{"id":39588,"date":"2014-02-01T06:30:17","date_gmt":"2014-02-01T11:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=39588"},"modified":"2014-01-31T19:24:39","modified_gmt":"2014-02-01T00:24:39","slug":"parents-warn-police-of-sons-intentions-for-mass-shooting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=39588","title":{"rendered":"Parents warn police of son’s intentions for mass shooting"},"content":{"rendered":"

ROS sends us a link from CBS News<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.'”<\/p>\n

She added, “This is my hell. This is my hell. If I make it through this, I go to heaven.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ROS sends us a link from CBS News about a mother and father who had to … Parents warn police of son’s intentions for mass shooting<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[156],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39588\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}