Active shooter in NZ

[Brian37]

It is possible to be disturbed and a terrorist too. Far too often the word "mental illness" gets defined as cartoon crazy. NO, you can  be quite lucid and sane and still be disturbed enough to do sick shit like he did. I m not downplaying it.  You have to be disturbed to do something like that, regardless of motive. He was a terrorist yes.


I suffer from mental illness. I am quite sane though. I am not desperate or disturbed or indoctrinated. That asshole was. 

That asshole was a terrorist, but he was still disturbed and indoctrinated.

I don't know, dude. I'm with Atlas on this. No professional has done a psychoanalysis on this guy yet. He is not necessarily disturbed or indoctrinated. He might be just a guy who really believes that a war needs to be waged against Islamic immigrants. He can consider himself to be a soldier toward that end without being disturbed. He would be no more disturbed than a Native American in the 18th century who attacked white settlements because he believed that the spread of the white settlers had to be stopped.

He attacked with no exit plan, and we should probably be grateful for that, at least. We're really in trouble if these guys start adopting guerrilla hit and run tactics. The guy is a terrorist, but he seems to not be a member of a group that is organized for tactics and strategy.  I don't know a thing about his state of mind and neither do you. Calling him disturbed and indoctrinated is jumping the gun, and is sort of providing him with an excuse (like that used by the ISIS women who are now claiming that they were just dumb brainwashed girls).

You are both missing my point.

1. He was disturbed. Mentally healthy people do not go on killing sprees. They don't join Isis either.

This doesnt even have to be about religion.

Say a guy suffers from depression, cant keep a job, gets fired, next day goes in with a firearm and murders several co workers. He is mentally ill, not crazy, but quite sane suffering from depression. Also say for example, If someone was abused as a kid, they can grow up quite sane but suffer the mental affects of the abuse growing up, and end up being violent themselves. In both of those cases you can have  a very sane person, who knows what they are doing is wrong, but at the same time be quite disturbed. Not all mental illness means you cant tell right from wrong. 

The guy planned months in advance, so he knew what he was doing was wrong, and he was a terrorist. But something disturbed him enough to lead him down that path.

But there is a reason regardless we don't hear about mass shootings that much in Australia or NZ, unlike America their populations have a very healthy attitude about firearms and keeping them out of the wrong hands. So things like this are very rare over there.

I am very worried right now about some of our Christian right wingers killing Muslims here in America because of this. I am also worried that maybe a Muslim here might want to retaliate. But one lady official in NZ did the right thing right off the bat. She said the Muslims who came there were just coming for a better life, and and were welcome there and were part of the nation. She also said about the terrorist, he  was not one of them(meaning part of the nation's ideals) nor was his kind of hate and violence welcome there.

Sad though, been watching the news all morning, has anyone seen a tweet or public statement from Trump condemning this? I haven't seen any statement coming from him as of yet. Not that he'd mean it. Any other president prior would be quick to condemn it, and certainly wouldn't have spent years vilifying an entire religion. This Christian terrorist I do believe had quoted Trump.