Heavily-armed man kills himself, rather than shoot up Colorado amusement park, authorities say

I'm 38, and yeah it's seriously fucked. I keep saying this and people still want to plug their ears and scream "it's the guns!".

I'm a prime example, I have ADHD and hardcore insomnia, and I got laid off a few months ago, my health insurance just ended. In order to see a psychiatrist it's gonna cost me $300 out of pocket for the visit, and then generic Ambien is like $120 for 60 pills. I got letters that say I could get health insurance via the COBRA Act of 1985, but it's SEVEN HUNDRED AND THIRTY DOLLARS A MONTH. Healthcare.gov keeps playing commercials that say "enroll now and you can get health insurance for as low as $10/month!". I went on there to look and it's only available for 2024 right now and they want to know your income for 2024. I put in 80k and they said I wasn't eligible, I put in 40k and it said it was gonna cost $350/month.

My dad is 73 and he constantly has to fight with insurance and the pharmacy to get his Ambien as well.

It's absolutely ridiculous.

If it puts your mind at ease at all, crime (violent and otherwise) had been on a decline from 1993 until 2016 and while it has risen since 2016, it still hasn't hit pre-'93 levels last I saw. Furthermore despite what you'd expect, those AR-15s are responsible for less than 500 (all rifles) of our 60,000 gun deaths, which is 0.833333333333% of our gun deaths. In fact, mass shootings account for less than 0.2% of our gun deaths per year. So, I mean "any is too much" yes, but it isn't near as bad as it seems. source

this wasn’t a normal thing until after Columbine.

Things that are relatively new, circa Columbine

• the 24-hour news cycle

• rage-farming as a genre of syndicated media (think: Limbaugh, Hannity, InfoWars)

• selling fear becomes huge moneymaker for opinion programmers (Limbaugh, Hannity, Carlson, etc)

• politics as a staple on social media comment threads

• offshore groups (like troll farms, etc) posing as domestic political actors, targeting particular demographics

Ready access to guns is of course a problem, but it's probably made worse when all those folks with ready access to guns are bathed in fear and loathing 24/7 by millionaires making lots of money telling them things to make them or their families afraid or angry. Just a thought

The vast majority of mentally ill people are not violent. The idea that mental illness is largely responsible for the prevalence of mass shooters contributes to the stigma already attached to mental illness.

It always weirds me out that the first school shooting I remember occurred a few bit over a year before Columbine. Heath High School, December 1997.

My high school school had a 1970s state championship banner for rifle shooting up in the gymnasium. It might even still be there.

The media circus around columbine has certainly contributed to mass shootings. Every loser knows how to be remembered now.

but if we stopped selling guns, how would we cure those mental health issues?

I don't think that sounds terrible at all. We can all agree, I think, that we'd rather this whole situation not happen at all, but of the two cases, one with one dead by their own hands, and another case with who knows how many dead at the same person's hands, there's absolutely nothing wrong with saying you're happy it was the former and not the latter.

Terrible would be saying he deserved it. Or putting someone in that position. Or a variety of other things, but it's not being relieved at a lower death toll.

You probably weren't at the end of your mental and emotional rope, with what seemed like no other outs. Context matters.

It's not that he's a good person, it's that he made the right decision at a critical moment. Still not a good decision, but a whole hell of a lot better than what he was prepared to do.

I mean, sort of makes sense? I assume with the overkill in firepower, he expected to meet armed resistance. Way more than a security guard would actually pose irl. So that I can at least get my head around.

But if he wanted to sneak into the actual caves like the phrasing would suggest, why die in the bathroom?

I think that's the least concerning part of this story

In my neurology class Whitman was the only case of the tumor clearly being a major driving factor.

I'm not saying the class was entirely comprehensive, or that the other cases were not medically-driven. The other cases we studied were psychologically driven (mental disorders) rather than physiological (e.g. tumor/cancer/head-trauma). I just wanted to say the tumor case might not be as likely as one might think.

While thats valid comment for the main post, for the Whitman case, he was in the military. Even with strict laws he would've still had easy access unless we're talking drastic changes of having military personel not having general firearm access.

First off, 1966 was a different time worldwide for firearms possession.

But for my real point, a continuous "activation" of fight or flight will always result in fight being the option, because all the running in the world hasn't helped to that point.

This dude in Maine had tried to get a silencer. Wonder how much worse it would have been if everyone didn’t hear the reports and start running.

Hard to say. It's not like the movies. With the firearm he had (.308 with ~14-16" barrel), a silencer/suppressor only brings the volume down from "instant tinnitus" to "still loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage". It's far from silent. I'd never thought about it until now but I wonder if a silencer/suppressor could have increased surviveability. When people heard gunshots at volumes they would expect, they might be less disoriented. Verses the muzzle flash and concussion that comes from what he was shooting (basically a semi-auto flash bang).

Probably had nothing to do with the tumor

BRUH, this was his suicide note:

I do not quite understand what it is that compels me to type this letter. Perhaps it is to leave some vague reason for the actions I have recently performed. I do not really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I cannot recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts. These thoughts constantly recur, and it requires a tremendous mental effort to concentrate on useful and progressive tasks.[43]

In his note, Whitman went on to request an autopsy be performed on his remains after he was dead to determine if there had been a biological cause for his actions.

People in the 60's didnt just say "do an autopsy on me" unless something was severely wrong. There was little to no public understanding of neurology, the general public wouldn't even think to guess that a brain tumor could play such a role.

And not like Whitman suspected it a little bit; before the incident he went to many doctors for help. This was his note in his journal

"I talked with a Doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt overwhelming violent impulses. After one visit, I never saw the Doctor again, and since then have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail."

He talked to friends about it and nobody would take him seriously because they just saw him as a respectable person with overblown concerns. His case is part of Neurology classes in Texas universities!

But the bad guy with a gun still made a victim out of the good guy with the gun. Idk this is making my head hurt.

Red what?

Good thing we're not on Reddit

that emotional attachment to your guns is

Kennedy and then Reagan combined to undermine the old mental hospital system. We'd be better off to expand the "gravely disabled" definition, expand conservatorship, and involuntarily commit at a rate resembling what they used to do in the 1960s. I'd rather revert to that and force severely ill people to get help than to quibble about which rights to strip from the general populace.

Gun controllers need to realize there are 300 to 400 million semi-auto guns in the US (and that's a conservative estimate). You could ban them tomorrow and you'd still never get rid of them, not in the next century.

i'm making a direct plea to people.. not offering a plan..

Sensible gun control exists in several US states and those tend to have far lower rates of gun crime.

Your turn.

On the positive side, he would never have been in the news if that happened. So maybe it's happening a lot that way.

What are the hot positions on the hot topic?