Thursday, December 20, 2012

Mental Health Bill Could've Stopped Shooter !


A troubling revelation has come to light regarding a mental health bill recently defeated in Connecticut during this calendar year. Had it passed, that bill could have possibly taken Adam Lanza off the streets so he would not have been free to commit his heinous act last Friday.

In February Connecticut Senate Bill 452 (SB452) was put forward to remedy the fact that Connecticut was one of less than 10 states in the U.S. to lack an ''assisted outpatient treatment'' (ATO) law. There are just 6 states that lack this law. The Bill was passed to Connecticut's Joint Committee on Judiciary in March, where it quietly faded away because of opposition from the idiots in ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) and other assholes crying ''foul''. These dickheads, instead to caring for the rights of the law-abiding citizenry, prefer the ''rights'' of the Fruitcakes to be left to their own devices.

Although there is some variation, the way these laws work is simple: AOT Laws preempt older statutes that only allow the mentally ill to be forcibly institutionalized for treatment if they've only done harm to themselves. This is possible because AOT Laws allow a state to institutionalize a mentally ill person for treatment if the state has reason to suspect such institutionalization will prevent the individual from doing harm to self or others.

Had the law passed, it may have forced Adam Lanza to be treated for his mental illness instead of allowing him to roam free, and ultimately to kill his long-suffering mother and 25 others and himself in a vindictive rage. But no...the ACLU, ignoring this law's success in 44 other states viewed it as ''egregious'' and repeatedly called it ''outrageously discriminatory.''  What is outrageous is the pure gutlessness of the politicians to allow these idiots to stop the bill's passage. They all have blood-on-their-hands! The parents should get after them with baseball bats to knock some sense into them.

Psychiatrist James Knoll told CNN's Headline News yesterday that Adam Lanza was ''acting in a ritualistic way during the horrific events.''  Knoll, who does research at the State University of New York Medical School, said in a recent report that killers like Lanza see themselves as ''pseudocommandos...driven by strong feelings of anger and resentment, in addition to having a paranoid character. He plans out the offense ritualistically, and comes prepared with a powerful arsenal of weapons.''  Knoll added that killers like Lanza have an ''obliterative mindset...his 'self' is already dead and...his physical death is of little consequence in his own mind. That's why the little creep killed himself in the end.''

The Way I See It....no one can know that the passage of SB452 would have stopped Lanza for sure, as there's no guarantee a doctor or mental specialist would have seen the warning signs in time to institutionalize him for treatment. However, it is worth noting that proponents of SB452 had the prevention of situations like Friday's shooting in mind when they tried to join the 44 other states to provide Connecticut residents with another layer of protection from the mentally ill (and criminal).

I think we think far too shallow about these events. We concern ourselves with metal detectors, security systems, ''profiles'', preventing the mentally ill from obtaining firearms. This is shallow facile thinking. Want to make a material impact? Think deeper.  Cultivate a respect for how to teach compassion, nonviolence and personal responsibility in each child's mind.

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