Every state has a government, TM. It is the institution made up of our representatives who write the laws, and the executive we elect to enforce them. These laws, and their enforcement, define how public policy is carried out in the state. That is what we native English speakers mean when we say that the states are run by government. Of course the government is elected by the people and works to carry out the people’s will, or is supposed to. And of course the government runs only those governmental functions. Most of us kinda think that is obvious. Do you actually have some kind of a point here?

Good point about Eric Scott. You definitely have to know your location situation; Las Vegas police have a very bad reputation, whereas Seattle (despite the federal interference and a few nasty outliers like the guy who was just acquitted) has a very good reputation regarding both concealed and open carry.

Or remember how the Police Chief of Milwaukee responded after the WI Supreme Court ruled that some means of carry was constitutionally required? At least that evil man was open about his intent to flout the law of the state, so reasonable citizens could take warning.

Kirk Parker – We agree that simply carrying did not violate the law. What I was trying to get at (and really should have checked better before I submitted) was that ignoring such signs are deeply imprudent (as Erik Scott’s family could tell you) and encouraging or expecting such imprudence is unwise with regards to anything touching on firearms. I was probably unclear.

You misunderstand–ORS 164.265 only applies in the “after” part of the scenario I describe.

No one who merely enters a place open the the public has “enter[ed] or remain[ed] unlawfully in or upon premises”. That’s why the prior specific revocation of the person’s welcome to be in the place generally-open-to-the-public is required before he’s guilty of a criminal offense.

And of course I mean to contrast this to the situation with, e.g., Texas where Texas Penal Code Section 30.06 gives signs (of a proper size and shape) the legal weight of prior notice.

Not that I want to have a big argument about this. I certainly agree it’s not an ideal situation; just pointing out that for those of us in some states it’s not quite as bad as presented. The annals of opencarry.org are full of accounts of WA folks (and maybe OR too, I don’t routinely read that section) being asked to leave anti-gun establishments w/o ever being charged with any crime.

Kipland Philip “Kip” Kinkel (born August 30, 1982) is an American spree killer. In May 1998, at the age of 15, he murdered his parents and engaged in a school shooting at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon that left two students dead and 25 others wounded.[1] He is serving a 111-year sentence, without the possibility of parole.

I can’t find the piece, but Vin Suprynowicz, writing about it years ago in the LVRJ, noted that the boy who tackled Kinkel and ended his spree did so BECAUSE of his familiarity with firearms. He heard the gun make the tell-tale “click” it made when out of ammo, so he knew he had a brief moment to tackle him before he could re-load or switch weapons. Thanks to his quick action, it’s likely more were not injured or killed.

This piece, claiming to transcript a CNN interview with the family, has the family claiming that one reason their son did not panic was, again, the fact that he wasn’t a stranger to firearms.

“It is somewhat concerning that you conflate the state with its servants, the government”

How did I do that? I said, “the states are run by governments”. I think that makes it rather clear that they are two different things. Maybe you have a little trouble with the reading comprehension thing? Ginny said that states should experiment with ways to treat mental health. I agree. I made an explicit mention of the process of trial and error that needs to be followed. But she then also added that “government should observe”. Which makes no sense. Because when states experiment (with governmental policy options), it is the state governments that are doing the experimenting. That was my (rather obvious) point, sir.

“Again, the law enforcement activity associated with Fast & Furious is not a partisan issue for those who are not in the tank hacks.”

Well, I would agree. I would just point out that for the last 3 years the activities associated with F&F have been made a partisan issue by the legions of in-the-tank hacks on the right.

“If the Federal government is this incompetent at following basic rules,”

Utter nonsense. It was not “the federal government” writ large. It was a bunch of prosecutors on the front lines of what is essentially a war with large, murderous criminal organizations. They tried a tactic to get the goods on some of the higher-ups, and it failed. Thats what happens when you go out into the real world and try to accomplish difficult tasks in dangerous and uncertain conditions. We should certainly do an evaluation of what went wrong, as I am sure they have done, but that should be the end of it.

“how can we have confidence that they can be trusted to control guns justly and properly?”

I don’t think that prosecutors in the drug wars would be the ones to run the gun control regime, whatever form that might take.

Fast & Furious violated a significant number of basic law enforcement principles that had been good sense and effective in keeping the innocent body count down. Again, the law enforcement activity associated with Fast & Furious is not a partisan issue for those who are not in the tank hacks. If the Federal government is this incompetent at following basic rules, how can we have confidence that they can be trusted to control guns justly and properly?

Kirk Parker – Courting a class A misdemeanor is (164.265 criminal trespass while in posession of a firearm) that carries a penalty of up to a year in jail and $6250 in fines seems to be force of law to me. That it’s difficult to prosecute should not encourage CCW holders to take a cavalier attitude towards them. Ignoring firearms laws when they do not suit is something we should discourage. It sets up a dynamic that is not good public policy. The cure is to restrict their use socially with laws that make it clear that discrimination against businesses who post such signs shall have a safe harbor in state law.

“Connecticut has the toughest gun laws in the country…”

This kind of statement really hurts your credibility. While this is a matter of opinion, not strictly fact, I would so no person who was actually acquainted with the general shape of state firearms laws would make such a claim.

We can argue whether IL, NJ, or MA are worst, or maybe some others, but really CT is not in the running for this “award”.

I agree that gun-free zones are generally bad policy. However, the intervenor in Oregon was not violating any law by carrying his concealed pistol in a mall posted “No Firearms”. These signs have no force of law in OR (nor do they here in WA, either.) The only thing the carrier was guilty of was rudeness in not respecting the mall owners’ wishes. If they had discovered his carrying and asked him to leave and if he refused or returned later armed, then he could be charged with a crime, but that crime would be “trespassing” and not “carrying in a prohibited place”.

Harrington had a step-wise program on the ward which held 200 men. The patient was allowed to assist man who ran the floor polisher by holding the cord. When he had treatment conferences, everybody, including the floor polishers were included. They were all part of the team. The patient might be on the more restrictive second floor where they were not allowed outdoors. Their chores went from the floor polisher to cleaning water faucets and other trivial chores. If they did this well, they were allowed to move to the next small . Eventually, they were allowed to go to the PX for candy and cigarettes. If all that was handled well, they were allowed passes for a weekend with a half-way house or family.

If they showed anxiety or misbehavior, they would be returned to step one. Then they would be allowed to start again but move up faster if they did well. This was probably the most important part of the therapy. They learned that if they felt bad they had immediate relief available by simply messing up some small task. It was not necessary to go crazy.

Eventually, he got most of the ward out in board and care facilities with trained caretakers who knew when to call the hospital for help. Before him some of these men had been there since World War II.

He was one of one or two of the greatest men I ever met in medicine. One of his residents wrote a book based on his ideas. At one time in the late 60s an 70s it was recommended reading for LA school teachers. THose days are long gone.

You are a dem talking point hack and nothing more.

States are run by governments.

“..if anything would sour me on gun control it would be Fast & Furious”

How does that work? Prosecutors try to use guns as a means to track up a drug cartel hierarchy, and they screw up by losing track of the guns, and this has implications on how you think about gun control???

And you really think that without those specific guns the drug cartels would have been unarmed, and those people who died would not have died? Seriously?

I used to be for gun control (that was the culture in which I swam and I’m not an original thinker); the experiments of gun-free zones, the gun control policies of places like Washington, D.C. and Illinois (yes, I’ll grant Virginia is close to Washington, but other countries border ours) has convinced me that such controls don’t work (as reading this and other blogs like it have slowly made me see constitutional issues in a different way). And if anything would sour me on gun control it would be Fast & Furious, which seemed implemented to make an argument for gun control, the 300+ Mexicans and smaller but vital number of Americans that died be damned. We can see what an administration either incompetent or manipulative with complete control over force is not good.

On the other hand, surely Kennedy brings the longest and closest perspective – and he sees any solution as difficult. Institutionalization has its flaws, but forcing parent to either imprison their children or leave them free to roam the streets is not a useful model.

I agree with you that this is a serious issue that needs more than knee-jerk political responses. Unfortunately, that is all that you manage to muster, especially in your last sentence. You revert to a tired accusation against “activists” while you ignore the fact that the overwhelming reason why our care for the mentally ill in this country has stagnated at a very low level for a long time now is that there has been constant opposition to spending any real money on addressing the problem.

No doubt the “activists” have probably come up with a lot of bad ideas over the years, but that is how things go in the real world. We don’t know the answer to the problem, so we need to engage in an extended period of trial and error in order to hone in on the best suite of policies to care for the sick, to protect society, and to uphold our values, hopefully all at the same time.

But this takes a commitment to 1) acknowledging the existence of the problem, 2) accepting the responsibility of the government to play a significant role in finding the solution 3) spending the money necessary to research and experiment with solutions until the best ones are found, understanding that some of that money will be “wasted” on ideas that do not turn out as well as imagined.

The conservatives in this country have never been willing to do any of these three steps, for this problem, and for many others. The attitude is to keep taxes as low as possible – as a first principle – for the government to do as little as possible – to agree to expend collective resources only when a problem is so blatant and overwhelming that it cannot be ignored. The mentally ill homeless population can be ignored, and so they are.

Veryretired – I hope that you aren’t putting me in that category. I’m just not qualified to delve deeply on the mental health front. I just know that it is quite easy to twist mental health to political ends and would urge sufficient safeguards to avoid soviet style psychiatry. There are a lot of people in the US who would seize on that in order to make political incarcerations.

I am a radical individualist, but when someone’s loving family comes to a hospital in tears saying their adult child is talking about demons and killing people and various delusional, violent things, it might be better to have some methodology available to detain and evaluate the person for potential violence rather than just blow everyone off with a prescription and a “good luck with that”.

This is a serious issue, and demands more than knee-jerk political responses, although I understand that’s all some trolls here can muster.

I have family scattered all over the country, and would just as soon not hear about some of them being slaughtered because it was just too ishy to actually consider doing anything serious and proactive about mentally ill people who desperately need help, especially when their families are often every bit as desperate for someone to help them through these attacks.

The are dozens of people dead over the past several years who were killed by mentally ill people who could not be touched under the current rules because of feckless activists and “compassion snobs” who think their pet causes are more important than anything else in the world.

The unorganized militia didn’t work in Connecticut. Why didn’t it work? Were there legal barriers that kept it from working? Was the shooting done in a gun free zone? Has the concept of firearms ownership been culturally beaten out of Connecticut residents so bad that the percent of gun carriers has dropped below a critical level there? Was it just the luck of the draw?

I welcome calls for a real conversation on firearms. We are badly in need of one. I suspect it is not one that Michael Moore and his allies will be very comfortable with.

Most immigrants did not leave a sense of safety for a crazy leap into a hostile unknown, but rather left an untenable poverty for the promise of a glittering ideal. Not crazy at all.

But I do agree with your general sense of the asylums of the past. They needed to be blown up. As Kennedy mentions, the potential of non-institutionalized care was never realized because the (conservative) politicians refused to allow the funding to follow the patient, but rather realized that the money could be saved for the taxpayers by simply dumping the patients on the street and washing ones hands of the matter.

I think we should only put people in jail for crimes they commit, not for crimes they might commit. My religion says people can change. Some religions say they are born evil and can’t change. My opposition is religious/irrational.

Put differently. We are a nation descended from immigrants. Imigrants are people crazy enough to leave the safety of an existing life so that they can find a new life in a new land that will probably be hostile to them.

However, if we decide to put people in asylums for having crazy, dangerous ideas, lets start with the White House and the TSA.