Quote:
Originally Posted by TLAM Strike
He didn't just drop everything one day and shoot a bunch of people, you cut out an entire month between the time he visited psychiatrist Dr. Maurice Heatly and the murders.
From his July 31st suicide note referencing his March 29 visit to the University of Texas Health Center:
A full month before he killed a Doctor knew what he was planning but couldn't or wouldn't do anything.
From Dr. Maurice Heatly notes:
Dr. Heatly told him to make an appointment for next week or to stop by to talk at any time. That never happened, not the following week or the next two weeks after.
There is also evidence that Whitman was abusing drugs like the amphetamine Dexedrine and over the counter pain killers in the months leading to the shooting.
While a tumor may have cause Whitman's murders there were warning signs in the month(s) leading up to it.
|
So, who makes the call? A person confesses to having irrational thoughts possibly involving grievous bodily harm and/or murder, you can rope several thousand, if not hundreds of thousands of people into that box. Also the abuse of over the counter painkillers is something undertaken by many, many people, one or the other, or even both combined is not necessarily the signs of someone about to commit mass murder.
With the Doctor's quote that you mentioned there, was that quote taken before or after the mass-murder? Because you will notice that post-event many people will come out of the woodwork to state that the person who undertook the massacre was 'a bit odd', from either playing violent games, being a gun enthusiast, or listening to heavy metal music. It is quite possible that the Doctor only latched onto that sentence after the event when he came to realise the significance of it, at the time it was probably just noted and ignored.
Likewise, if one were to look strictly at the online blogs of Eric Harris and his 'rage against society' one would not have any major alarm bells ringing initially that would not also be put down to a young man going through a difficult stage of his life. In fact, on website statements alone one could probably select several members of this community out for concern that they may become a mass murderer. Obviously, as time went on, there were increasing warning signs from Harris and Klebold, however there is simply not the money or the manpower to read every online blog, to watch every troubled teen or young man, and only those who actually go to seek help are those who make it into the system, which at the moment from what I can tell in the writings post-Sandy Hook, is somewhat lacking in America because of a cutback which took place a while ago.
The fact is, unless you unleash the sort of 'big-brother' style monitoring system on America which pro-gun supporters seem determined to fight against, then you will not stop these sort of things happening because people will fall through the system, then they will get angry with the system, and then they will shoot at the system, taking out anyone who gets in the way, and usually they are young school-age people who see the school as 'part of the system' and thus target it.
So, what do you do? That's the Catch-22.