[Mental Illness] Florida high school suspect Nikolas Cruz claimed to hear voices in his head

You seem to really not want this guy to be a white supremacist.

 

they... the white nationalist group? Law enforcement are saying they are still investigation the link...

 

He was adopted, hence the last name Cruz.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/15/us/nikolas-cruz-florida-shooting.html

 

Ehh in fairness when there were terrorist attacks there were a lot of people that did not want the guilty party to be Muslim.

If this shooter is associated with MAGA or worse, the white supremacist movement, AND it becomes a trend, there could be some several political consequences down the road.

 

Those people are equally ridiculous.

 

If he's really mental, then he need to be held in a mental treatment facility until he get back to normal. No such place exists in the USA (or probably much anywhere in the world).

 

I agree with. I am just not surprised.

 

I'm not one of those people. But, I wouldn't call forced commitment to a long-term mental health facility as 'getting away with murder.' He'd be a prisoner, essentially, except with better mental health care and no specified release date.

I think the intersection of insanity and the justice system gets really messy and there probably aren't many right answers. I understand the insanity defense for some lesser crime on the premise that you can actually improve the perp's mental health with treatment. But when you commit a crime so horrendous that we would execute a sane person for it, I'm not sure there's a point to treating the mentally ill person. We give up on people who shoot up a bunch of schoolchildren, even if they could be saved. I'm not sure it should be different for the insane.

 

Not where you were going with this, but our nation chose a (relatively speaking) somewhat radical path in the early 1980's when it comes to institutionalizing the severely mentally ill. Compared to most modern countries, we really do let them on their own to do as they "wish," (I put wish in quotes b/c after seeing decades of mentally ill people on the street, their own wishes are scattered and sometimes completely nonfunctional).

 

Not really understanding your logic. Do you think that people hearing voices in their head are not mentally ill?

Your issue seems more with the law, not with the stance that mental illness is the root cause of many of these problems.

I have an idea. In keeping with the thought that if we just outlaw things they magically disappear...maybe we should just outlaw mental illness? Wouldn't that fix this problem? If not, then I'm confused, because I thought the thinking was that if we just outlaw things, they aren't a problem any more.

FWIW...agree with many of the other posters in this thread that mental illness just gets messy in our legal system. It's hard to reconcile, and I don't think you can make the assumption that just because someone believes mental illness is a problem that it follows that those same people think people should 'get away with' heinous crimes. It's more an issue of recognizing what the root causes are, so that those can be addressed.

 

I think that we are all entitled to our own set of facts.

 

What are you talking about?

 

So in the 80s, the US dismantled the entire mental health system that had been built up over the course of several decades. All of our federally funded mental health care centers were killed by the Reagan administration with no alternative as far as treatment and care. Reagan also scrapped involuntary institutionalization laws (which had big problems but he also had no solutions beyond just scrapping it). Instead we started jailing mentally ill people and scaling back state funded treatment programs after the federal programs were ended.

And at the same time, we allow virtually anyone to buy weapons capable of slaughtering huge numbers of people. Even the US military won't allow people that their commanders deem a danger to themselves and others around them to carry weapons but in the US civilian world, there are zero restrictions.

And instead of debating either of those we're debating the merits of the insanity defense? No wonder, our problems go unfixed.

 

He is talking about the crux of modern America.

 

Isn't everyone who murders other people mentally ill? [not in self defense / accidentally]

 

well he's not but funny how the media jumped all over this narrative without any fact checking. I wonder why

 

I would not say so.

 

Are you a white supremacist?

Why do you care about their feelings so much?

 

it's too soon to make light of the situation, but can you imagine being the uber driver that dropped him off at the school and then saw the face later in the news that day. It reminded me of post made by someone here who saw the candy man killer van or one of those serial killers from houston. can't remember which.

 

That is changing. One of the most conservative think tanks in Texas, TPPF, has a Right to Crime center and they are pushing for less incarceration, more community supervised release, more education and vocational programs, and a complete turn around in pretty much everything criminal justice in Texas. Texas has already closed down I think 7 prisons. The next step is juvenile justice.