The mass shooting in Buffalo, New York will dominate the news cycle a bit more. The bad economic news is just too much to ignore. Americans can and do have the ability to be horrified by this tragedy, but also worry about how they’re going to pay the bills. For mothers, the lack of baby formula has become a more pressing concern. Domestic crises will drown out the Left’s call for more gun control and the silly narrative about the existential threat we face from white nationalists. No one cares because they know the threat isn’t real. This was done by a crazy person.
Payton Gendron shot and killed 10 people at Tops Friendly Market. He’s a racist. He’s an eco-fascist. He’s a green nationalist. And he’s not a conservative. He even thanks God that conservatism is dead, or so he thinks. It’s all in his 180-page manifesto. Yet, how did this even happen? Gendron was on the radar of authorities when he threatened to shoot up his high school and commit suicide last year. He was brought in for a mental evaluation. What happened? The story stops there. Obviously, he wasn’t mentally adjudicated. He passed a background check. So, what gives? Well, apparently, threatening to shoot up your shoot or kill yourself isn’t enough to be declared mentally unwell in New York (via WSJ):
The 18-year-old accused of killing 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket on Saturday didn’t discuss any specific threats and was deemed not to be a danger by mental-health workers after he wrote that he wanted to kill himself and others last year, according to the local district attorney.
Payton Gendron, then 17, made the comment in an online economics class last June and was referred to a hospital where medical staff determined he wasn’t dangerous or mentally ill and sent him home, said Mike Korchak, the district attorney of Broome County, N.Y., where Mr. Gendron lived.
Mr. Gendron told his teacher and the state troopers who took him to UHS Binghamton General Hospital that the threat was a joke. He likely told the medical staff the same thing, Mr. Korchack said. A hospital spokeswoman declined to comment.
[…]
“He never even mentioned a gun. He didn’t make any direct threats against students at the school or teachers or anything.” Mr. Korchak said of Mr. Gendron.
In a digital diary he later posted online, Mr. Gendron said he spent 20 hours in the emergency room before talking to someone for 15 minutes. “This proved to me that the US healthcare system is a joke,” he wrote.
“I got out of it because I stuck with the story that I was getting out of class and I just stupidly wrote that down,” he wrote. “It was not a joke, I wrote that down because that’s what I was planning to do.”
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Well, maybe they’ll pay more attention now. It also doesn’t help that the COVID lockdowns have led to a massive spike in mental health issues among adolescents.
Emergency rooms have been overwhelmed by teens with mental-health issues during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the bar is high to admit them to the limited number of inpatient psychiatric beds. Patients sometimes have to wait days or weeks in the emergency room before a bed opens up, says Robert Trestman, chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Council on Healthcare Systems and Financing.
Many states, including New York, have laws that allow hospitals to hold patients involuntarily if they are deemed dangerous to themselves or others. Such holds usually have strict time limits, while longer involuntary stays generally require a court order. Federal law prohibits people who are involuntarily committed by court order from possessing guns.
The Left always focuses on the gun, part of their ongoing crusade to shred the Constitution. Our founding document is the biggest obstacle to the authoritarian progressive agenda left-wingers want to be enacted. This isn’t new, and neither is the pattern where the shooter exhibits some form of extreme mental illness. If it’s not that, it’s the authorities not doing their part to enforce the law like in the mass shooting that occurred in Sutherland Springs, Texas.
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