I think we should also be including Major Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, in these discussions. The order of magnitude of the event was roughly comparable. 13 dead, 29 wounded.
Also Luby's cafeteria. 23 dead, 20 wounded.
But then there's Timothy McVeigh and Oklahoma City. 168 dead, 680 injured. With nothing more sophisticated than a U-Haul truck, fertilizer, and diesel fuel. Holmes certainly had the smarts to come up with something equally or more devastating, and if he hadn't have been able to purchase firearms it's reasonable to conjecture that he would have simply blown up buildings rather than shoot people.
So what's the answer? "Ban large-capacity fertilizer bags." "Background checks for U-Haul truck rentals."
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Originally Posted by Glenn E. Meyer
The insanity issue is whether they are turned over to the mental health systems or criminal justice systems - but that can be another thread.
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I think there's another issue. To whom the shooters get assigned after the fact doesn't really help any of the victims. What about looking at what's WRONG with the mental health system that allows mass murderers to "slip through the cracks." Clearly, if a shooter has been totally stealth and then pops up shooting people, as the mass killer in Norway appears to have done, there's not much to fault the mental health system for because they never had a chance at his. But IIRC Cho had been in treatment, and Holmes was under psychiatric care. Why isn't there some level of outrage being expressed that the mental health professionals weren't able to see these events coming and/or didn't do anything to raise red flags that might have prevented the killings?
This is not a red herring argument. I understand that psychology and psychiatry are imperfect "sciences" (I tend to think of psychology as pseudo-science, but I've known a fair number of psychologists over the years ...), but the anti-gun faction wants to tell the world, "If he hadn't had access to guns, he couldn't have done this." (Which, of course, ignores the fact that if he hadn't had access to guns he could have made bombs. Really sphisticated bombs.) My counter-point is, "If he had been committed to a mental health institution, he couldn't have done this ... OR made bombs."