enthalpy

Tuesday, May 15, 2007


This week's award for pointing out that psychos shouldn't have guns, but yet somehow, it's the gun's fault goes to Robert Jay Lifton. And for pointing this out for the 1,745th time, you just won an oven mitt! [see stores for details.]
The combination of mental disease and access to guns leaps out at almost everyone in connection with the Virginia Tech shootings. But from there ideas and advocacies tend to become amorphous and tinged with hopelessness. There is consensus that something should be done to intervene earlier in threatening forms of psychological disturbance, and as a psychiatrist I agree and also recognize some of the social obstacles to doing so. But while there will always be mentally ill people, a few of whom are violent, it is our gun-centered cultural disease that converts mental illness into massacre.

Indeed, I would claim that a gun is not just a lethal device but a psychological actor in this terrible drama.
Sure you would. A head-shrinker will blame the gun just as quickly as the gun dealer will blame the psycho. That's to be expected. But only one of those two participants is an inanimate object, and the shrink has chose to argue with them. Good luck.

Also, this guy needs another dumbass award for using the word "indeed" twice in a 500 word op-ed. What an ass.



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