Say a store owner had a diagnosed mental illness and a criminal walked in with a gun pointed at him and asked him to empty out the cash register. Or what if a single father was diagnosed with depression, and someone tried to rob him or take his children. Would you rather have had been able to defend yourself? I think guns are ok for self defense in the worst situations. Places where guns are outlawed are statistically less safe from murder and robberies, and it leaves families defenseless. Your only defense line in the police or alarm systems. But if you are black you are less likely to trust the police and if you are poor you have less of a chance of installing a security system other than bars on the windows etc.
Cops carry weapons for self-defense, to defend the victims and population from harm, and are authorized to use them if a true threat occurs. Often times the threat is exaggerated and suspects become victims, even of petty theft if the suspect panics and flees, pulls out a cellphone or tries attack someone. If they have a mental illness and are not using any deadly weapons, then I would say the police force should use methods to calm and isolate the person. If a person is drunk or disorderly then that warrants hospitalization. But if they are someone who is psychotic and off medication, a night in jail isn’t going to fix them it will just aggravate them until they get their medicine and feel safe.
Maybe the question we should be asking instead is, how messed up is it that cops can get away with so many fatalities on the mentally ill? Should cops have guns or bring weapons if they are addressing a person with a mental illness? I would think it would be more wise for a police man not to bring a deadly weapon wen handling a case of someone acting off from a psychotic disorder. The guns being in their hands causes them to act impulsively as if it were a criminal. The issue is not of crime, it’s of general safety. I think a different task force should be used to address people in states of crisis. There should be crisis teams for people in crisis and police officers for people who are breaking the law, or to handle situations of public safety.
I don’t think the laws are too strict right now, and I don’t like guns either. I’m a pacifist. It’s just that a lot of people with diagnoses are victims of crime, and to treat someone with a mental illness like a criminal makes many of them fulfill that mistake. I also think that if a person comes to the ER or somewhere with hostile or crazy thoughts that many of them do get turned away due to insurance or other reasons. My mom was barefoot walking the streets of the city when she had one of her severe episodes, and the hospital turned her away due to lack of beds. The system itself cannot boast security if people aren’t secure or being helped.
We have good cops an bad cops but overall it seems our capitalist system doesn’t regulate crime enough in the interest of the general population. People just seem selfish and to scapegoat an entire group of people with these generalized conditions is stupid and hypocritical.
The whole system needs to be scrutinized to minimize public risk. Why have all these shootings started happening?
The media has generalized a lot of these mass shootings by scapegoating a mental illness that is still misunderstood scientifically, but who has noticed that the majority of the shootings occurred from veterans and extremists. It almost seemed like a direct threat to America, almost as if a terrorist organization or cult infiltrating the population, a virus of evil.
Were these killers trying to make some kind of warped political attack? I also noticed that none of them were liberals. More like the type to be inducted into a cult. Someone mentioned that in Connecticut there is a cult.