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Please don't bring Elliott Rodger into it. His parents tried desperately and every which way to get him help and to stop him. He was an adult so they couldn't have him committed. They saw his alarming messages and called the Santa Barbara police, who went to his apartment, and then "took his word for it" that he was okay, and refused to listen to the parents urging them to search his apartment--even though the parents told the police they thought he was armed.

When the police refused to do anything, the parents, who live in L.A., got into their car and drove straight up the Ventura Freeway as fast as they could, 90 minutes to Santa Barbara, but en route, they heard on the radio about the killings, and they knew immediately what had happened. I repeat: these were parents who tried everything they could, who were thwarted both by the utter lack of mental health care, inadequate policing, and the terrible legacy of Reagan here in this state, where you can't "commit" someone under any circumstances, no matter how ill they are and how much danger they represent.

You also couldn't even get the police to take their guns away... until now, that is. The parents worked their asses off and just got a new law passed here in California, where if someone presents a danger, family can petition a judge to have his weapons taken away.

This was a mentally ill kid, who wrote a mentally ill manifesto, and went out and killed people, and then killed himself because he was disturbed. And his parents knew and tried and tried to stop it. The fact that they were well-to-do has little to do with it--I repeat, they tried everything within their power to stop this from happening and to help their mentally ill kid. It was a tragedy, not some "evil rich kid."

I agree with the rest of your post. In Orlando, and in Nice, these were deeply disturbed angry men, with no connection to ISIS, which itself has no connection to Islam. The better comparison, for me, is that ultra-Christianity was also the "excuse" for Nazism--and no one then assumes all Christians are Nazis.

I heard a forensic criminologist talking today, talking about the fact that disturbed individuals get angrier and angrier, get no help, and extremist groups push them over the edge. He said what needs to happen is people need to feel free to report disturbing behavior, but that also our treatment of the mentally ill, as well as policing needs to change. People are afraid to report anything, because there's a stigma to mental illness, and also they have no guarantee the police will do the right thing. (There are plenty of instances of a terrified, worried parent calling the cops on their disturbed adult son, only to have the police come and kill him.)

And, as anyone with a mentally ill loved one can tell you, there's nowhere to take mentally ill people-- no mental health institutions (thanks, Reagan), very few mental hospitals, who may only take them for 72 hours, or a few weeks, so they probably end up in jail, which is disastrous. The last thing we should be doing is somehow turning into some anti-Muslim frenzy. To circle back to the Nazis, that's exactly what they did, and it's awful to see Americans emulating that sorry part of our past.

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