More Gun Madness At The Times

Yeah, yeah, the sun rises in the east, my morning paper is delivered, and the Times has another daft article about gun rights. Their latest:

Mental Health Issues Put 34,500 on New York’s No-Guns List

Is that a good thing or an emerging scandal? It's complicated! Remember, in lib-world taking guns away from people who respect the law is a good thing. But taking guns away from victims of victims of society, such as the mentally ill, is problematic. Away we go:

A newly created database of New Yorkers deemed too mentally unstable to carry firearms has grown to roughly 34,500 names, a previously undisclosed figure that has raised concerns among some mental health advocates that too many people have been categorized as dangerous.

Ahh, we need to protect the victims (and minimize their tendency to violence). The Times offers some background, with my emphasis:

The database, established in the aftermath of the mass shooting in 2012 at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and maintained by the state Division of Criminal Justice Services, is the result of the Safe Act. It is an expansive package of gun control measures pushed through by the administration of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. The law, better known for its ban on assault weapons, compels licensed mental health professionals in New York to report to the authorities any patient “likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to self or others.”

And back to the analysis:

But the number of entries in the database highlights the difficulty of America’s complicated balancing act between public safety and the right to bear arms when it comes to people with mental health issues. “That seems extraordinarily high to me,” said Sam Tsemberis, a former director of New York City’s involuntary hospitalization program for homeless and dangerous people, now the chief executive of Pathways to Housing, which provides housing to the mentally ill. “Assumed dangerousness is a far cry from actual dangerousness.”

Dangerous to whom? Remember (and the Times will barely nudge your memory on this point), roughly 60% of gun deaths are suicides. Pressing on, the Times notes the alliance of gun nuts with, well, nut nuts:

Similar laws in other states have raised the ire of gun rights proponents, who worry that people who posed no threat at all would have their rights infringed. Mental health advocates have also argued that the laws unnecessarily stigmatized people with mental illnesses.

Some ink is splashed towards TimesWorld:

Gun control supporters argue a wide net is appropriate, given the potentially dire consequences.

Even if just one dangerous person had a gun taken away, “that’s a good thing,” said Brian Malte, senior national policy director of the Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence. The National Rifle Association of America favors a separate “process of adjudication” to make sure that “these decisions are not being made capriciously and maliciously,” Andrew Arulanandam, a spokesman, said.

And back towards obfuscation:

Mental health professionals and advocates point out, however, the vast majority of people with mental illnesses are not violent. Accurately predicting whether someone will be violent, they said, is also a highly fraught process.

Again, violent towards whom? Suicide prevention should be a key goal here, but the only mention of suicide comes in this description of the cases passing through the database:

On a recent Wednesday, Dr. Glatt logged into the system and up popped the names of people being reported — 16 since he last looked three days before.

Among the newest cases was a patient who had threatened to kill his partner. “Becomes aggressive and unpredictable, has history of noncompliance with medications,” the narrative said.

Two patients had attempted suicide with guns. Another “is exhibiting manic behavior,” the note said. It added that the patient was “not sleeping in the past few days, throwing lit cigarettes and matches around the house,” and had “a history of fire setting.”

Still one more involved a man who had threatened a housing office worker if he was not helped immediately and was so agitated that it took six police officers to bring him into the emergency room.

Well, four out of sixteen were cited and two involved suicide; we are pressing the envelope of social science with this data sample.

My suggestion - the Times ought to decide whether death by suicide is something they are worried about and then report accordingly. They do brush by the topic ocassionally (with no explanation of a link between suicide prevention and magazine capacity). And the normal liberal tendency is to rely on misleading stats to minimize the palce of the mentally-ill in our problem with violence (e.g., violence by mentally ill substance abusers is not counted as violence by the mentally ill because... sorry, I am not smart enough to be a progressive so I can't answer that).

Comments

[Danube on iPad]

First?

[henry]

Danube, your statistic is correct. No NYT sink cure for you.

[henry]

Autospell resembles NYT editing. Sinecure.

[AliceH]

Meanwhile, 2 (maybe 3?) more homicides in STL in last 24 hours. No word on whether any were killed with lawfully-owned firearms. /sarc

[Neo]

It would be a short jump to believe that New Yorkers who are "too mentally unstable to carry firearms" might be too mentally unstable to vote.

[Neo]

Sweden hunts damaged Russian sub: report

Swedish signals intelligence officials first heard an emergency call on Thursday evening, the newspaper said. Fourteen hours later, at around midday on Friday, a foreign vessel was spotted in the Stockholm archipelago.

Sweden intercepted further communications after it began its military operation in the waters off Stockholm, as encrypted messages were relayed between transmitters in the Stockholm archipelago and the Russian enclave Kaliningrad, SvD said.

LUN

[Iggy]

--Even if just one dangerous person had a gun taken away...--

Do people on the right make this argument? I only ever seem to hear it from the left and I never hear them extend it to their own pet causes.

If only one life were saved by;

Banning pot,
Banning all abortions,
Banning pre marital sex,
Banning homosexual acts,
Banning idiotic non profits like the Brady Campaign,
Banning the NYT,
Banning _______

it would all be worth it.

[Pagar]

Will Gigi solve the Ebola problem?

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2014/10/17/A-Robot-Named-Gigi-is-Using-UV-Rays-to-Kill-Ebola-in-Hospitals

[Jim Eagle]

More "War on Religion and Churches": Conduct Same-Sex Marriage or Go to Jail.

Not Houston this time but Idaho of all places.

http://dailysignal.com/2014/10/18/government-ordained-ministers-celebrate-sex-wedding-go-jail/

[Iggy]

But they assured us that would never happen JiB.
I sure hope they weren't lying.

[Jeff Dobbs]

Since about 2007, Hope = Lying.

[AliceH]

Excellent question, Iggy. I can't think offhand of a case where conservatives use that ... but I think there must be. Will have to ponder.

[AliceH]

In a way, the conservatives with a bipartisan group pressing for travel restrictions might qualify. If we stop just 1 potential asymptomatic Ebola carrier...

[Neo]

Mental Health Issues Put 34,500 on New York’s No-Guns List ... and most of them are Democratic politicians. LOL

[Cecil Turner]

I think this is way over toward "good thing." The approach ought to be restrictions on those who ought to be restricted (and personally, I have no problem with them setting the bar fairly high), and none on everyone else.

The nonsensical approach is to restrict everyone's gun rights (ensuring only criminals have guns), and then making special game preserves where nobody can be armed (establishing happy hunting grounds for those wacky enough to ignore one more law). And ISTM that's what we've been doing.

[Pagar]

Just looking at the info in 01:46. I wonder how the feelings about guns of those who have the authority to put people on that list?

[lyle]

IDAHO, dammit! I can't even watch the local news any more. It's gay marriage wall to wall. Effing gaystapo.

[Threadkiller]

This is why the Marine stays locked up in Mexico. Until he and everyone around him declare that he is a nutcase because of Bush's credit card wars and the NRA's homoerotic love of firearms, he will not get an assist from Preezy.

[James D.]

Cecil @ 2:03

In theory, I agree with you. In practice, that approach requires a level of competence, good will, and respect for the citizenry on the part of those administering the law which is not in evidence. To put it generously.

[AliceH]

At the very end, the NYT piece says "Patients can challenge the revocations of their gun permits in court...". Guilty until proven innocent - due process is so medieval.

Missing in the article is how does anyone know if they are put on the list? I seem to recall the law doesn't require those submitting names to inform the person they are reporting.

[Cat]

Russians are dangerous, because they are so careless, lazy, sloppy and incompetent that they are much more likely to get people killed inadvertently than on purpose. Basically Russians are inbred Neanderthal, retarded cro magnon.

[narciso]

Carlos Slim's mentioned this book today,

http://www.amazon.com/White-Guard-Mikhail-Bulgakov/dp/0300151454/ref=la_B000APW544_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1413762220&sr=1-4

it illustrates the Russophile trend, that the Ukrainians regard poorly,