Orion's picture

    Eery Stuff In Seattle

    This Seattle Pacific shooting is some eerie stuff. Immediately after I heard about it, I told my landlord about it and her response literally was "What the hell?"

    Seattle Pacific University is a very quiet, conservative religious university in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle. The university is so quiet and (normally) uneventful that I was pretty unaware of its existence in to my late teen years and my recent trip there was my first real visit there.

    It overlooks the Puget Sound and is almost unnoticeable unless you are looking for it - some parts of the campus are literally located in houses. There is graffiti in the area but it is the "Jesus Rules" variety. Here are pictures I took while I was on the campus seven days before that shooting:

    This is a good picture from Seattle Times of two students consoling one another (though I will note that the Facebook post of this had an SPU student saying that "the media is hanging out of trees" and, in my personal view, the media is as responsible for this with their constant fear mongering as the people supplying weapons):

    I was actually there only the week before. I met with an author who I will respectfully not name in this article out of respect for him and given the subject matter but I will tell you the name of his book - Beauty Will Save The World. The author had had his share of disillusionment, including with the conservative political world, and much of the book is focused on how artistic expression, far from being a source of sin, actually provides salvation for humanity. Bizarrely enough, the subject of discussion was a potential book about trauma and loss and the concept that all of us are defined by what we build and construct in this world versus what others tear down.

    It's solid, Christian material and both meeting with him and reading his book was helping me deal with what was a serious clusterfuck in my own life (I know it's strange to curse in the context of religion but how else can I describe it?). Jennifer Reimer's death was the most intense experience of my life - more intense than living in the South Pacific or working at the Heritage Foundation. On top of all that, one of my friends had been at UCSB when that shooter (I refuse to name these people) went crazy - she is a graduate student and three people from her department were hurt or killed.

    What the hell does this all mean? A week after I had been at Seattle Pacific, this tragedy occurred. A shooting at SPU of all places really shows some mental illness - a small community of religious devotees like that can be expected to respond just as they did, with a student stopping the killer heroically.

    I messaged the professor I had visited and he told me he was away and that his staff was reportedly okay. Initial reports indicated multiple "victims" while later reports indicated only one fatality and others hurt. As one writer here said, we are dealing with an insane society. This isn't normal and this isn't acceptable - there is no point in having a government unless it is purposed with stopping things like this. Without life there is no liberty and no equality either.

    I'm not sure what the answers are. There obviously need to be stiffer regulations on firearms acquisition and I think, eventually, there will be. Absent from the debate also is bringing back involuntary commitment. I also think that psychiatric medication needs to be taken out of the commercial sphere - handing out mind altering substances like antidepressants, which often warn of "homicidal and suicidal ideation," liberally in hospitals is extremely dangerous and the implication of such drugs in these tragedies is considerably alarming. All of these blend in to one another and nothing will change until we change it.

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    For a couple of years during high school I lived just up the hill from the campus and, yes, it is hard to imagine such a tragedy occurring on this particular campus. Yet from one news report

    In 2010, [he] called 911 to report "a rage inside him" and said he wanted to hurt himself and others, according to a police report of the incident.

    Two years later, officers responded again — this time finding him lying in the middle of the street in front of his suburban Mountlake Terrace home, ranting drunkenly for a SWAT team "to get him and make him famous."

    In both of the earlier contacts with police, officers committed [him] involuntarily to Swedish Hospital in Edmonds for mental evaluations. [Public defender Ramona] Brandes said he has a long history of mental health problems for which he had been treated and medicated.

    Is this a case of the mental health system simply failing?  The budget increases to allow all the people such as the shooter to be monitored and evaluated by a case manger to ensure compliance with a treatment plan, or whether the treatment plan was being effective would have to increase more than a few percentage points.

    Back in the early 90s when I was in the mental health field in Seattle, those case managers who had clients living out in the community commonly had 35 or more clients on their case load.  That meant even if they met one client a day working seven days a week, they couldn't see all of them at least once a month. And a lot of these clients were homeless, taking days to individually track down.  I'm sure the budget is much worse these days.

    In many ways this is the same dilemma that faces educators when looking just at the problem of class size, where teachers are given over 30 students per class when just about every study will same the optimum level is around 15 to 20.

    Of course, one of the key components in both of these is an increase in tax revenues to pay for system (aside from such issues as the quality of case managers or teachers, etc.)


    I've been writing about this subject regularly since 2011 now and I've pissed alot of people off, including here, in what has been effectively thinking out loud about the topic. There are three things that I think changed radically in just the last few decades that I think explain this:

    1) The destruction of large mental institutions and leaving the mentally ill to homelessness, psychiatric clinics and social services - that started in the 1980s and large scale shootings became more and more regular starting from there.

    2) Large scale drugging - there used to regulations on advertising powerful pharmaceuticals. Those were gotten rid of in the late 1990s and we have now reached a point where mood altering drugs with warnings of suicidal and homicidal ideation are advertised in grocery stores - I literally saw a "Try it now!" type of ad for Effexor XR while I was at Safeway with Jennifer. Psychiatric drugs may have their place for some but they should obviously not be doled out like that.

    3) Deregulation of firearms.

    Add that in with an economy going south and this country losing its place in the world and it shouldn't come as a shock that we are seeing this. Also, from what you posted, it seems that this loser knew that he would finally be famous and recognized by society if he killed a whole bunch of people than if he just carried on with life normally. We all know that the media exalts these killers and I certainly hope the SPU hero, Jon Meis, becomes a household name instead of this freak.

    I suppose also that it's fortunate that we are dealing with crazy people and not organized criminals who could inflict more large scale damage.


    Your last line made me think of the Nigerian rebel group Boko Haram, whose leader seems to be not only as pathological one can get, but also seeking his moment in the spotlight, which he has received in abundance. Of course, how many of the leaders of various countries throughout the globle were down right insane, leaving carnage, death and suffering in their wake - all of them, to some degree, were seeking to achieve greater and greater fame and adoration from as many as possible. 

    Reality television, and even those game shows that have been a staple of television, demonstrate the lust for notoriety, to be recognized above the crowd.  We seem to be like the people of Whoville, screaming "we are here! we are here!" as if it were as in was in the Dr. Seuss book a matter of life and death.

    The issue of pharmaceutical intervention to deal with the complex issues of the "mind" is a complicated one, as someone personally who is currently taking some rather serious medication to alter mood and anxiety.


    Alot of terrorist groups in the Middle East were also known to hire people to do deliveries, not revealing that they were militants at all, and detonating car bombs while a delivery was being made near a marketplace, mosque or other crowded area. That's way more methodical and destructive than these shootings.


    I have held my tongue (or typing finger) as long as I can. You write about helping the mentally ill in your comments about these shootings, but you then refer to the shooters as "freaks" and "losers," over and over again. 

    I really don't think it is helpful to call the same people you say need to be involuntarily committed because of mental illness these names.  Yes, what they've done is horrific, and they were horrible to do it, but your ability to analyze the situation suffers a credibility gap with me when you use these terms. 


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