Because people who are committing murders, and murder suicides think that way... at least at that moment. Later they claim remorse, if they haven't 'offed' themselves first, because then they are facing legal consequences, and it is usually the thing to do; it's de rigueur.
I'm sure that this shootist believes he did the right thing in shooting the mayor, and the right thing in turning himself in. The conundrum will come when he faces the consequences for illegally using his presumably legal firearm for when he mistook the good and evil in his own nature when using his firearm. He must have had some understanding of having a conscience, and of good and evil in attending church, as recorded below. (I've bolded the section for emphasis).
It would be far better if he never had a gun in m the first place, and far better if we lived in a non-gun culture that did not glorify gun violence to resolve problems.
I suppose we should be grateful that this gun lunatic stopped at firing multiple shots into one person, instead of additional shots into multiple people and himself.
I'm sure our gun lunatics would like us to label this gun lunatic a goblin, so they can deny his humanity, his personal mixture of good and evil.
From the AP by way of MSNBC.com:
Small-town Ky. mayor shot dead, suspect surrenders
By ADRIAN SAINZ
HICKMAN, Ky. — A small-town Kentucky mayor was shot dead early Monday in his home in what the police chief said was a dispute with the stepson of a woman the mayor had dated.Hickman Police Chief Tony Grogan said 30-year-old Thomas Joseph "Tommy" Lattus walked into the police department around 1 a.m. CST and said that he had just shot Mayor Charles Murphy. An officer went to Murphy's home and found the mayor's body in the bedroom.
Grogan said Lattus broke into the side door of Murphy's house and killed him with a shotgun. Multiple shots were fired, but Grogan wouldn't say how many times Murphy was hit.
"As far as clear motive, I would assume that it's just that he didn't like him," Grogan told The Associated Press.
Lattus has been charged with murder and is being held at the Fulton County Jail, where records do not indicate whether he has an attorney. He is scheduled to appear in court Tuesday.
The mayor's brother and neighbor, Fred Murphy, said his nephew told him Monday that the mayor had been concerned when Lattus visited his house in recent days. The mayor asked his son to call periodically to check on his welfare, Fred Murphy said.
The mayor had dated the suspect's stepmother, Carole Lattus, on and off for years, according to the police chief and other friends and family.
"Sometimes they broke up, sometimes they got back together," Grogan said.
The police chief added: "From Tommy's point of view, I think he might have had some friction, from things that happened in the past."
Carole Lattus was out of the country and couldn't immediately be reached. Thomas Lattus had been adopted by Carole Lattus when he was a boy, said Gerald Harris, whose niece is married to the mayor's son. The suspect's father, Carole Lattus' former husband, died years ago.
Another neighbor who had known Tommy Lattus since he was young said his behavior led her to believe that he was unstable. Melissa Somerfield, who has lived near Murphy for 22 years, said that behavior included once when Lattus had a singing outburst at a church service.
"He just got up out of the blue and starting singing aloud. People went and started telling his mother that things were not right with him," she said.
Somerfield said she didn't hear any gunshots Monday morning. She was awakened by her sister at about 2:30 a.m. with the news that the man who once served as her elementary and junior high principal had been killed. Authorities were at Murphy's home until around 4:30 a.m.
"It's been really hard to wrap my head around this," Somerfield said. "He will be greatly missed in the community."
Harris, who owns a tractor business in town, said he's known the popular mayor since grade school. Murphy's family is devastated by the shooting, Harris said.
"They're tore all to pieces, all of them are," Harris said.
Jason Sipes, pastor at West Hickman Baptist Church, told a reporter from The Associated Press that family members gathering at a house would not comment on the shooting.
The city of about 2,500 people in the extreme southwest corner of Kentucky is known for the Hickman-Dorena Ferry, the only connection for automobiles over the Mississippi River between Kentucky and Missouri. Violent crime there is rare.
"We have speeding tickets and running stop signs, but to have something of this magnitude, we may have something like this happen every five to 10 years," City Manager Larry Myatt said.
Morrison Williamson, manager at Hickman Hardware, said he first heard about it early in the morning from his wife.
"Next thing I know, people started calling the store, saying 'Did you hear what happened?'" Williamson said.
Murphy, 68, was in his second term as mayor. He previously served on the city board of commissioners. City Commissioner Charles Choate described Murphy as a small farmer who loved to spend time on his property.
Murphy was also proud that recent audits showed the city's financial situation was improving.
"He was very proud that the city was turning the corner and being more financially responsible," Choate said.
A search of online court records in Kentucky showed that Lattus had no pending civil cases or criminal charges against him in Kentucky.
 |
| Thomas J. Lattus, 30, of Hickman, Ky. is seen in an undated photo provided by the Fulton County, Ky., Jail. Hickman, Ky. Police Chief Tony Grogan said in a statement that 30-year-old Tommy Lattus walked into the police station early Monday morning, Jan. 23, 2012 and told officers he killed Mayor Charles Murphy. Grogan said a witness came in a short time later and reported hearing shots at Murphy's home. An officer found Murphy unresponsive around 1 a.m. CST. Lattus has been charged with murder and was being held at the Fulton County Detention Facility, where records do not indicate whether he has an attorney. (AP Photo/Fulton County, Ky., Jail) |
Aw, c'mon now, dog gone; just 'cuz he was a little "tetched" in the head, you'd deny him his GODgiven gunzrightz? Why, he's prolly oneathem folks who'd be denied firearms based on a faulty "false positive" diagnosis by some antigunmentalhealth professional.
ReplyDeleteDog Gone,
ReplyDeleteAre you suggesting that we deny gun rights to people whose neighbors find them suspicious? That's far more dangerous than an incident like this.
Other than naming the MMPI as your favorite testing instrument, you have yet to state what tests and what results would show a person to be disqualified to own or carry a firearm. What's YOUR standard?
How tragic. That said, we know almost nothing about this event and I am reserving any judgments. For all we know the mayor molested this man when he as a boy and the aftermath of that boiled over to the event of this article.
ReplyDeleteGC writes:Are you suggesting that we deny gun rights to people whose neighbors find them suspicious? That's far more dangerous than an incident like this.
ReplyDeleteAre you claiming there are no gun owners who are crazy?
I'm suggesting this person demonstrated questionable judgment and function; this appears to have been only one example of a PATTERN of behavior.
I'll leave it up to mental health professionals to determine the best testing for screening out the extremes of dangerously mentally ill people. There has been a lot of research just during 2011 that is discovering new ways to detect existing schizophrenia and even predict future probability of schizophrenia. For example:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110405084302.htm
At least one method of diagnostic testing had a 97% success rate of correctly identifying those who were suffering from it, and correctly screening out those who were not.
I have no problem with some sort of additional testing or appeals process to someone who thinks they were wrongly identified being made available.
But it is stupid for us NOT to distinguish who is and is not dangerous BEFORE, not after, they have access to a gun when these are people who have a high probability of hurting and killing a lot of people.
Your response is to stick your head in the sand like an ostritch and claim that we can't test anyone for anything or deny anyone a gun ever, or track how and where firearms get into the hands of criminals -- you want NO restrictions ever on guns anywhere at any time.
That is stupid. It is an illogical, irrational, and badly emotional aspect of gun lunacy. It is flawed, bad thinking.
And that hardly argues well for your judgment on anything, much less with a firearm.
Crunchie wrote:How tragic. That said, we know almost nothing about this event and I am reserving any judgments. For all we know the mayor molested this man when he as a boy and the aftermath of that boiled over to the event of this article.
ReplyDeleteUm......what???????????
The facts show that the shootist took his gun, apparently in the middle of the night, and went to the house of the mayor and blew him away.
We have accounts of the shootist behaving erratically on other occasions, such that people who knew him and lived near him were concerned about his being impaired, dysfunctional.
There is nothing anywhere which suggests the victim did a damn thing wrong.
But if he did, it was still not appropriate or right or moral for this man to kill him.
That you would begin making up scenarios like this instead of condemning the gun violence is a part of the problem Crunchy with those of you who embrace a gun violent culture.
Whatever else the victim did or did not do, this was wrong, and it happened in part because of the lethal instrumentality of a gun.
What is NOT true here, as in post after post after post is that the innate goodness of human nature stopped a bad killing with a firearm.
ReplyDeleteBut commenters here like Greg want and need to believe in that kind of magical thinking because otherwise the foundation of your gun culture goes to hell.
Dog Gone,
ReplyDelete1. Ostriches don't stick their heads in the sand.
2. You trust mental health professionals without question? That's my point--I don't trust people in power without question.
3. Actually, I'd be willing to talk about reasonable rules for ownership and carry if I saw any willingness on your side to compromise. But as long as gun control advocates insist on taking and never giving, people on my side have to resist. I've told you this before, but typically, you don't listen.
dog gone,
ReplyDeleteI am not defending what this man did. I was merely pointing out that we have very little information in this article and speculating based on such limited information is prone to gross inaccuracy.
That aside, I have said before and reaffirm that I do no want to see mentally ill people able to acquire or own firearms. The difficult part is a real world testing methodology to identify mentally ill people that is both accurate and affordable.
Dog gone, I have a few questions for you- fleshing this proposal out a little further. Let’s say a licensing/permitting procedure gets implemented complete with mental heath screening as you are proposing:
ReplyDelete1) Let’s take a case where someone is denied. Now what? What is the next step besides adding them to the NICS? You’ve just labeled a person as dangerous- it would be extremely irresponsible to just let them go, free to hurt someone with a black market gun or any other weapon. You might be thinking, “treat them”. Do you just give them a referral and let them walk out the door thinking “whew, that was close. He could have hurt somebody”? What if they don’t want treatment? Do we regress back to the days of insane asylums and incarceration without due process? Mental health issues are very tricky for these reasons. This is bigger than just a gun issue.
2) How do you expect our mental heath network to accommodate the additional millions of man hours needed each year for screening? Do you think a psychiatrist’s time is better spent interviewing perfectly healthy people who want to buy a gun, or treating patients with diagnosed disorders? Given how taxed the network is now, I go for the latter.
3) Let’s say the doctor gives someone permission to buy a gun, then he goes Jared Loughner on us? What is the doctor’s liability? Can she be sued? Or let’s combine this with case 1. He was denied, but walked out the door and killed someone with a stolen gun (or any other weapon). What is the liability- and don’t just say the person who had their gun stolen? I know how you guys think, and typically the reaction is to say “how did this happen, and what do we have to do to stop it next time.” So it is a serious question to ask when someone was flagged as being too dangerous to buy a gun, and then latter plows his car into a playground. Naturally people would be saying “we knew about this guy, and we let it happen.”
4) I read the link you provided for cynical diagnosis of schizophrenia. We both understand that this may be a ways off, but what do you think a test like this would cost? Ballpark?
Crunchie, there is no way what this guy did is anything but terrible, no spin that can be put on it any other way.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure more information will be forthcoming, but as with Loughner, this guy had a pattern of dysfunctional behavior which taken with this act isn't good.
We make no effort effectively to prevent dangerously mentally ill people from having guns. We don't maintain an effective data base of people we know to be dangerously mentally ill or drug users -- and the NRA was instrumental in the NICS being as ineffective as it is, pro-gunners are responsible for fighting the funding and participation of the individual states and of fighting what could have been a federal mandate for participation.
Because lethal weapons are deadly and have all too often been used to harm and kill people as well as themselves, because weapons are by intent and design dangerous, we should be preventing mentally ill people from acquisition of weapons, ditto drug users.
Once we make the decision to go forward to effectively limit prohibited groups of people from obtaining firearms, we can decide what form that should take. The argument to do nothing because it might not be perfect is stupid on the face of it. We make the effort because doing nothing is not acceptable, and as our knowledge and resources advance, we update the processes to continue to improve on it.
The real world methodology for identifying people who are dangerously ill is not that difficult. We are talking about an extreme degree of mental illness, not some minor diagnosis.
greg, lemmings don't jump off cliffs in mass suicide migrations either, but if you use a reference to lemmings, people know what you mean.
ReplyDeleteI trust mental health professionals as a profession to be largely self-correcting. I've already stipulated that there should be some appeals process for any questionable test result, so that no one mental health professional has a great deal of power. But yes,I trust a mental health professional generally to both be professionally competent and to value the rights of an individual.
You're the one who wants us to trust people with a lethal weapon because of a general human goodness. I see no reason to exclude mental health professionals from that larger membership of humanity.
Do you not see the inherent illogic that we can't trust mental health professionals to act in a professional manner.......but we should trust someone with a lethal weapon, blindly, without question?
That is just stupid. It is ludicrous in the face of clear instances of dangerously crazy people legally buying guns without any effective screening process to prevent that.
TS, if someone feels they have been wrongly identified as dangerously mentally ill, I've already stated there should be some sort of appeals process for review by other mental health professionals.
ReplyDeleteGiven the nature of a lethal weapon, I'd rather see someone who was genuinely not clearly sane and safe denied a firearm, but anyone who as a part of their profession does so should be required to defend their position to other mental health professionals, just as one could seek a second opinion on any other health matter.
Such mental health testing could be made available under health insurance with some modest co-pay - I haven't priced testing but let's say a co-pay of $35 to $50. IF you balance that off with the costs of gun violence, this should in fact be cost effective.
Should a mental health professional who fails to diagnose a dangerous mental illness be held professionally liable? I would imagine that would be like any other mental health profession activity.
You'd have to prove that the mental health professional failed to do their job properly, as well as prove that someone was dangerously mentally ill in a way that was detectable (as distinct for example from some other impairment such as a brain injury, tumor, etc.
Something else not mentioned so far is that there are people with these kinds of illnesses who can be treated and have a dramatically improved quality of life above and beyond not killing other people.
Don't stop at just that one link I posted. Do a google search and read through some of the pros and cons of diagnostic medicine for dangerous mental illness.
I don't think there is a good argument for us NOT doing this before allowing someone to buy firearms, ditto drug testing. There is no positive side to dangerous people having guns.
Dog gone, I am not saying screening and evaluations don’t have their place. As it now, there has to be a reason for someone to require a mental health evaluation- like an outburst that leads to an arrest, family intervention, or self-admittance (typically only arrest leads to being adjudicated mentally ill). Screening also works well on a small scale like for employment at the CIA. When you talk about screening everyone in the whole country who wants to buy a gun, it becomes unmanageable. That leads to question number 2 which you did not answer. We have no where near the resources available to accomplish your proposal. Who does the screening?
ReplyDeleteYou also did not answer the first question. What do you do besides add them to the NICS?
Dog gone: “Such mental health testing could be made available under health insurance with some modest co-pay - I haven't priced testing but let's say a co-pay of $35 to $50.”
I wasn’t just asking about the cost to the gun buyer, although that was part of it. There would obviously be a tremendous cost associated with doing the test that the Finish are developing. Even if over time it got to be cheap (on the order of thousands of dollars)- when you multiple that by millions of gun buyers, you are talking about billions and billions of dollars.
Dog gone: “There is no positive side to dangerous people having guns.”
But there is a huge negative to the cost performance and how that money could be better spent. Not to mention the time. Diverting mental health resources to the millions of perfectly sane people who just want to buy a gun means that the people who desperately need treatment are going to suffer.
TS nailed it. There are some one hundred million gun owners in this country. Dog Gone, are you suggesting that there are enough mental health professionals and drug screeners to process all of them? Under your system, either the healthcare budget of this country would be taken up in analyzing gun applications, or gun owners would have to pay a huge new tax. Try, for at least a moment, to live in the real world. We can't get a rational national general healthcare system in this country. Now you want a gun healthcare system?
ReplyDeleteThis is why I accuse you of wanting to take guns away from everyone. When we dig into your proposals, we see that they would be impossible.
And by the way, I don't talk about lemmings, either. Such things only encourage a bad understanding of the natural world.
Greg, It's intellectually dishonest of you to say stuff like this.
ReplyDelete"2. You trust mental health professionals without question? That's my point--I don't trust people in power without question."
Where did you get that "without questions" part?
Mikeb302000,
ReplyDelete1. The claim of intellectual dishonesty is tired. It adds nothing to the discussion, and it's wrong in reference to me.
2. I objected to the idea of warrantless wiretapping. I objected to secret detention. I didn't trust Bush when he asked me to do so without evidence. I continue to object to things like that. In the case of mental health professionals, I object to someone who can use a secret formula to determine whether a person gets to do something or not.
3. Government must operate in the open whenever possible. It must always follow a set of known rules when dealing with citizens.
I live in this town that this happened in. I know both of these people well.Yes I believe that everyone should have the RIGHT to bare arms. However, if you have a documented mental illness with violent tendency's then no you should not. The victim did nothing to the shooter to deserve this!!!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the personal report. I guess there are just too many nuts out there with guns, huh?
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