Mass Shooting in Toronto

Don't know much about him but I liked his response to this.

The cops said it was "not random" so they obviously know something and I wish they'd come out and fucking say it already

Possible explanation, if I'm understanding the CBC correctly: there are two investigations going on, the shooting and an SIU investigation, and the latter puts strict limits on what can be said publicly.

I see.

This is 18-year-old Reese Fallon, a recent grad of Malvern Collegiate. She was out with friends when she was gunned down on the #Danforth. @globalnewsto #TorontoShooting pic.twitter.com/TZJFKg7Gt3

— Shallima Maharaj (@ShallimaMaharaj) July 23, 2018

The only reason to buy guns is to kill all the other people who own guns, take their guns, and melt them

never had Tombot pegged as a cop killer but it shows what I know

So apparently the gunman had a long history of mental health issues.

The stigma will continue, unabated.

Aaaaaand Doug Ford wants mental health funding diverted to the police

https://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2018/07/23/council-postpones-meeting-gun-violence-reduction-plan-debate-after-danforth-shooting.html

Fucking hell.

Motherfucker is completely untethered from reality and basically admits as much with his "bias" statement.

People say "stigma" a lot but it's the wrong word. I think people need to start looking at mental health issues the way people look at chronic physical illness. Friends who are depressed or in hospital because of mental illness need to be brought soup and watched movies with and supported and cared for. There is a handbook about how to help your friends with cancer, but not a handbook for how to help friends who are experiencing mental illness, especially something as scary as psychosis.

And caring for your mentally ill friends is exhausting. One of my friends, right now, is in an extreme state of psychosis, going on and off their medication, checking themselves out of the hospital whenever they get a window and escaping, hiding, and showing up when they run out of money and hope. This friend has almost no friends left-- really, just their ex-partner, me, and their worried-but-exhausted family. I spent much of Saturday calling alternative institutions to the mental hospital for my friend to exist in, places that allowed for more social freedoms instead of just a shared room and a hospital bed. It was agonizing-- wait-lists for years, dead phone lines, not the right resources. Even when I found a perfect place, my friend-- at once amenable to going there and checking in-- got cold feet, had an episode, and was taken back to the mental hospital.

It's not so much "stigma" as it is, like, a full-time job. To protect myself, and my own sanity, I had to bow out of the care process.

When the shooter's family posted that stuff about how hard they'd been working to try and help him, with medication and therapy, I felt that. When the shooter's proxy-brother had trouble reconciling the upbeat person he knew with the crime he committed, I felt that too. And the scary part, too, about having to open up to a mental health professional about violent urges, is that as soon as any plan is described, the police are involved. There is so much work to be done to prevent this sort of shit from happening again

Yeah, I've already seen posts from local mental health professionals (a couple of them friends of mine) describing the woeful mental health infrastructure here and this is only going to get worse based on what we see are Ford's priorities.

Goon I believe we are discussing two different things here, not that I was clear in the beginning but I agree with you. I was talking about the reality of mental health patients/survivors on a macro level. Yes, there's the day to day difficulties people face with their loved ones and I am not denying anyone's courage to face the burden here, it's something that saved my life and now drives me personally.

Besides that there is the long term trend that point to a situation where mental health is seen as the exact same as it was 60 years ago. I'm talking more about stuff like the lack of funding for care, medication and recovery; or the near impossibility to take those mental health issues to the public without social pushback (especially at work); many sufferers are still blamed by their own families for their ills, etc. Pointing out the lack of handbook for how to help friends in that condition is the societal problem I'm talking about when I say 'stigma'. I was basically expressing that after an incident like this, the very crucial notion that mental health issues is just like any kind of health issues is going to be met with more pushback than we need right now, that there's going to be even more stigma to deal with.

There is so much work to be done to prevent this sort of shit from happening again

How about first we take the shooter, with all his complex and intractable problems, and remove the gun, and we have done quite a bit to prevent that shit from happening.

that just sounds complex and intractable

xp to VHS, yep, I didn't disagree with you at all! I just had a thing to get off my chest :) Good post, too

How about first we take the shooter, with all his complex and intractable problems, and remove the gun, and we have done quite a bit to prevent that shit from happening.

Canada already has comparatively strict gun laws. There might be ways to improve them, if you have specific suggestions. Unless you are suggesting that the US tighten up its gun laws, since a lot of guns are still coming across the border.

I personally would love to see the dialogue in the states regarding "stricter gun laws" be less about stricter background checks and what-have-you and be more about the higher rates of gun-related deaths, by state, and over time, related to the availability of concealed-carry permits. The statistics are pretty convincing that the easier it is to legally carry around a gun, the more likely you are to get shot (or shoot yourself accidentally). Bringing the dialogue back round to "we need better background checks" just reinforces dumb notions of good guys and bad guys and American Exceptionalism and so on. Statistics say that easy CCWs cause more gun violence. SCOTUS continues to block state-by-state legislation to restrict availability of CCWs. Sorry to soapbox but I just can't comprehend why the dialogue drifts-- except perhaps for deliberate misdirection of the dialogue by NRA propagandists.

My feelings on this, sure, they're informed by "the drift of guns across the border into Canada"-- the same way that single-payer health care in the States would be great for Canada, as we might start to see US medical incomes become less preposterous, and we might keep more doctors and nurses at home instead of having them go south to get paid ridiculous incomes-- and many other similar secondary benefits-- but mostly my thoughts about Gun Control In The States is worry about my American friends and relatives, worry about them getting shot at, and worry about the long-term psychological effects of living in a society that is constantly living in fear of being shot at