Hello, new member. Dave.

I'm interested in discussion of how LE might improve policies to help prevent incidents like the recent Pittsburgh synagogue shooting.

The online presence of the alleged shooter differed from the norm in observable ways: obvious anti-semite, anger, sustained vitriol, etc.

1A says our society will not infringe on his protected right of free speech.

2A says our society will not infringe on his protected right to keep and bear arms regardless of how much hatred he spews.

In the absence of regular community intervention, the point of potential prevention probably often resides at LE involvement.

My Q's:
1 - Do LEO's generally favor increasing interventions based on public behavior in order to try to reduce such incidents?  
2 - How is it done?

Social media users don't often publish their geographic locations.  That info is not difficult to obtain, but there has to be a mechanism in place to obtain it.  
Does that mechanism exist?  If you're a cop in Cleveland, how does Cleveland become aware of a social media lunatic who resides in Cleveland?  
Community residents are often reluctant to "report" or "speak out" about potential psychopaths.  Are there other ways that LE becomes aware of people like this in their community?

A similar issue applies to content.  If 1 isolated anti-whatever comment should not result in an intervention, but 1 million should,
then there are levels to types and quantities of anti-social content, and presumably thresholds.  
Other than community reports, do you know of any monitoring mechanisms in place that seek to red-flag people like the Pittsburgh shooter for an intervention,
with the goal of engaging before an incident?

Thanks.  I'm not LE; hope it's cool for me to ask this here.

Constitutional open/concealed carry.

I’m not LE either, but here’s my opinion.

I don’t think we need to prevent this stuff with any legislation. We’re much safer nowadays and crime is way down. We don’t need to do anything. Yes, it sucks when bad things happen, but the things people are proposing to make the world safer are unacceptable. We already have various task forces who already do a fine job thwarting terrorists and whack jobs.

I think we need to stop wringing our hands, stop thinking ‘of the children’, and stop being so concerned.

Pretty much this. Crime is very low; the huge drop in violent crime compared to 90s more than offsets all of these sorts of events.

Every citizen should be armed and prepared to defend their life and the lives of their loved ones.  It's not paranoia.  It's accepting the fact that deranged people exist and refusing to be without a hope of saving your own life.

It is perfectly fine to be frightened by events like today.  It is completely unacceptable to not take accountability for your own safety and be prepared.

Carry what ever defensive weapon you can and learn how to use it.

When seconds count, help is minutes away.

I agree with you on this, but I also think we need to stop making these assholes famous.  Stop giving them exactly what they want: publicity and recognition.  Stop publicizing their names.  Stop making everything so....dramatic.  Just end them, dump them in a nameless grave, and learn that we need to do a better job ending them faster.

When they stop succeeding, when they stop getting their name in the papers, and they stop being able to cause the kind of damage they want because of whatever pain they feel that they need to inflict upon others to get recognized or seen or whatever...they will stop seeing this as a way to obtain that which they want:  for others to feel the pain they feel has been inflicted upon them, or whatever.

But if they can't get all the eyes on them, on why, whatever....they won't see shooting places up as a viable way to air their grievances.

Ideally, if you are crazy, you shouldn’t be free roaming, you should be in a special type of gated community. You shouldn’t need your gun rights revoked, because any free man should have 2A rights. I repeat, if you are an adult, and cannot be trusted with weapons because you’re likely to murder someone, then you should not be free.

The root of the problem today IMHO is obviously mental health, but also that the medical community decided simply giving a crazy person a pill was their only responsibility. The pills seems to make many worse, yet they continue lrescribing unabated.

More Guns Less Crime

An Armed Society, is a Polite Society

OP is a reporter posturing as middle of the road to foster discussion promote ideas and dialogue.
In reality he will selectively edit the content of this thread and quote the most outrageous reply.

The way we PREVENT events like this is to rebuild our culture and society by rebuilding the nuclear family as the basic unit of society.
We return to collective social pressure to disaprove of abherrent and rude behavior.
We return to hospitalizing dangerous people.

Pretty much.

A couple more things:
1) enacting more control does not work, as it has been shown time after time, since the folks hell-bent on causing harm will always find loopholes.

2) look back and see if it isn't society in general that needs to review its values and ethics.  Not long ago kids played with guns, took them to school, allowed to be kids and even punched each other in fist fights and so on, and we did not have all the violence and hatred we see today.  What actually changed?

ETA: fix auto-correct...

Join date, post count.

^This

Nailedit.jpg

Yep.  Couldn’t be any more obvious if they tried.

Welcome to ARFCOM Dave...

Pretty heavy topic for your first post there, Dave.

Low post counts are not always a harbinger.  Everyone here once had a post count of 2.

My OP queried workable solutions that preserve 1A and 2A.

A partial solution for our current societal problems is a reversal of the unraveling of the moral and ethical fiber of American society; restore the proven form of nuclear family structure, etc.  
Unfortunately there is no known method for accomplishing those feats, aside from the natural cycle of the rise and fall nations.

It's pretty easy to sit back and wait for things to fall apart.

The more difficult challenge is the attempt to stop the fall and reverse it, by acting on what we should all already know about the history of human civilization.

Proponents of gun control use incidents like Pittsburgh to advance their narrative.

Even worse, these incidents are actually horrible crimes.

So there's 3 good incentives to find proactive solutions.

I appreciate the replies, but few attempted to address the questions posed.

How do you preserve 1A & 2A and identify / interact with a publicly recognizable psychopath before they come unglued?

As far as "everyone should arm themselves"...

Original argument on 2A (pre-1791) included debate on whether keeping and bearing of arms would be a citizen requirement or a protected right.  The FF wisely chose the latter.  In America, you are not required to own and bear arms.  Instead, it's your choice and the right shall not be infringed.

If your message to political moderates and leftists and many conservatives is that the solution to violent crime is they need to get a gun and carry it, you're gonna lose that entire fight and be marginalized as irrelevant.

The eventual solution is to prevent and punish crime, and to effectively manage mental disease.

Until the time that we return to doing those things effectively, it makes sense to to search for immediate workable solutions to immediate problems.

Some people are so obviously unstable that any rational person KNOWS they're a threat and should be disarmed.

But actually implementing a program to deal with them without running afoul of their rights is difficult to say the least.

If every sane person were to carry and be ready to drop the true nutjobs in their tracks should they start something really bad,  that'd be a great start.

But you can't always tell who's crazy by looking at them.

Why don't you ask an easy question, like how to create a working hyperdrive and also invent a super cheap and effective human rejuvenation system that restores you to your prime of youth and health instead?

I am LE and I like this response.

To add to this, years ago we used to keep the criminally insane people locked up and segregated from society. Society decided that wasn't nice so we released them. Now they wander the streets and inflict themselves on society as criminals. In addition, mentally disturbed people meet other mentality disturbed people and then they reproduce....making more mentally ill people. Those mentally broken children grow up to be school and church shooters.

If you keep the mentally broken people contained in a structured environment, they take the medications they need to keep their brains functioning properly, they take care of their hygiene and eat properly. That minimizes their mental issues. Or, we release them, thinking we are "helping them" and they live homeless or couch surfing, poor hygiene, lack of regular nutritious meals, they self medicate with whatever they can building drug addictions in the process, and committing endless crime. How is that humane? Society says that's humane treatment.

Then, to add to the mental issues, there is a small number of people who aren't mentally ill...They are just purely evil. The truly evil ones are usually the serial killers. The mentally broken ones are usually the mass shooters.

Most mass shooters had major warning signs that are often ignored. They HATE being ignored so they end up deciding that they will do something to be infamous.

Amen, ColtRifle - the SMI end up in prison with staff who are not trained to clinical standards on how to address their illnesses, and things go from bad to down right ugly sometimes. Bring back the mental hospitals, BUT, give them far more state and federal oversight to stop the abuses that led to the shutdowns in the 70s.

That little bit shows me you are not quite sold on the 2A or the 1A. We might say the same of Maxine Waters call to "push back" on Republicans as unhinged hate speech, or the rabid dog calls for violence in the streets from numbers of prominent left wing politicians and public figures - "I have often thought of blowing up the White House" - Madonna. "Hate speech" is really defined by the people offended or affected by it. The Left defines what i just posted as merely protected speech. Yes, this anti Semite murderer was a nut job with a highly irrational hatred of Jewish people, and what he said and posted, much less did, is unacceptable in societal norms. However, calls for mindless violence directed against any group of people as a group,  "Pigs in a blanket, fry em like bacon" - BLM, and other chants leftist groups have used targeting law enforcement and conservatives leads to that "defining moment" as in who gets to define the "hate speech" for everyone? Political speech you don't like is actually the real reason for the 1A, and the 2A is there to protect the other rights.

But, I digress - to answer your question, reduce welfare from a sustainable career and quit reward those who abuse it, to help rebuild the family units.
Promote the general carrying of defensive arms - Dodge City was never this violent, not by a long shot. Phoenix AZ has just over half Chicago's population and NONE of the gun laws, yet Phoenix murder rate is less than 20% of Chicago - let people defend themselves and natural consequences occur. No, you don't force them to, but I will point at Kennesaw GA and the experiment there that led to a dramatic drop in crime.
Reopen mental health centers, updated with good staff and equipment and modernized policies. Also, establish a prison wing in that same hospital for convicted SMI inmates to receive the care they need.
Understand that the world is dangerous and doesn't give a rats butt about feelings or wants. Nature is tooth and claw, blood and death. Civilization is a thin veneer over that. Understand that it is YOUR responsibility to prevent crimes against you, not the police, who have no legal obligation to protect you or yours, though they will die trying.
Last step, streamline death penalty - regardless what you think about the deterrence value, it prevents murderers from murdering again.
I hope this may help to answer your question, welcome to AR15.com and have a safe day.

Another thing to remember....true mental issues are not curable. Period.

You can treat it and use medications to get the brain functioning near normal but it's a lifetime medication. You stop taking it and your brain malfunctions. It's not like an antibiotic where you take it till you're better. Once you need mental health meds, you're on them for life and if you want a normal life you have to take them consistently and constantly.

Those who take mental health meds often take them for awhile, feel better, then think they are cured and stop taking them. Then, their brains start malfunctioning again.

I generally dislike government solutions to problems but I'm afraid this is one of those areas government needs to be involved with funding. I hate it but don't have an alternative solution.

And yes there was problems in the mental hospitals that did also contribute to the backlash against them. But, part of the issue as well was many of the mental health issues of the day were not well understood and there wasn't medications to treat the issues like we have today. So, as bad as this sounds, the medical field was experimenting to try to figure out what worked. And, that's nothing new. Every treatment we have today, was once experimented on people and yes, some did die from the procedure as the doctors learned about how to do it properly.

We have all kinds of knowledge today on mental issues and how to treat it but we can't usually force the people to take the meds consistently so they get diagnosed, start treatment, then stop the meds and then their brains go right back to where they were.

No. If the left or “moderates” insist that further restricting the rights of law abiding citizens is the solution they will lose the fight. The fact remains that crazy and evil exist and regardless of the tools used the targets have to have the means to turn the table and protect themselves. That is the preventative measure that works. Those who desire and act to neuter the general population are actively promoting future events. Intentionally or not it doesn’t really matter in the end.

In the face of a predator the prey has to be willing and able to become a predator also. Predators don’t live off other predators they live off prey. Armed and trained citizens are the first line of defense against armed violent criminals. It’s the governments job to be available to back up it’s citizenry not to render them helpless and dependent.

The other issues are cultural and can only be addressed by promoting values that dignify family, maturity, compassion, strength, personal responsibility and individual rights.

During the founders' time, citizens were REQUIRED to keep and bear arms or pay a fee for not doing so.  Conscientious objection was allowed but those who did so paid a sum equivalent to the value of their service. It was viewed as both a natural right and a requirement to bear arms.  Read a real history book.

Legislation will not help anything.

Not true.  Stop the political correctness bs, stop the media's usual defense of criminals, stop the "everyone gets a trophy" bs, stop the brainwashing in schools and universities, etc.

These alone will have a quick and positive reverse on many of the issues we have now that have been eroding family, moral and ethics values that are critical for a healthy society.

None of them are "impossible and hard".

I don't totally disagree BUT.....If it's not impossible or hard, why can't we just snap our fingers right now and fix our problems?

Have you seem how the progressive leftists react to even a hint of doing it?

It can be done via legislation, like when they push their crap and say "f*ck you" to us.  We unfortunately do not do the same but should start.

For me, I had enough and cannot give a sh*t about their "feelings" anymore.

If you want something safe, secure it. Anything else is like a kid closing their eyes saying you can’t see them.

Lots of religious groups have organic or off duty LEO security.

Thanks for the replies.  Few were worth reading.

The Pittsburgh guy flashed warning signs for a long time and then shot 11 old people.  This happens all the time.

How many pre-advertised mass killings before we start looking at the advertisements?

Is anyone looking?  
Acting?  
If so, how?
How is it done?

I'm interested.

Thx.

Hey, I just realized my communication failure.  Maybe part of the mess above was my fault.

Lemme start again:

I'm 53.  I don't use social media.

Not only do I not "get" social media, I'm not interested in it.  It mostly looks to me like a waste of time.

So with that in mind, maybe my perspective is clearer.

I don't know if I'm correct, but it seems like it wouldn't be that difficult to spot some (not all) of these crazy people before they pop.

So I asked if LE does that at all, and if so, how.

Sorry if that lack of clarity was a problem.

Dave

So you're saying it's impossible or hard........

It is happening. All over the place. Departments investigate all kinds of nuts. But, some hide it well. Others, well people see it but in GD favorite fashion, MYOB (mind your own business) so the information never gets passed to those who can do something about it.

Also, in our legal system, we can't arrest for what you might do.

The first answer is security. Smart churches understand that. Other religious organizations put their head in the sand and pretend "it'll never happen to us". Some believe God will protect them but they don't realize that God needs something to work with. God may well protect them if there is an armed person or persons there to do God's work.

Like I said, neither.  Just ignore the fake "outrage" demonstrated by the progressive left and re-adopt philosophies from when people were not so "sensitive".  Those can be done overnight, or, as you say, with the snap of our fingers.

I already did some of my part by taking my son out of the rotten public school system and placing him in a private school where moral and ethics still mean something.  Did not even blink an eye when I started noticing the brainwashing.

Also teaching him to not a be a pussy who gets "offended" by what others think or say to him.

It can be done.

ETA: Like others mentioned.  How many of those mentally disturbed ended up that way for being too "sensitive" and "feeling the need to be accepted and not being able to deal with rejection"?  Life is not easy, kids need to learn how to deal with it and that the world does not revolve around them.

Usually, you can't.  Every once in a while we get lucky and are able to prevent an incident, but that isn't the norm.  The trick is to make contact with a mentally unstable person (happens every day) after they have done something that we can take action on (either criminal or something to justify a mental health hold) but before they actually hurt someone.

Although you didn't mention it, the 4th Amendment is also a significant barrier to stopping these things (which is not a valid reason to attack the 4A).

If it can be done on a society wide scale and is that easy, why isn't it happening then?

Is there really a will to do it?

There are unfortunately too many capitalizing on others' misery.

How many get money from soros and others to promote the "gun sensible laws"?

How many like that California politician who was a rabid anti-gun in the legislature and in public while smuggling and selling guns to criminals?

Where's the media reporting the truth instead of false narratives?

Cut the money flow and this stops.

it's not binary -- with just "good people" and "bad people" out there, who can be neatly sorted into two piles.

it's a big gray tangled mess, and often the people beating their chests on social media are in fact less harmful than the quiet people who are meticulously planning.

i'm not sure how you think it's possible to sift through ~300 million unique individuals and gauge their future actions with any sort of precision.
you know that dolphins and turtles end up in the same nets that catch tuna -- now extend that problem to real people, perhaps innocent people.

but let's take an easy example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamerlan_Tsarnaev

In early 2011, Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) told the Federal Bureau of Investigation that Tsarnaev was a follower of Islamic extremism and a strong believer. The FSB said that he was preparing to leave the United States to travel to the Russian region to join unspecified underground groups.[73][74] The FBI initially denied that it had contacted Tsarnaev, but then said that it actually had after Tsarnaev's mother talked about the FBI's contacts with her son on RT.[75] The FBI said that it interviewed him and relatives of his, but did not find any terrorist activity, and that it provided the results in the summer of 2011.[74] At that point, the FBI asked the FSB for more information, but the Russians did not respond to the American request, and the FBI officially closed the case.[76]

Tsarnaev's mother said that FBI agents had told her they feared her son was an "extremist leader", and that he was getting information from "extremist sites".[77][78] She said Tsarnaev had been under FBI surveillance for at least three years and that "they were controlling every step of him". The FBI flatly denied this accusation.[79][80] Tsarnaev "vaguely discussed" jihad during a 2011 phone call with his mother that was taped by the FSB, and intelligence officials also discovered text messages in which his mother discussed how he was ready to die for Islam.[81] In late 2011, the Central Intelligence Agency put both Tsarnaev and his mother on its Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment databas.

Tsarnaev traveled to Russia through Moscow's Domodedovo International Airport in January 2012, and returned to the U.S. in July 2012.[93] He and his wife received public assistance and food stamps from September 2011 to November 2012, which included all the time Tsarnaev was in Russia. Zubeidat Tsarnaeva said her son had wanted his wife and their child to move to Dagestan with him, and that: "She herself agreed; she said she wanted to study a different culture, language."[65]

During the six months he was overseas, he visited his family in the North Caucasus.

Tsarnaev's father said that he was with him in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, for six months and that they had done ordinary things, such as visiting relatives. His father also said that they visited Chechnya twice, to see relatives there and to receive his son's new Russian passport.[18][94] While Tsarnaev arrived in Russia in January 2012, however, he only arrived in Dagestan around March, and his father arrived there in May.[95] U.S. House Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul said he believed that Tsarnaev received training during his trip, and became radicalized.[96] In an early report, Dagestan's interior minister Abdurashid Magomedov said through a spokesman that Tsarnaev "did not have contact with the [Islamist] underground during his visit".[97]

The Tsarnaev brothers' mother's second cousin, Magomed Kartashov, is a figure in Dagestan's Islamist community.[98] Zubeidat confirmed that they "became very close." Kartashov's Islamist organization, "The Union of the Just," advocates Islam as a political system under sharia law. He and Tsarnaev discussed fighting the global fight. Kartashov said the Boston bombing is "good" in that it will increase converts to Islam similar to the attacks of September 11.[99]

According to media reports, Tsarnaev was seen by Dagestan police, who were conducting surveillance, making six visits to a known Islamic militant in a Salafi mosque in Makhachkala founded by an associate of Ayman Zawahiri.[100][101][102][103] According to Russian investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta, quoting unnamed Russian security sources, Tsarnaev was linked to 23-year-old William Plotnikov, an ethnic Russian-Tatar Islamic militant and Canadian citizen, with whom he communicated via online social networking sites.[104][105][106] Tsarnaev had also visited Toronto, where Plotnikov lived with his parents.[107] Once in Dagestan, Tsarnaev is said to have met on several occasions with Makhmud Mansur Nidal, a 19-year-old Dagestani-Palestinian man. Nidal was under close surveillance by Dagestan's anti-extremism unit for six months as a suspected recruiter for Islamist insurgents, before the police killed him in May.[103] According to Novaya Gazeta, Tsarnaev had sought to join the local insurgency, and was put on a period of 'quarantine' – a clearance check by insurgents looking for infiltrating double agents, taking several months for a recruit to be verified. After Tsarnaev's alleged contacts were both killed, he "got frightened and fled". He left Russia in July two days after Plotnikov was killed, in an apparent hurry that Russian authorities considered suspicious, not waiting to pick up his new Russian passport — ostensibly one of his main reasons for coming to Russia.[29][106][108][109]

In an interview, Tsarnaev's father later said he had to force his son to return to the United States to complete his U.S. citizenship application, after Tsarnaev tried to convince his family to allow him to stay in Dagestan for good.[110] e

...

the FBI and several other three letter agencies apparently had insight into this fucking idiot and his hero-worshipping younger brother years before they acted.

in your eyes, what exactly was the FBI supposed to do?  reading sites on the internet is not a crime.  religion is not a crime.   traveling to Dagestan is not a crime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_Report_(film)

ar-jedi

So once again, we are back to impossible and hard.

I agree with your premise so if it really is as easy as you think it is, make it happen.

Are you sure you want to give me that kind of power?  

Sure. Make it happen. Now.

This nudged my perspective, and pretty much answered my questions.  Thanks.

MYOB is a prevalent mindset today.

IMO, it often translates to a failure of community responsibility.

If people in a community have concerns about one of their own, they have 2 choices: do something or do nothing.

A popular choice today is do nothing.

The problem is exacerbated by societal failure to institutionalize people who need to be institutionalized.

The MYOB crowd prioritizes individual liberty.

I wonder if a fast-track to lost liberty is promoting MYOB to such an extreme that a society can no longer tolerate the resultant outcomes, at which point a centralized government steps in to fill the void, ergo lost liberty?

IOW, who do you want identifying your mentally ill folks: your community, or your gov?  Someone has to do it.  If we don't, they will?

Just some thoughts.

Thx.

Dave

Very well.  I'll need you to transfer several billion Dollars to my bank account so I start hiring and funding people and organizations that will put an end to it.

When we hear about something being posted on social media, we're usually advised by family or friends reporting what the poster has said. Usually regarding some desire to harm themselves

None of the social media platforms will cooperate with law enforcement without a court order as far as releasing any information about an account, end even then they give minimal information.

Well I don't have that and don't know where to get it. So, we are again back to impossible and hard.

Yep.

A bunch of us being armed and ready can help. A return to traditional family structure and values would also help. But the numbers of the mentally ill are increasing by the year and there is little being done.

Where there's a will there's a way.  Maybe we can start a go-fund-me?

It's hard but not impossible.