PA - 11 killed, 6 injured in mass shooting at Pittsburgh Synagogue, 27 Oct 2018 *guilty, death sentence*

[bluesneakers]

Does the shooter have a mental illness?

Alt-Right: Are Racists Mentally Ill? Some Psychiatrists Say Yes

In a statement provided to Newsweek about its approach to prejudice-based violence, Saul Levin, CEO and Medical Director of the APA, said, "The APA has a longstanding policy noting the negative impact of racism on mental health. APA policy supports public education efforts and research on racism and its adverse impact on mental health."
...
Sander Gilman, who teaches psychiatry at Emory University, and co-authored with Thomas the book Are Racists Crazy?, agrees that dangerous racists leading seemingly normal lives are hard to identify. “Racists, sadly, cope quite well with daily life,” says Gilman. “They have a take on the way the world should be, and that take functions in the world they live.”

Gilman does not favor a standalone diagnosis of extreme racism, and believes that attempts to categorize such people as mentally ill masks the greater problem of society allowing them to commit vengeful acts.

“Those people are evil. They’ve made bad choices, but they’re not choices you can then attribute to mental illness,” says Gilman. “The minute you do that you let people off the hook.”

 

[bluesneakers]

White Supremacy: An Illness Denied

White supremacists are afflicted with this disease, and they may well know it, but coming face to face with it is too painful; they vehemently deny its existence in general and in them in particular, but in denying its presence and its virulence, white supremacists are leading America to its own destruction.
...
The poison of white supremacy is oozing from America’s core and if we don’t fix it soon, this country will suffer irreversible damage. Some would say we are already at that point. If we are not, we are certainly close.

 

[CoolJ]

It's true. There's a great documentary I watched called I Am. It was abouthow a movie producer went around the world and talked to all the most brilliant minds and scientists in order to determine whether humans are inherently evil, selfish and violent or inherently coooperative and good.

I won't spoil the film but in it some researchers show how simply smiling and being positive affects the actual air around you. It causes changes in molecules and changes people you encounter.

Well need to smile more at others and try to spread kindness like @margarita25!!

The Physics of Emotion: Candace Pert on Feeling Go(o)d • Six Seconds

It's an all around incredible documentary and it really has a lot of other good stuff in it. Amazing. Like how the earth has a pulse that can be tracked and how it sort of sighs deeply every time there is a horrible, massive scale tragedy.

Sounds like real hippy stuff but it's all backed by real science and research which I like.

It's available on Netflix I think:

Too much truth in this documentary for most people to comprehend. Way ahead of its time.

 

[Only4Justice]

I don't give a DAMN if he has a mental illness. IMO - he should be pulled out of that hospital bed and took to the middle of Pittsburgh and hung or shot. I wish he would have been killed. God Bless the INNOCENT Victims who gathered to pray before being SHOT TO DEATH.

 

[bluesneakers]

I don't give a DAMN if he has a mental illness. IMO - he should be pulled out of that hospital bed and took to the middle of Pittsburgh and hung or shot. I wish he would have been killed. God Bless the INNOCENT Victims who gathered to pray before being SHOT TO DEATH.

If he has a mental illness he should receive treatment. I don't think he does though. I think he's just another angry, racist man with a big gun. I have to stop myself from thinking about what should happen to him.

 

[bears10]

Too much truth in this documentary for most people to comprehend. Way ahead of its time.

I’ve never seen it as I prefer to read over watching tv or movies. Can you give a synopsis for norms such as myself who may not be able to comprehend?

 

[Only4Justice]

I understand that we are a free country and all that, with constitutional rights. I GET IT. But this is beyond what that was meant for. AGAIN. Tremendously sad when people are gathered to pray and worship and shot dead.

 

[CoolJ]

I’ve never seen it as I prefer to read over watching tv or movies. Can you give a synopsis for norms such as myself who may not be able to comprehend?

You may very well be able to comprehend bears, but it is my experience that many don’t or won’t.

Been a few yrs since I watched, but in general it is about the true nature of human beings, our interconnectedness and how our world might look if we could learn to harness that nature.

 

[MaryG12]

I wonder when our society is ever going to be civil once again.

Does the shooter have a mental illness?

Alt-Right: Are Racists Mentally Ill? Some Psychiatrists Say Yes

In a statement provided to Newsweek about its approach to prejudice-based violence, Saul Levin, CEO and Medical Director of the APA, said, "The APA has a longstanding policy noting the negative impact of racism on mental health. APA policy supports public education efforts and research on racism and its adverse impact on mental health."
...
Sander Gilman, who teaches psychiatry at Emory University, and co-authored with Thomas the book Are Racists Crazy?, agrees that dangerous racists leading seemingly normal lives are hard to identify. “Racists, sadly, cope quite well with daily life,” says Gilman. “They have a take on the way the world should be, and that take functions in the world they live.”

Gilman does not favor a standalone diagnosis of extreme racism, and believes that attempts to categorize such people as mentally ill masks the greater problem of society allowing them to commit vengeful acts.

“Those people are evil. They’ve made bad choices, but they’re not choices you can then attribute to mental illness,” says Gilman. “The minute you do that you let people off the hook.”

Racism is more of a behavior, usually learned from/socialized from one's environment, such as parents, teachers, etc. No one is born racist.

Can behavior be modified?

Of course it can.

 

[Inthedetails]

I'm sorry for the Squirrel Hill neighborhood and for the congregation of the synagogue that was attacked today.

I've spent the last 20 minutes, maybe longer, typing and deleting a post.

What can we say about this? Again?

jmo

 

[bluesneakers]

I'm sorry for the Squirrel Hill neighborhood and for the congregation of the synagogue that was attacked today.

I've spent the last 20 minutes, maybe longer, typing and deleting a post.

What can we say about this? Again?

jmo

What can we say? I have the same feeling. Ask "Again?" Ask "When and where will the next one be?" It's hard to not feel hopeless.

 

[MaryG12]

If he has a mental illness he should receive treatment. I don't think he does though. I think he's just another angry, racist man with a big gun. I have to stop myself from thinking about what should happen to him.

BBM

I've been thinking the same thing.

Technically the punishment should fit the crime, MOO.

Right now I am more worried about copycat weirdos, namely because we do have a synagogue (Messianic) next to us.

 

[OTPTarheel2018]

I'm sorry for the Squirrel Hill neighborhood and for the congregation of the synagogue that was attacked today.

I've spent the last 20 minutes, maybe longer, typing and deleting a post.

What can we say about this? Again?

jmo

Evil exists. Evil people exist.
We can say don’t put the shooter in solitary. Don’t coddle him. Don’t excuse his behavior
Please house him in the general population.

JMO

 

[MaryG12]

Evil exists. Evil people exist.
We can say don’t put the shooter in solitary. Don’t coddle him. Don’t excuse his behavior
Please house him in the general population.

JMO

Maybe the federal death penalty?

 

[bluesneakers]

Maybe the federal death penalty?

What did Dylann Roof get?

 

[bears10]

You may very well be able to comprehend bears, but it is my experience that many don’t or won’t.

Been a few yrs since I watched, but in general it is about the true nature of human beings, our interconnectedness and how our world might look if we could learn to harness that nature.

Thank you. Sounds interesting. I have my sisters Netflix password, I’ll have to give it a go.

 

[Inthedetails]

Evil exists. Evil people exist.
We can say don’t put the shooter in solitary. Don’t coddle him. Don’t excuse his behavior
Please house him in the general population.

JMO

As much as I hate the violence that the perp committed, I don't want to respond to it by wishing violence on him. He deserves to be punished when convicted and be put away forever - for sure! But when people say they wish prisoners to be beat up or raped or killed by fellow inmates, I can't stand by on the board when my post is quoted as part of the conversation and pretend I agree.

I'm for peace. Convict the guy, jail the guy - yes I'm for that. But reacting to violence with more violence is not what I stand for.

jmo

 

[cybervampira]

WATCH LIVE: ATF Agents Investigate Apartment Connected to Synagogue Shooter STORY: Gunman attacks Pittsburgh synagogue, killing 11 people

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=689923014696582

 

[MaryG12]

What did Dylann Roof get?

Didn't he get the federal death penalty? He's at the US pen in Terre Haute, IN.

Maybe we should resume hangings in the town square for criminals like this.

 

[bluesneakers]

(Post-Gazette) Dispatch From Squirrel Hill

Here, this weekend, is Squirrel Hill, home of a dozen synagogues and for more than a century and a half not only the spiritual center of Pittsburgh Judaism but also a vital landmark in the history of Jews in America, along with New York’s Lower East Side and Boston’s Blue Hill Avenue, one of the vital centers of Jewish identity since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

And here — amid the kosher grocery and the kosher restaurant and the kosher-style deli, and where the knotted fringes of tzitzit are familiar features at the corners of the garments of the Orthodox who walk through the area just before sundown Friday evenings -- it didn’t require social media for the news of the shooting at the Tree of Life to spread.
....
Changes in demographics, increased intermarriage, and the growth of the suburbs have diluted the Jewish identity of Squirrel Hill somewhat, but it remains true, as Steven R. Weisman, author of Chosen Wars, the most recent history of Judaism in America, put it in a phone conversation only hours after the shooting, that ‘’the fabric of American Judaism is woven into Squirrel Hill.’’
...
In our grief — shared across all faiths — we need something to lean on, to steady us. We might reflect on the passage from Proverbs that lent its name to this place of tragedy, a reference to the metaphor describing Judaism’s most sacred text, the Torah, as a tree of life, or, in transliterated Hebrew, Etz hayyim:

It is a tree of life to all who hold fast to it; its ways are ways of pleasantness, and all its paths are peace.