass shooting is the product of a disordered mental process. You don't have to be a psychiatrist: what normal person would go out and shoot a bunch of strangers?
But the risk factors for a mass shooting are shared by a lot of people who aren't going to do it. If you paint the picture of a young, isolated, delusional young man ― that probably describes thousands of other young men.
A 2001 study looked specifically at 34 adolescent mass murderers, all male. 70 percent were described as a loner. 61.5 percent had problems with substance abuse. 48 percent had preoccupations with weapons. 43.5 percent had been victims of bullying. Only 23 percent had a documented psychiatric history of any kind ― which means 3 out of 4 did not.
People with serious mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, do have a slightly higher risk of committing violence than members of the general population. Yet most violence is not attributable to mental illness. Can you walk us through the numbers?
People with serious mental illness are 3 to 4 times more likely to be violent than those who aren't. But the vast majority of people with mental illness are not violent and never will be.
Most violence in society is caused by other things.
Even if we had a perfect mental health care system, that is not going to solve our gun violence problem. If we were able to magically cure schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression, that would be wonderful, but overall violence would go down by only about 4 percent.
Guess us crazies has to get all uppity about our civil rights by our own selfs. Else we all gonna haf’ ta pass as not crazy by not goin’ to no doctors and takin’ no medicines that’ll git us in a big FBI list the whole wide world kin read.