Texas Killing Spree: Charles Everett Brownlow Jr. Arrested For Arson, 5 Slayings

[Jackpine Radical]

11. Yeah, most had emotional/mental problems already.

Last edited Tue Oct 29, 2013, 10:14 AM - Edit history (1)

Ya know what? You already nailed it. Those emotional problems come from being raised in a "sick, mean vicious country breeding sick, mean pathological monsters."

Actually, I believe in family values. I believe every family ought to have enough to eat, decent shelter, health care including mental health care, access to good jobs, a good education,and a positive connection to the larger community. Instead, we have people who are born to 13 year-old single mothers, traumatized by the brutal conditions around them, beaten down by an uncaring system, raised in squalor, and destined for prison. We would much rather invest in incarceration than in early intervention, would rather let mental illness fester until it erupts in violence than head it off early, and would rather destroy the human potential of millions of children rather than nurture and educate them.

Then we wonder where the monsters come from.

And another thing--about this screening of gun buyers? That's a total fantasy. I happen to be a criminal forensic psychologist with a specialization in violence risk assessment and considerable experience testifying in court on these issues, and I can tell you that we do not have the tools to reliably identify who might be a potential mass killer. It's always easy after the fact--you can always find cues and ask how people cold have missed them.

But--suppose one person in 1 million is a potential mass murderer, and suppose that you have an actuarial instrument that helps you identify people more likely to commit such crimes. The BEST actuarials in the behavioral sciences have likelihood ratios on the order of 3.0. That means that someone who tests "positive" on your instrument is 3 times more likely than the average person to commit a violent crime. Further imagine that 1 person in 100 tests positive on your instrument. That is a very conservative estimate of the rate of "dangerous serious mental illess" in the population, lower than the rate of paranoid schizophrenia, and much lower than the rate of Bipolar Disorder. For simplicity, we will say that the US population is about 300 million. Given that 1-in-1-million figure for mass murderers, your instrument will identify 3 million people as high-risk, but only 300 of them would actually commit a mass murder. You are therefore falsely identifying 100,000 people as high-risk for every one you correctly identify as high risk. Furthermore, since your instrument is only 3 times better than chance, you will be missing about 1/3 of the actual mass murderers.