Schizophrenia – When Fantasies Meet Reality!
Diseases | February 2, 2011 | Share
It has not been very long since the massacre at Virginia Tech took place. Four years past this carnage, we see the Tucson tragedy doing the rounds. A tragedy unfolded serious errors in U.S. policies and reduced them to a sad dissertation.
To begin with this story, it is important that I first highlight what led to this misfortune.
When at an open meeting in 2007, Gabrielle Giffords calmly missed out a question raised by one of the members of the audience. She wouldn’t have thought that this would call for an attempt to assassinate her by the same young man. Jared Loughner was a 20 year old guy then, is a victim of schizophrenia as has been believed so far. Like all boys he had a normal childhood but only until his young adulthood when he got engrossed in drugs and started drinking heavily. Schizophrenia is a mental condition that causes crumbling of a person’s thought process and emotional reflexes. It occurs in the mid teens. A person suffering with this disorder may not talk things that make sense and when extremely disconcerted, may indulge into acts that are potentially dangerous. According to what I read in various magazines and journals, Loughner thought that he was a sufferer of ‘government mind control’.
After what happened at the 2007 open meeting, he felt agitated. He felt something against the congresswoman. But the question is it that, which led him to assassinate her? Well, yes. It is a high probability among someone suffering from a mental disorder and has never been pushed towards medical treatment but simply ill-treated for his excruciating behavior. He was not known to his disease from the beginning however always made an attempt to change his booze and drug habits. He wanted to join the US army but his history of dope smoking did not let him fulfill his wish. When at college for his superfluous remarks and unacceptable behavior he was suspended despite of being identified as a person with uncharacteristic behavior. No body bothered to send him for a treatment or ask for his care and confinement. After all this he was no more at peace with himself or with anybody else and then the strangest thing happened which nobody could ever think of.
Few weeks back when Gabrielle Giffords held a meeting with her constituents, Loughner from nowhere entered the meeting carrying a fully loaded gun (Glock 19 pistol) with him. He pointed the gun at Giffords head and within a few seconds, 18 people got injured and 6 were dead including a 9 year old girl Christina Green.
What drove Loughner to commit such a crime? I believe it was not only his illness that flared up the anger in him but the loopholes in the government’s laws against gun control too form a party to this episode. It is the flexibility these laws offer that has made access to weapons an easy affair in most of the states of America. I was taken aback when I learnt how easy it was for Jared Loughner to buy a gun, walk through Giffords meeting and use it to kill 6 people and injure 18. This shows how flawed the American policies are to have allowed a mentally ill person sans treatment to roam freely about anywhere and buy a pistol.
Moreover years back at a Tucson rally being addressed by Sen. Humphrey it was seen that some spectators were carrying side arms which was considered a usual site in Arizona. The rally took place immediately after President John Kennedy’s assassination.
Somewhere behind laws like the ‘Castle Doctrine’ that permits a person to use arms against any individual causing harm to his property and the people inside it, the permission to carry arms in bars unless not drunk and carry arms without a permit is a result of support from the state’s politicians itself. A lot of politicians including Giffords own a gun themselves and are supporters of the above mentioned laws. Not much has been done in the U.S. to curb or restrict gun access for whatsoever the cause was.
As a citizen outside Arizona, this incident doesn’t disturb me much but to some extent it made me realize how dire the consequences of such policies are. These consequences are not only confined to the people of the country but to policy makers themselves who might keep self-interests above other important things. The same incident can happen anywhere, in any country where policies are made to fulfill the interests of a few. There was a lesson to be learnt from the Virginia Tech incident as I mentioned in my article’s opening line but sadly there wasn’t any.
Shelly Mahajan
(3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading ...
Image Source: [http://www.flickr.com/photos/exquisitur/2550241624/]
Related Views
Tweet This
Digg This
Save to delicious
Stumble it
It’s hard in these situations because a logical and fully functional adult brain cannot understand the mental processes that go on in a brain with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a serious illness and I hope that more research goes into that illness and safe treatment of it rather than spending funds on gun control.