RangerDave wrote:
So this guy didn't buy his guns. That doesn't tell us much of anything about whether mental health screenings would prevent some meaningful percentage of other gun violence by nutjobs. In plenty of other mass shootings, spousal murders and suicides, the shooter used a gun they had purchased themselves, often within a few days of the shooting. It seems reasonably likely that at least some of those people would be screened out and would not have ready access to other guns or as many guns and as much ammunition as they might otherwise have purchased and thus would either be delyed long enough for the impulse to pass, be forced to use weapons with a lower body count (e.g. knives) or a higher failure rate (e.g. IEDs), or would get caught trying to steal guns somewhere.
Ok, first of all we are not talking about "spousal shootings" o suicides. Suicides, in particular, will not be reduced by anything to prevent access to guns. There are 2 kinds of suicide attempt; the cry-for-help kind and the serious kind. Guns are used in the latter because if you commit suicide by gun its almost always instantly fatal, and that sort of person is the sort that is going to find another means if a gun isn't available. We discussed this at least once before. As for spousal shootings, no, it
doesn't seem reasonably likely that spousal shootings would be reduced meaningfully, because most domestic violence is not traceable to detectable mental illness. A far better idea would be to restrict the sale of firearms to people with known, and untreated addictions to alcohol and drugs because contrary to what DV advocates like to think, booze and drugs contribute a lot more to DV than do either male attitudes or guns. In fact, preventing known spousal abusers from buying booze would do a hell of a lot more than the current idiotic Lautenberg amendment. Either way, mental health science is not some sort of catch-all that can locate any person who might commit murder, or even anyone who will kill themselves or their spouse.
Second, talking about preventing "a certain percentage" and how this case doesn't disprove their effectiveness is meaningless. It isn't the job of everyone else to disprove the efficacy of mental health screenings. Furthermore, showing that guns were purchased in other cases doesn't in any way establish that those people wouldn't have obtained guns by an alternate means. A massacre is not something a person does just for kicks; a person bent on that sort of mayhem isn't likely to just say "well, they wouldn't sell me a gun so **** it, I quit".
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If you want to argue that requiring mental screenings is too great a burden on the vast majority of perfectly sane gun purchasers or that the costs will outweigh the benefits, that's fine, but arguing that mental screenings would be totally ineffective strikes me as implausible. Most nutjobs are not master strategists who plan out elaborate ways of obtaining their guns; most just use whatever guns are easily available to them, which, under current law in many states, is basically as many guns as they can afford to buy at the local Walmart whenever they decide to kill a bunch of people.
Well, the fact that it "strikes you" as implausible is irrelevant, since it's your job to establish their effectiveness, and furthermore, that the effectiveness is so high that the costs are worth it. It is not a matter of "if it prevents even one death, its worth it".
As for "master strategist", you don't need to be much of a strategist to commit a massacre, nor to find some alternate means of getting a gun or otherwise killing a lot of people. This is one of the major problems of most of these arguments in favor of various restrictions on ability to obtain a gun. It's simply assumed that if that means works, the person will not get a gun some other way, or find another means (such as a bomb) to do what they want, and wild exaggerations of the difficulty of doing that like "they aren't master strategists" are used to justify this shoddy, intuition-based idea.
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