Do you feel like you know a potential Jared Loughner or Seung-Hui Cho?

The women of this country need to have more sex with creepy nerds. For the good of society.

 

OK, but what do we do with everyone else?

 

Boom would have won an Osker.

 

Ragu for two points and the foul.

And then slappy drains a three from half-court.

 

The mentally ill are a distinctly different group of people from the unhappy kids in high school who are socially isolated. Being miserable in middle school and high school is not the same thing has having a mental illness, like these two pretty obviously were.

And an important thing to remember is being crazy is not a crime in this country.

There are plenty of people who are batshit fucking insane and literally believe Beelzebub and Jerry Garcia are communicating with them through Anne Rice novels or somesuch. There are also plenty of bipolar people who can act with reckless disregard for human life in a manic phase or are depressed enough to take their own life and maybe someone else's when they're down. Then you've got assorted schizophrenics who might or might not be taking their medication or people with PTSD who could have flashbacks to war zones and see innocent people as enemy combatants and so on.

And none of that is illegal. Relatively few of those people will go on to commit crimes and only a handful will end up murdering someone. Many of them are homeless and undiagnosed.

Given that, with the history of abusing the mentally ill (both the actually sick and people who were deemed sick because they didn't conform to society's ideals at the time), we have really moved away in this country from forced institutionalization and medication unless a person is proved to be a danger to himself or others. Trying to prevent crimes like this is ridiculously difficult because while you might know someone who is dangerously mentally ill and refuses to seek treatment (which is his right), there is no recourse to forcing him into treatment. Until he actually does something or admits to planning something to a degree a court would consider commitment, you're kind of SOL. Heck, you can be actively psychotic but unless you're a danger to yourself or others, there's really nothing anyone can do to make you take your medications or even get diagnosed.

The question is where do you draw the civil liberties line, I guess. For all their problems with mental illness, these are independent adults, often with high IQs or other striking talents like music or art. Why do I get to decide he should be medicated when he hasn't done anything dangerous and odds are he won't do anything dangerous? And when is someone "crazy enough" to medicate? It's not like the mentally ill have a barcode that will tell you they're homicidal in addition to being nuts.

 

Individuals with the potential to snap, who freak people out with their strange views on life?

Sure.

These types can be found on just about every Internet message board.

 

I worked with a copy editor who scared the shit out of everybody. He would just stare at people and would creep everybody out. The other writers, all told me about him my first day there. "When you call in to check transmission, if he answers, hang up..."

My first week there, I called to check transmission and he answered. I didn't want to just hang up, but I said, "Hey, just wanted to see if the story made it."

I was on the phone with him for 35 minutes and I listened to him bitch about his wife, his mother, politics, his fantasy baseball team, how no one at work appreciated him. He then told me if I ever wanted to go get drinks he could tell me all the dirt on everyone who works there.

One other time I called he (I was 22 at the time) he started asking me about my sex life and started complaining that his wife wouldn't have sex with him anymore.

After that one, I started calling the agate guys directly to check transmission. I don't think I ever called the main sports line ever again in five years.

I came in the office about a week later and shot a look over to his desk to see if he was there and the ASE noticed that and said, "Oh, David (not his real name) isn't here, he's off plotting to shoot the place up."

 

You stayed on the phone for 35 minutes? Jesus. I hope you were wildly exaggerating about that.

 

I was young and didn't want to be rude.

 

I hear Obama's got that going for his second term.

 

I don't know him, I know of him.

We have .... wouldn't call him a neighbor ... but he lives in the adjacent neighborhood. He's ... Loughner's father meets Norman Bates meets Glenn Beck meets the Unibomber meets Giovanni Ribisi's character in Boiler Room.

He sends the town attorney and other town officials harassing e-mails that walk right up to the line of being an arrestable offense... files complaints with the FBI, the media, anybody who will listen... yells at the neighbors. His job is "professional nuisance." He files lawsuits (representing himself, even though he's not a lawyer), sends nasty e-mails to all sorts of people and corporations, writes rambling posts on the internet and lives off family money. He's also a Tea Party organizer. Paranoid, rambling, anti-government, contemptuous, loner....

Yeah, I lock my doors at night.