ANybody remember hearing about the fire triangle in grade school ?

[hedgehog]

We were given fire safety courses and it was emphasized that three things were needed to cause a fire: fuel, oxygen and an ignition source (or spark)

Take away the oily rags, keep the curtains away from the stove, throw dirt over that old campfire and you eliminated the fire hazard.

I submit that in this case, we had another triangle: someone who was mentally ill and paranoid, politicians hinting that certain other politicians should be killed, ready access to guns. If any one of those links had been broken, Congresswoman Giffords would be at work today. All three were needed, so it is foolish to blame or exonerate any single cause.

[HereSince1628]

1. It is unclear to me that mentally ill are different from the mentally well

with respect to being influenced by extremists using violent images to express their beliefs.

There does seems to be evidence that the mentally well can be led into violence by extremist leaders who, after the fact, are labelled with various popular labels associated with mental illness...I present as evidence Adolf Hitler.

[hedgehog]

2. The difference is that often the mentally ill person knows something is wrong,

and at a certain level is looking for the source of the problem. The problem is, the person can't see that what's wrong is something in the brain. For example, a depressed man may blame his problem on his wife and decide the solution is to get a divorce. In this case, the supposition is that the shooter was feeling increasingly under attack. The theory is that the political rhetoric pointed him at the Congresswoman. It's entirely possible that absent that stimulus, he might have gone after people at Pima Community College.

[robdogbucky]

3. Hedgehog, I agree

but to just pick a little nit all 'cuz I learned about the fire triangle in the USFS. Those 3 elements of the fire triangle are Heat, Fuel and Oxygen, not simply an ignition source. No matter, point still made. The nuance is that just radiant heat can and is frequently, a source of ignition. Any other source of ignition employs that element, heat, to igite one way or another. Smoke itself, not being an ignition per se, but providing pre-heating toward anything in its path, is one of the main ways a wildfire spreads. Just sayin, but your analogy is right on.

Loughner also apparently had an unsatisfactory one-on-one Q/A with the congresswoman a while back and friends that knew him said he referred to that direct incident once in a while, especially after his purported personality change about 3 or 4 years ago when he quit smoking cigs and pot and resolved to get himself healthy, etc. I wish I knew more of the particulars of that particular incident. Perhaps someone can fill that in here. Seems as though he had some smoldering resentment toward her for that alone. Combine that precondition (fuel), and the (oxygen) benefit of our free society for pols to hold open meetings in parking lots with constituents, then add the heat of readily available guns (heat), which he apparently was able to purchase with little or no background check (none that revealed others fears about him ala students/faculty) and voila! The varying reports floating in now from friends and acquaintances, neighbors, etc., as well as the dude's own rantings on the net point to an isolated anti-social person equipped for violence. We are all still struggling to understand this guy.

That particular fire triangle theory does not specifically list right wing rhetoric as one of the elements, as the empirical evidence of that connection is yet to be established beyond a reasonable doubt. But the statement of someone associated with government in Tucson said yesterday that the road will eventually lead back to the undue influence of such right wing hate rhetoric as that used directly by Palin. We shall see.


Hands off my Social Security!
Hands off Latin America!



rdb

[hedgehog]

4. Thanks for the correction ! Most accidents or disasters go back to

a chain of events rather than a single point. For example, it might not have mattered that the Titanic hit the ice berg if the sealed bulkheads had been brought up through all the decks, or if the ship had been going slower, or if there had been enough life boats, or if the radio operator on the California hadn't gone to bed, etc.

Same thing with the Deep Horizon oil spill - multiple warnings and safety limits ignored.