Sarcasm in print is a delicate talent. Thankfully you seem to be able to it right.

because this characterization isn't all that hyperbolic relative to the ongoing conversation.

"Newton gives US are real chance..."

Did you mean "our"?

thanks.

Sad and scary as shit.

Last edited Mon Dec 24, 2012, 02:01 PM - Edit history (1)

It's curious that it's DUers with mental illness that recognize the need to help them off the ledge.

Against Illegal Guns, along with 750 other Mayors want Obama to create a central data base that will include mental-health data on people.

We already have the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, and now the new health care record system that can easily share data.

All that's needed is to identify the Diagnosis Related Group codes that place a person at risk of becoming a mass murderer and add their name and appropriate data and create the central data base Bloomberg and his mayors want.

Even better, identify the prescription drugs that might trigger a mass murder episode and whenever a patient fills a prescription add that incident to the central data base. That would give our Attorney General all the data needed to monitor in real time people who science and health care professionals have profiled as mass murder risks.

How do we insure government will not use any list just as ACLU alleges govt. has misused the U.S. government's terrorist list? See http://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/terror-watch-list-counter-million-plus

Are we not moving closer to John Poindexter's creation the Information Awareness Office with its All Seeing Eye?

the basic software to search billing codes is already available and used by Infection Control and in epidemiolgical studies. This would be pretty easy to implement

What bothers me is there is really no precision in those billing codes with respect to distinguishing between people. The actuarial risk of gun violence among the mentally ill is very small (even if we accept that all 35 of the mass murderers in the US have been mentally ill)

And SSRIs and other psychoactive drugs may be used on disorders that have very low risks of violence, even if SSRIs are known to sometimes elevate risks of violence in some cohorts--mostly the young.

Moreover, because an estimated 66-75% of people with mental illness don't get to treatment, this approach would actually miss a big fraction of people the enforcement would want to catch.

My personal concern has nothing to do with gun ownership, its about targeting a class of people already discriminated against, and possibly making the discrimination worse.

I have never seen what information comes back to a gun store on a background check. So I don't know if it conflates those adjudicated to be blocked from purchasing a gun due to mental illness with criminals. And I don't know if it identifies them as denied for mental illness. I don't know how privacy restrictions may or may not limit a clerk in a gunshop from surfing the system for information on neighbors.

I think reasonable people can see how either of those might be troubling, particularly if the NCIS is made available to more than gun shops. Access to government databases has a history of expansion.

identified as mass-murder risks.

With that system in place, we may as well allow HSA to add its “right-wing extremists” list and Education to track people who have defaulted on student loans, and don't forget drivers with unpaid parking tickets.

John Poindexter will have won even though he lost.

When the confusion of this furball settles to the ground, I really wonder where DU and the democrats will be standing.