AND ANOTHER OUTRAGE – AT 8:48 A.M. ET:  This relates to our first post of the day, just below.  We now have more details on the Aurora shooting, and what is coming out is outrageous.   From ABC News:

The psychiatrist who treated suspected movie-theater shooter James Holmes made contact with a University of Colorado police officer to express concerns about her patient's behavior several weeks before Holmes' alleged rampage, sources told ABC News.

The sources did not know what the officer approached by Dr. Lynne Fenton did with the information she passed along. They said, however, that the officer was recently interviewed, with an attorney present, by the Aurora Police Department as a part of the ongoing investigation of the shooting.

Fenton would have had to have serious concerns to break confidentiality with her patient to reach out to the police officer or others, the sources said. Under Colorado law, a psychiatrist can legally breach a pledge of confidentiality with a patient if he or she becomes aware of a serious and imminent threat that their patient might cause harm to others. Psychiatrists can also breach confidentiality if a court has ordered them to do so.

"For any physician to break doctor-patient confidentiality there would have to be an extremely good reason," said Dr. Carol Bernstein, a psychiatrist at NYU Langone Medical Center and past president of the American Psychiatric Association.

COMMENT:   Look, we understand the privacy concerns.  And, yes, there have been outrageous cases of false charge and some irresponsible examples of professionals using absurd theories to destroy innocent people.  Witness the so-called "child abuse" cases of the 1980s, and the famous Duke University lacrosse-players "rape" case.

But there's something called maturity.  There's something called common sense.  These items are not in great supply in our educational institutions.  We know that the alleged shooter in the Gabrielle Giffords case, who will appear in court today, had multiple hostile contacts with his college's police force, yet nothing was reported that prevented him from buying a gun.

I hope the press pursues the Colorado story intensely.  Here is a case of a responsible psychiatrist who saw a clear and present danger, and reported it, with apparently no results.

But, naturally, once the massacre occurred, it was the guns that were blamed.  And one commentator even suggested that the Tea Party might be involved.  And violent movies, and...and...  And yet there'd been a specific warning.

August 7, 2012