Tuesday, December 18, 2012

NEWTOWN INCIDENT

POLICE RESPONSE:  It took police 20 minutes to respond to the Sandy Hook shooting according to the CNN timeline. This seems like an awfully long time. If all police forces are this slow in responding to a crisis, one rally needs to have some kind of plan to wait for such a delayed response if something serious is happening.

REASONS: And it also raises issues of why some people are not being treated in mental facilities. David Kopel gives a lot of statistics to show it is not just a gun issue. In the 1960s there were laxer gun laws, but not these kind of massive shootings. He also raises the role of the media in bringing attention to these incidents, but as is pointed out this is not just a contemporary issue (haven't seen "The Young Werther" ever mentioned before!).

Loren Coleman's 2004 book "The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow's Headlines" shows that the copycat effect is as old as the media itself. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1774 classic "The Sorrows of Young Werther" triggered a spate of copycat suicides all over Europe. But today the velocity and pervasiveness of the media make the problem much worse.

A second explanation is the deinstitutionalization of the violently mentally ill. A 2000 New York Times study of 100 rampage murderers found that 47 were mentally ill. In the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry Law (2008), Jason C. Matejkowski and his co-authors reported that 16% of state prisoners who had perpetrated murders were mentally ill.

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