Thursday, December 20, 2012
Guns, Mental Illness and Newtown - WSJ.com
I'm willing to bet that elected officials and the legacy media won't be interested in this...
In the Wall Street Journal, David Kopel tells us this and more:
"Since gun controls today are far stricter than at the time when 'active shooters' were rare, what can account for the increase in these shootings? One plausible answer is the media. Cable TV in the 1990s, and the Internet today, greatly magnify the instant celebrity that a mass killer can achieve. We know that many would-be mass killers obsessively study their predecessors."
"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."
