Parents warn police of son’s intentions for mass shooting
ROS sends us a link from CBS News about a mother and father who had to warn police that their unstable son had purchased a firearm (the type is in dispute) from Walmart and that they suspected that he was going to commit a crime with it. Questioning the 20-year-old, Blaec Lammers admitted that yes, indeed, he’d been planning a mass shooting. So what made the family suspect he was going to go off the rails? He had been in the same Walmart two years prior in a hockey mask and carrying a kitchen knife. He had planned to follow someone in to the storage area and hoped that the police would catch him before he killed or hurt that someone.
The parents checked him into a mental hospital – four times – and each time, doctors released him four days later, because that happens to be the amount of time that they can hold a person without a court order.
The reason: Blaec was never involuntarily committed to a mental institution by the courts, so no mental health record turned up on the background check.
A day after discovering the receipt, Tricia contacted police, who arrested Blaec. He allegedly confessed that he planned to open fire that weekend at Wal-Mart and also considered targeting the local movie theater.
On turning in her own son to the police, Tricia said: “My first thought was, ‘What have I done? I just destroyed my son’s life.’ And people would come up to me and say, ‘No, you saved our lives.'”
She added, “This is my hell. This is my hell. If I make it through this, I go to heaven.”
Of course, the implication here is that laws aren’t protecting Americans from the Blaecs of the world, background checks aren’t working in their current form. Well, garbage in, garbage out. While I applaud the parents for making the difficult call to the cops, I also have to wonder why, if they knew there was a problem, didn’t they involuntarily commit their son? If they could call the cops on him, throw $50,000 at treatment that never worked, why didn’t they get a court-ordered commitment to a mental health facility?
And why wasn’t he arrested at the Walmart the first time? There’s also a story about him coming up behind his sister with a knife. The mother was even contemplating buying a gun to protect herself from her own son. I guess she didn’t think about the rest of us who, without knowing, needed to be protected from her son.
This just follows the whole pattern. Jared Loughner, James Holmes, and Adam Lanza were all known to their families as unbalanced, but no one did anything substantial about it. I guess that’s what happens when we all sit around waiting for the government to tell us what we *have* to do before we do it. Background checks won’t pick up anything that’s not there, and that’s the part that needs to change, not that crap that they tried to pass in Congress last year.
Category: Guns
I haven’t researched Missouri’s laws on involuntary committment, Jonn. But if they’re anything like Connecticut’s, it would have been virtually impossible for the parents to have their son involuntarily committed before he committed a violent act against either himself or others.
Per our liberal brethren, that’s the way it should be. The rights of madmen simply must be given preference over public safety – even if it results in mass killings like Sandy Hook. The safety – and lives – of the rest of society are a secondary concern.
Right on, Hondo. Dang!
>> I also have to wonder why, if they knew there was a problem, didn’t they involuntarily commit their son? If they could call the cops on him, throw $50,000 at treatment that never worked, why didn’t they get a court-ordered commitment to a mental health facility?<<
This is really, really hard to do in most jurisdictions. We have overcorrected from the time in which you could have somebody locked on the say-so of a doctor and a family member (and there were, to be fair, many abuses of this policy.)
I am willing to bet you that they have tried multiple times to get a public hospital to keep their son, and failed. Check out some of the material on involuntary commitment at the NAMI site (a group mostly composed of the friends and family members of people with mental illness):
http://www.nami.org/Content/ContentGroups/Policy/Updates/Involuntary_Commitment_And_Court-Ordered_Treatment.htm
I guess I don’t get it. If you take your son to a facility and say he is unbalanced. Been here 3 times before, did this at Wal-Mart and that at home, what is the problem with getting him involuntarily committed? Is it really that hard, given that history and evidence? Are the doctors that hamstrung by policy? I guess this is the result of the mindset that did the 50s and 60s clean out effort of the mental institutions. Dumping them on the streets. But is makes no difference to me. Crazy is as crazy does. This kid IS crazy and should be institutionalized now for the rest of his life. But what do I know. He may be back out amongst us sooner then later and next time he will just be more careful before he commits his mass shooting.
I have 3 links that might explain this. I hope they all post.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/mentally-ill-youth-in-crisis/
Please also watch the overtime video “The stigma of raising a mentally ill child.” at that link. ^
http://goo.gl/aeBxM5
and finally this explains how we got here:
http://goo.gl/mgIa4p
I know people who live with this Every. Single. Day.
James Holmes (the Aurora theater shooter) WAS reported to police by his psychologist. Nothing was done. So it is a combination of our laws, and enforcement thereof.
Mental health professionals can get sued for keeping a patient on an involuntary hold. And without a court order to back them up, I don’t blame them.
Not the only problem, of course, but a big part of it is the reluctance, and often the refusal, of school systems to call in law enforcement when criminal acts are committed. We now have a couple of generations of folks trained to ignore criminality in others.
Instead of holding the little darlings responsible for committing crime and paying the price for it, give them some pills to “treat” their anti-social behavior and call it a day. So now the special little snowflakes who could not control themselves enough to behave without engaging in criminal behavior are supposed to control themselves well enough to take meds to control their behavior? Yeah, like that makes sense to any sane person.
And it escalates from there. No wonder so many are confused about, well, pretty much everything. When the schools are teaching people to NOT call in law enforcement when laws are broken, that the stories from their parents and grandparents are all lies, and that there is no hope for their futures in spite of our heritage of exactly the opposite it is no wonder that we are increasingly dysfunctional.
If he made a popular movie critical of dear leader and is a conservative action would have been taken
Looks like the guy was convicted and is gong to prison.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/missouri-man-convicted-of-planning-assault-after-mother-turns-him-in/
“Lammers could get life in prison when he is sentenced in March. The defense could have asked for him to be put in a mental-health facility.But before the verdict, the judge asked Lammers if he had any interest in that. He said no.
So his only option now is prison.” (From the CBS story linked by ArmyATC in comment 9)
This whole story is odd, including that reported exchange between the judge and defendant.
2/17 – if he’s self-destructive, which it sounds like he is if he wanted to do suicide by cop, he may see prison as an instrument of his eventual destruction. Or, that prison will keep him locked up and unable to harm others, which he has tried to be stopped from doing – whereas the mental-health system has proven not to be able to do.
Clearly he has no faith in the mental-health system, which has done nothing to actually help him.
I worked for awhile in a mental health half-way house, Yes, there is such a thing. There were 4 patients, 3 workers to a shift, 3 shifts a day with people to fill in where needed (sick day, vac, weekend, holiday, etc). So to Recap: 4 patients, 12 workers ++. This was progress according to some.
The parents did the right thing, and yes it would have been easier for the mother to buy a gun to protect herself than to have a court order her son to be committed to a mental institution.
Patient rights to personal freedom have trumped the rights of all of us to be safe.
The courts will only involuntarily commit those that the presiding Judge believes is the most dangerous or incapable of caring for themselves. The rest… those that even are getting help to begin with are out here around us.
As to criminal letdowns, that is a huge question to be answered.