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To have a gun license, you should have reached a pretty high bar. You would hope that most people with mental health issues of the sort of severity that manifests itself in murder-suicide would be denied one. You would hope.

You'd also expect them to be denied to controlling and/or abusive cunts. But it's the police that grant them, so you're asking them to look at toxic males and see something other than a kindred spirit. They'd also granted that Plymouth incel guy one, remember.

That’s a get out in 97%* of these cases. It’s toxic cunts and labelling them any different hurts people who truly need help.

*made up figure.

I have no doubt that there is a societal element and that there are many incidences of toxic cunts partaking in gender driven violence. I'm sure there is also a tendency to blame mental health when there were other issues at play...in some cases.

I'm going to duck out of this conversation because I'm speaking from a recent experience of a family member suffering a severe psychotic episode and causing risk to life. News thread on a cycling forum isn't the place for me to go into that.

Edit: what I will say is this...its pretty common for somebody to see things that do not exist during a crisis and this leads to a lot of terrible outcomes from unwell people who genuinely believe they are fighting for their lives.

[deleted due to petulance and impoliteness]

Feel free to dip into the Covid threads to catch up on what was a horrendous saga during the first lockdowns. I've been sharing the situation with this family member with forumengers for 8 years.

I think it's equally likely that they want to commit suicide but don't want to abandon their families.

I'm not saying it's definitely the reason, but it doesn't strike me as being especially illogical or dependent on a male sense of entitlement.

Also what about all of the mothers who kill their children? What's their rational? Will fact check, but I'm pretty sure just as many women kill their children as men. Either way you've got to be in a pretty desperate place when that seems a viable option.

[deleted due to petulance and impoliteness]

Honestly mate, it wasn't petulance or impolite. It was a cuntish thing to say.

Maybe all three.

Anyway, my point still stands. A lot of people with severe mental health issues see things that are very real to them. Its not possible to reason or rationalise these things. Sure, some people might kill their wife and kids because they are awful people, but equally they might kill them because they are being chased by alien monsters trying to tear their throats out and desperately trying to stay alive.

I know literally nothing about this case so maybe I'm miles off the mark.

I’m dredging my memory bank back 20 years, but I think I’m right that the greatest predictor of a family murder-suicide is past domestic violence. It’s 90%+ I think.

Clearly in simple terms mental health is always a factor, but psychosis isn’t often and depression is a very, very different mental state to killing your family.

it's almost always men doing it to women and children

Small sample size but a member of my extended family shot her husband and then herself (not their girls though thankfully). There's a whole load of crap in there I don't want to go into, but it basically boils down to "unreasonable" (but VERY consistent) behaviour creating or adding to a mental break she couldn't find any other way out of when she was in it and had nobody to see her and help.

There's lots and lots of supposition but ultimately, it's not really possible to know why she planned and carried out this murder-suicide at this particular time, rather than just walking out. It's mostly just fucking horrific that their girls have to start their lives with this. I truly hope that they've been able to learn to live with it.

I'm so sorry for your family, and also for the abused woman who couldn't find a way out.

The references I can find with a quick google put murder of children by a parent were "roughly" equal between fathers and mothers for US and Australia, with "roughly" doing a bit of heavy lifting (eg 40% mothers vs 57% fathers). The UK reference I found had no stats but said mostly fathers.

That's murder of children by a parent.

But family annihilators, the people who kill their children and the other parent as well, are almost always men.

Family annihilators are horrible wrong ‘uns.

Just from a purely psychological perspective, I do wonder what could get someone into that mindset, though. Looking at his business accounts on Companies House, his firm went from having £20k in assets to nothing in the space of a year. Things were bad enough with his job situation that she made that odd comment about him having an unplanned new job on a student podcast. Obviously financial difficulties can put strains on a relationship. But if his whole identity was tied up in being the man of the house… it’s horrible to think quite how fucked up his view of the world was that annihilating his family was even an option.

I guess what I’m grasping imperfectly at is that toxic masculinity is toxic to men as well as to the people around them.

Anyway, horrible stuff. I’m going to look at gifs of puppies now.

Are you saying that’s a mentally healthy response?!

I’m pretty sure that knowing the right people is the only bar to a gun licence if you can satisfy the storage requirements.

Come on now, you didn't actually read it like that did you?

I don't think he was deluded into seeing aliens instead of his family, or believing his wife was a plant by the CIA.

I think his values and ego were screwed up and he didn't see his wife and child as having value in their own right outside their roles in his life.

Sure he probably had some sort of breakdown but the form it took is down to the underlying belief framework and that wasn't a function of any mental health issues, just good old fashioned sexism.

I confidently predict he'll turn out to have a history of emotional if not physical abuse and controlling behaviour. This won't be out of character, it'll be the core of his character.

More to the point, none of us know anything about this so seems a bit weird to be arguing who is more likely right or wrong.

Which was kind of my point in the first place. I suppose I was just a thing that we don't know what happened and that it doesn't necessarily have to come from a place of gender violence, misogyny or other societal toxicity....it could have been something else or a combination.

im always behind the chat, but anyway -

SEIS and EIS are tax incentives, or efficient tax planning - you have some money to invest, you want to put it somewhere, the government wants you to put it in small entrepreneurial fast growing businesses, the schemes encourage that.

The film finance scheme started off as tax breaks to encourage investment in the UK film industry, and became tax avoidance (and in some cases evasion) when they were abused - being used to make money not films. So it got shut down. That was probably partly the government’s fault but also the dodgy investment co scammers.

Tax evasion is always illegal.

I still think my point is valid - it’s not tax avoidance if the government has effectively removed a tax in some situations that otherwise would have tax. Outside of PAYE tax is often not clear, there are sometimes different ways of looking at the same thing, and I don’t think it is wrong to seek to pay only the tax you are required to. If that makes you put money in an industry out company type the government wants to encourage that’s fine by me.

I suppose if you got married purely for the tax breaks you might be trying to avoid tax though.

….. and that ^ seems entirely irrelevant/of small importance.

The murder/suicide is awful

Not all men / all lives matter etc.

Sigh.

I don’t have a source to link to, but I recall an academic who suggested we should ask ourselves whether dad-initiated familycides weren’t just honour killings for Europeans.
I don’t have the background to comment much myself, but reckon it’s worth considering at least. Surely we don’t think the thousands of honour killings in the ME are driven by mental illness, we’re usually quick to blame their culture. I wouldn’t be so quick to rule out the same causality over here, at least to some extent.

It's similar to school shooters in America, mental illness gets bandied around a lot, especially if they're white. Are they mentally sound and perfectly happy, no, but that does a disservice to the millions of people suffering from various mental illness problems that don't do shit like this and the people suffering from severe issues or episodes where they may well be a danger to themselves and others. Is poor mental health a contributing factor to stuff like this? Almost certainly, it may be the straw that broke the camels back, but it's not the root cause.

I think you are reading negative connotations into the phrase "tax avoidance" that are not intended. It's a neutral statement of fact to say that a particular structure avoids a tax charge that would be payable in another structure.

What is ethical and what are the standards we might expect of our elected representatives is a totally different question.