The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Crazy People Are Dangerous

Posted on | November 29, 2015 | 132 Comments

 

Aloof. Angry. Alienated. Robert Lewis Dear Jr. was a dangerous kook, who inspired fear among his neighbors in North Carolina:

“He was the kind of person you had to watch out for,” one neighbor said. “He was a very weird individual. It’s hard to explain, but he had a weird look in his eye most of the time.” . . .
In Anderson Acres, neighbors said they recognized Dear from television news coverage of Friday’s shootings, in which police said he killed three people, including a police officer, and wounded nine others. They said he looked more beaten down than the last time they had seen him, and that his beard was new — but that he was the same aloof, angry man they remembered. . . .
“He complained about everything,” said another neighbor who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying that he feared for his security. “He said he worked with the government, and everybody was out to get him, and he knew the secrets of the U.S.A. He said, ‘Nobody touch me, because I’ve got enough information to put the whole U.S. of A in danger.’ It was very crazy.” . . .
“He was weird. Everyone kept an eye on him.” . . .
“He was really tightly wound. You could see that from the stress on his face, from the way he acted.”

The paranoid weirdo had a record of frightening behavior:

He had a history of run-ins with neighbors and police, including arrests for alleged cruelty to animals and allegedly being a “peeping Tom.” He was not convicted in either case.
Pamela Ross . . . was married to Dear nearly 20 years ago. . . .
Dear’s problems with the law date to 1997, when his then-wife reported to police that Dear had assaulted her, according to reports filed with the sheriff’s office in Colleton County, S.C., where Dear lived at the time. She declined to file charges against him but told police she reported the incident because she “wanted something on record.”
Colleton County police released reports of at least seven other episodes in which Dear . . . had disputes or physical altercations with neighbors or other residents. . . .
In May 2002, a woman who lived next door to Dear in Walterboro, in Colleton County, complained to police that Dear had been “making unwanted advancements” toward her since she and her husband had moved in a year earlier.
The woman told police that she had seen Dear hiding in the bushes next to their house at 5:30 a.m. She “heard her guard dog barking and saw Mr. Dear looking into her house.” . . .
[In North Carolina, another] neighbor said that Dear would carry a stick as he rode his trail bike, and he would slow down and try to bait dogs in the area. He also said that Dear swung the stick at his dog several times.
The neighbors said that Dear’s behavior seemed to change last year, and he seemed angrier.
“The last time I saw him, I waved and smiled. He just stared and glared back at me. It was disconcerting,” one said.

Cruelty to animals, incidentally, indicates a high risk of psychopathic disorder. So, how did this scary nutjob — who had so frequently come to the attention of law enforcement in South Carolina and North Carolina — make his way to Colorado?

Dear moved to Colorado last year, when he bought a five-acre plot of land in Hartsel, about 40 miles west of Colorado Springs, according to Jim Anderson, the real estate agent who brokered the deal. The previous owner said that Dear paid $6,000 for the vacant land.
“He said he wanted a cheap piece of land to put a camper on,” Anderson said. . . .
Anderson also said that Dear arrived with a woman, but he did not know her name. Colorado records show that Stephanie Michelle Bragg was registered to vote at the same address earlier this year.
Her ex-husband, Michael Bragg, said she moved to Colorado with Dear about a year ago. Michael Bragg said he had two daughters, ages 19 and 15, with Stephanie Bragg, who had worked as a waitress at a Waffle House. Bragg said he believed that his ex-wife met Dear online.

Great. A divorced Waffle House waitress goes online looking for love and finds this weirdo loner. This connection somehow leads him to Colorado and now three people are dead. How many times have I warned against “online dating”? Not often enough maybe. But I have repeatedly warned that Crazy People Are Dangerous:

You let enough kooks run around loose — as has been the policy in this country since we de-institutionalized the mentally ill in the 1970s — and people adjust their expectations. People become accustomed to encountering weirdos, freaks and lunatics, jabbering madness to themselves on street corners or posting deranged nonsense on Tumblr blogs. You’re not even supposed to notice there is anything strange about these wild-eyed nutjobs roaming around with facial piercings, tattoos and purple hair.

That was my warning in July after Tyrelle Shaw, a/k/a “Mr. Talented,” was arrested for a series of attacks on Asian women. I issued similar warnings in connection with Dallas shooter James Boulware, mass murderer Aaron Alexis, psychotic professor Deborah Frisch, notorious stalker Diana Napolis (a/k/a “Curio Jones) and many other similar cases. Our society has been persuaded by liberals that the demented and deranged should never be criticized because criticism might hurt their feelings. Wackos and lunatics are very sensitive people, we are required to believe, and deserve our sympathy. We should never be afraid of these psychotic misfits, according to liberals who are eager to convince us that maladjusted loners are perfectly harmless.

Liberals tell us it is heartless and “mean-spirited” to suggest that public safety would be best served if mentally ill people with histories of dangerous behavior were locked up in psychiatric wards. Americans are told that it’s OK to let delusional and antisocial freaks roam around free in our society, because what could possibly go wrong?

When one of these dangerous kooks who roam among us finally commits an act of crazy violence, however, liberals quickly rush to tell us that his insane actions have some kind of political significance and that the proper response to this atrocity is — wait for it — more liberalism. Another crazy killer, therefore, vote Democrat!

Liberalism would be laughable, if it were not so deadly.





 

Category: Abortion, Crime, Planned Parenthood

Comments

132 Responses to “Crazy People Are Dangerous”

  1. Matt_SE
    November 29th, 2015 @ 1:40 pm

    I’m still waiting to hear the left’s Planned Parenthood angle. How are they going to shoehorn a kook like this into their narrative?

  2. SouthOhioGipper
    November 29th, 2015 @ 1:46 pm

    He’s white, old and scary looking. They’ll make up the rest as necessary.

  3. DeadMessenger
    November 29th, 2015 @ 2:20 pm

    I’ve already seen it. Lots of tweets claiming this guy is a pro-lifer and “Christian terrorist”.

  4. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    November 29th, 2015 @ 2:21 pm

    I am all for keeping guns from ISIS and insane people…

    explain to me how you propose to do it.

  5. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    November 29th, 2015 @ 2:21 pm

    He is certainly not a “pro-lifer”

  6. DeadMessenger
    November 29th, 2015 @ 2:22 pm

    He looks a bit like Joe Biden, except more alert.

  7. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    November 29th, 2015 @ 2:27 pm

    I typed PROLIFE but it changed it to PROFILE

  8. DeadMessenger
    November 29th, 2015 @ 2:27 pm

    Well, according to one tweet, Christian pro-lifers will kill adults and children, and care only about unborn fetuses.

    I’m not making this stuff up. There are actually some people saying it. I think I saw some on Twitchy, but am too lazy to go find and link them.

  9. Art Deco
    November 29th, 2015 @ 3:24 pm

    Problem:

    1. Did this man ever do anything before this which would have induced the courts to remand him to an asylum for an indefinite period (under present standards or under the standards common in 1955)? You can imprison people for being peculiar, but not if you care to live in a decent society.

    2. You’ve got about 2 million people walking the streets who’ve had a schizophreniform breakdown at some time in their life. Even if every single person who killed more than two people at a sitting was in that slim minority, the lifetime probability that a schizophrenic would do so would be about 0.37%.

  10. Southern Air Pirate
    November 29th, 2015 @ 3:30 pm

    https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/photos/a.404595876219681.103599.142474049098533/1109128985766363/?type=3&permPage=1
    Here you go, from Robbie Reich’s Facecrack page.. He went on a rampage at a PP Clinic and therefore he is a nutzy. He said something about “baby parts” ipso facto he was driven to kill folks by Carly Finoria and all the rest of the GOP talking about the PPA Videos.

  11. WHMay
    November 29th, 2015 @ 3:31 pm

    This Waffle House waitress didn’t fare as well.
    http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/11/28/man-kills-mississippi-waffle-house-employee-over-smoking-policy/

  12. NeoWayland
    November 29th, 2015 @ 3:38 pm

    Unfortunately, owning a gun or using a gun makes you insane according to some people.

    And yes, they are predominately on the left.

    ETA: Pardon, I should have said “proves you insane.”

  13. Steve Skubinna
    November 29th, 2015 @ 3:40 pm

    Simple. We pass another law: no guns for crazy people.

    Problem solved! You’re welcome.

  14. marcus tullius cicero
    November 29th, 2015 @ 4:16 pm

    …I will take my chances with crazy people, not with our so called “leaders”. Crazy can be contained, Criminals cannot!

  15. Prime Director
    November 29th, 2015 @ 4:36 pm

    I’ll take the crazies over the politicans, too.

    When the crazies comes for your stuff, it’s still legal to shoot ’em.

    and I’ll take chaotic liberty over ordered tyranny everyday of the week and twice on Sunday.

  16. Finrod Felagund
    November 29th, 2015 @ 4:36 pm

    From what I understand, Planned Parenthood was already fundraising off this incident before the bullets stopped flying.

  17. Adobe_Walls
    November 29th, 2015 @ 5:05 pm

    Quite.

  18. Squid Hunt
    November 29th, 2015 @ 5:06 pm

    They’re just going to keep saying crazy, right wing kook until it sticks.

  19. mole
    November 29th, 2015 @ 5:45 pm

    There is a special place in hell for those who ordered the closing of the asylums.
    Most of the insane people living on the street die squalid, early deaths after lives of abject misery, and the “do gooders” arer happy because they are ‘free”.

    Has anyone ever tried to quantify the cost side of the de-institutionalisation fetish? The police hours, damage, medical and insurance costs?

    Ive worked briefly (on secondment) in a secure facility at an Asylum. and was impressed by it overall.
    Everyone there seemed to know they were unwell and wanted to get better (bar one). The nurses treated people with firmness but respect and it was clean and well run. There was only one emergency in the couple of months i was there where a patient was violent and needed to be restrained.

    Oh and EVERY person brought in had street drugs of some sort on them. Self medicating or cause?

  20. Eastwood Ravine
    November 29th, 2015 @ 5:52 pm

    I blame Star Trek. He sure looks like crazy Will Riker.
    http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/startrek/images/9/9a/Alternate_Riker.jpg

  21. Ronald J. Ward
    November 29th, 2015 @ 6:00 pm

    ‘I am all for keeping guns from ISIS and insane people…

    explain to me how you on the left propose to do it.’

    I’m thinking that just in last year or so, not only those on the left wanted to close the Background Check loopholes (weeding out the felons and crazies) allowing Internet and gun show sales to anyone with a pulse but somewhere to the tune of 80 some % of Americans did as well.

    Republican legislators, at the marching orders of their NRA owners, said no.

  22. Fail Burton
    November 29th, 2015 @ 6:18 pm

    I’m not sure there’s any kind of lesson here. A senseless murder may be exactly that. You can’t lock up everyone who’s nuts based on the violence of a few any more than you can lock up the guns they use to perpetrate that violence. I’m far more concerned with normal people being driven unsane by institutional propaganda.

    I just watched a woman at Oxford, England declare the standard for evidence at rape trials should be lowered, and she wasn’t remotely a radical feminist. And yet she had eaten the radical feminist notion that if men aren’t breaking laws just change those laws until they do. That’s because where there’s smoke there’s fire and men are always smoldering these days.

  23. Daniel Freeman
    November 29th, 2015 @ 6:22 pm

    Oh and EVERY person brought in had street drugs of some sort on them. Self medicating or cause?

    Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

  24. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    November 29th, 2015 @ 6:25 pm

    Bullshit. What tripe you just spewed had nothing to do with any shooting I am aware of.

  25. Art Deco
    November 29th, 2015 @ 6:29 pm

    There is a special place in hell for those who ordered the closing of the asylums.
    The asylums are still there. They just have a much lower census. Except as an auxiliary to the prison system, you can get along without public agencies operating asylums. Private asylums financed by an analogue of Medicaid will do passably.
    As for the asylums as they were in 1955, they were populated by people addled by disorders that are hardly seen anymore (e.g. tertiary syphilis), retarded people who can be housed in group homes, senile people who belong in nursing homes, &c. As for the schizophrenic population, most do not benefit from long-term confinement because psychotropics can alleviate their hallucinations and delusions so that they can live with family or nearby family who can visit and clean up after them. Modest disability payments are a great deal more cost effective than 24 hour care in institutional settings.
    As for your vagrant population, a large mass of them would not be candidates for commitment and are merely unlucky, eccentric, and willful. Austere in-kind benefits administered by local churches will do passably for this segment. HUD, which is not likely to lowball the figure, offered a cross sectional estimate of 580,000 vagrants as of January 2014.
    About 0.5% of the population was to be found in asylums in 1955. In our own time, that would be 1.6 million people. You’re not going to find more than a fraction of that (20%?) as we speak who can benefit from long-term confinement and who are not there now.

  26. Finrod Felagund
    November 29th, 2015 @ 6:38 pm

    There are no ‘background check loopholes’. Every leftist that goes on about that is pushing gun control under a different name.

  27. Art Deco
    November 29th, 2015 @ 6:39 pm

    Republican legislators, at the marching orders of their NRA campaign donor bosses, said no.
    The NRA is an actual popular movement, unlike the sorosphere rent-a-crowd which makes up the left.
    Your problem in these discussions is ever the same. Restrictions on gun ownership are a weak vector in their influence on homicide rates (or, per some examinations of the question, actually influence those rates in an unsalutary direction. All references to gun control are non sequitur. It’s just an effort by bourgeois twits like the President to stick the blame for urban crime on subcultures they despise (like rural gun owners). That way, they do not have to talk about effective crime control, which involves hiring more cops, optimally deploying them, and making use of best practices.

  28. Art Deco
    November 29th, 2015 @ 7:01 pm

    The problem is, you commonly have no idea someone is going to do something along these lines until they actually do it. For every schizophrenic that does something like this, there are 98 others who would never do something like this. If you run down the list of mass shootings, only a minority might have been averted with less restrictive standards for civil commitment.

  29. robertstacymccain
    November 29th, 2015 @ 8:43 pm

    Riddle me this, sir: Why do liberals believe “sensible gun control” is the answer to a problem caused by a shortage sensible lunatic control?

    Once upon a time in this country, people who acted as crazy as Robert Dear would likely find themselves in a padded cell at the State Asylum. This was the policy until the 1960s, when craziness became fashionable (think Haight Ashbury after 1967) and later “de-institutionalization” became a matter of official government policy.

  30. Dana
    November 29th, 2015 @ 8:58 pm

    Let’s be honest about one point: nobody wants to pay more taxes to keep the loonies institutionalized. While a few people wind up paying the ultimate price, for the vast majority of us it’s a lot cheaper to let the mentally ill shuffle around and sleep in dumpsters.

    Is that cold and calloused? Yup, sure is! But it’s also the truth.

  31. concern00
    November 29th, 2015 @ 9:15 pm

    The left are always quick to shunt home blame for these incidents to a selection from their large repertoire of straw men. Your article’s title succinctly sums up the ultimate root cause and you also helpfully allude to a very workable solution.

  32. Ronald J. Ward
    November 29th, 2015 @ 9:32 pm

    If there were no loopholes (which something like most Americans supported closing), why was there such a backlash from the NRA when legisltion was brought up to close them?

  33. Art Deco
    November 29th, 2015 @ 9:32 pm

    Once upon a time in this country, people who acted as crazy as Robert Dear would likely find themselves in a padded cell at the State Asylum.
    I don’t think so. By his former wife’s account published in The Times, his line of work was out of the ordinary (self-employed as an art dealer), but he was not peculiar in other respects up to the point they were divorced (at which time he was 42). You had in 1955 a large census of untreatable schizophrenics, people mad from syphilis, senile dements, &c. This man was merely an abrasive and disagreeable neighbor. If he was not observably schizophrenic at age 42, it is exceedingly unlikely he would be at age 57 (and the median age of onset for schizophrenia for males is somewhere around age 19, and onset past age 45 for men or women is as rare as hen’s teeth).

  34. Art Deco
    November 29th, 2015 @ 9:36 pm

    Your chances of ending up in long-term care before you die are around 40% and the nursing home census is in the seven digits. You’ve got another seven digit population tracked by state welfare departments for one reason or another, a great many resident in group homes. We pay out a great deal for long-term care, for which the going rate is north of $100,000 per person per year where I grew up.

  35. Matt_SE
    November 29th, 2015 @ 9:37 pm

    I find that hard to believe for an upstanding, moral organization like PP.

  36. Ronald J. Ward
    November 29th, 2015 @ 9:38 pm

    “All reference to gun control are non sequitur”.

    That’s an interesting admission to sticking your fingers in your ears and singing “la la la” to any rational conversation pertaining to the many many shootings occurring at an epidemic level.

    Or wait, let me guess. We’re really not having a shooting problem at all. It’s just left liberal talking points? And, and, and the NRA has no say in gubermint so take that!

  37. Finrod Felagund
    November 29th, 2015 @ 9:38 pm

    What part of “there’s no such thing, it’s gun control under a different name” didn’t you understand?

  38. Ronald J. Ward
    November 29th, 2015 @ 9:39 pm

    I have no control over what you are or are not aware of.

  39. Ronald J. Ward
    November 29th, 2015 @ 9:41 pm

    I understood you fine.
    I just don’t agree with you.

  40. Matt_SE
    November 29th, 2015 @ 9:41 pm

    1) Nazis were National SOCIALISTS, and therefore leftists.
    2) This guy followed the PP videos from his shack with no electricity?
    3) For a “rampage” at a PP office, he didn’t seem to kill any PP personnel or damage their facility much, did he?

  41. Art Deco
    November 29th, 2015 @ 9:42 pm

    Again, per HUD, the census of vagrants is around 580,000 and a large slice are not ‘loony’ at all. Another federal agency offers that about 25% of all vagrants qualify as ‘mentally ill’. So, we’re talking along the lines of 150,000 people, which is a fraction of the nursing home census. Or, we would be talking along those lines if those so classified actually merited indefinite confinement.

  42. Southern Air Pirate
    November 29th, 2015 @ 9:48 pm

    Dude,

    Its Robert Reich and all of the hand wringing for the last 72 hours has been that its the GOP and their hate speech, the CMP and their hate filled videos, and that Trump with his fascist ideas (which I believe that Trump is a fascist) that created this monster. Don’t ask me to explain it beyond the fact that, yet again the Left has found that “Free Speech” needs to be tightened down. That yet again, the GOP has proven themselves as agents of terrorism more than KSM or any of the Taliban or ISIS recruiting videos. At least according to the left and the media.
    The latching on to any thing that this loon said proves the point that speech is dangerous and the only speech that should be allowed is from approved Prog-Dem sources.

  43. mole
    November 29th, 2015 @ 9:48 pm

    Good reply, we seem to have gone to the extreme here in Oz with extremely few places available for even crisis psychiatric care.
    I had to try to involuntarily commit my brother after he suffered a major breakdown and tried to kill himself, its a horrible thing to be waiting and hoping your brother gets locked up and treated before he kills himself. (hes much better now and never looked back)

    Quite a lot of the ‘down and outs” would benefit from a comprehensive period of readjustment in an institutional setting, I wouldnt be arguing for lifelong or even long term residential living except for in a few rare cases.

    It does seem the good intentions switched from one extreme (lock em all up forever) to the other without a lot of long term planning.

  44. Art Deco
    November 29th, 2015 @ 9:51 pm

    Sir, ‘rational conversation’ relates behaviors to consequences through references to empirical investigation. You’re reciting talking points while condescending to people.
    People here are aware of what you’re not, which is that it’s difficult for students of human behavior to isolate any salutary effect from adding restrictions to gun ownership.
    Gun ownership is prevalent in rural areas and small towns. The homicide rate in rural New York is less than 1/4 the national mean. In the South, the distinction is less stark, but still present. The reason? The prevalence of firearms is not an important vector in influencing homicide rates.
    What can be an important vector was manifest in New York City, which engineered an 81% decline in homicide rates between 1990 and 2010. They did this by hiring more police, meticulous statistical tracking, encouraging police to be more proactive and to shift tactics and priorities. The changes to state regulations on gun ownership were close to nil.
    When your crew have engineered an 81% decline in homicide rates in a major municipality, get back to us.

  45. Finrod Felagund
    November 29th, 2015 @ 9:51 pm

    A question with a lie as its premise produces nothing that means anything. You could go around asking people “Do you support nuking the moon so that everyone on Earth gets free ice cream?” and get equally meaningful results.

  46. Southern Air Pirate
    November 29th, 2015 @ 9:59 pm

    You mean loopholes like how city, county, states and federal law enforcement agencies fail to report to the DoJ that there was felony convictions for folks and therefore allow criminals to purchase weapons. Even when said criminals are in violation of the 1968 Gun Control Act and the Landenburg amendments about who is banned from owning firearms after a conviction.

    Lets not even talk about the loophole that was created when HIPAA was passed where it prevents unless there is a court of law determination that the records be turned over, only after a court of law determination that a person is unable to think or act rationally on their behalf and has been through the layers of checks which the government requires.

    Or are you going with the concept of the “gun show loophole”? That now tired ol’meme where supposedly 99% of all the shooting crimes have purchased their weapons. At least according to some of the survey’s of American people and the talking points parrotted in the media. Whereas, the only accurate stat that we have from a study in the late 90’s by the Bureau of Justice Statistics has shown constantly that less than 2% of all total illegal weapons were purchased from a gun show. Or are you just trying to limit the free enterprise of intra-state business of private individuals? If that is the case, then you might as well start to crack down on all manner of other free enterprise business transactions between private individuals and make sure that everyone doing anything and everything is by the book and by the law. From the guy down the street from the little old lady who goes over and fixes her plumbing to the car sales in the classifieds.

  47. Art Deco
    November 29th, 2015 @ 10:02 pm

    Dunno. I assume that the frequency of suicide is responsive to several factors. The thing is, headline suicide rates had an abrupt increase of about a third during the period running from 1950 to 1955, prior to de-institutionalization. There was a milder increase of about 20% during the period running from 1955 to 1975, when de-institutionalization was taking effect. Since then, suicide rates have bounced around a set point of 12 per 100,000 per year, in spite of the slow decline in the state asylum census. I’m just not sure that suicide rates are all that responsive to the propensity to commit people. In any case, long term commitment was for schizophrenics and people with various sorts of dementia. There were some people with mood disorders therein, but the sort of acute melancholy which produces suicide was (I’ll wager) quite rare as a primary driver of remands to state asylums for anything but a few weeks.

  48. BillClintonsShorts17
    November 29th, 2015 @ 10:31 pm

    The “…legisltion…” [sic] was a stalking horse for ‘gun control’ of other sorts. There are no ‘gun show loopholes’.

  49. concern00
    November 30th, 2015 @ 1:19 am

    Yeah that’s ’cause Christian pro-lifers are 2nd amendment enthusiasts and the only reason to carry a gun is to kill random innocent people. It all makes a crazy kind of progressive sense.

  50. concern00
    November 30th, 2015 @ 1:20 am

    Minor edit: no guns for progressives.