Temperance forever! Let's go get some axes!

Sorry if I sound a bit flippant, but haven't we known this for centuries? To me, what is the most troubling is that this young person evidentally had a serious problem and no one was there to help him. Apparently he had no safety net or social group that might have been able to stop him.

I think he must have had some anger issues as well.
I witnessed my father have psychotic blackout episodes and he certainly had anger/ anger management issues.
What we had here was an angry, non-recovering alcoholic with ready access to a gun.
So if that description applies to you as well, you have to ask yourself- do I really know what I am capable of when I get blind drunk?

Can we blame Trump...please!?!?!?!

I don't know many people who have never blacked out. Never anything extreme... I've even known people who I later found out were blackout drunk who appeared, in direct conversation with me, to be completely sober.

The violence associated with alcohol is pretty extreme. I've heard it's responsible for like 40% (or even up to 75%??) of traffic fatalities, involved in a huge proportion of sexual assault, regular assault, murder, etc. It's definitely 100% more dangerous to society than crack ever was.

But at the same time... I have a very happy relationship with alcohol. I like to get a bit tipsy with friends, and that's about it. I regularly go a month without drinking, even if just by accident. I dont want to reduce my ability to drink when I want to as a responsible adult who has been spared the alcoholism gene.

@2 - He was married and had a history of stable employment. He also had been in alcohol recovery and had a history of blackouts, yet he chose to go buy alcohol (a lot of it). I don't see any need for the "aw, the poor guy, he didn't have anyone" defense.

Recovering drunks will confirm that functional but psychotic behavior is possible when blacked out. Many have "come to" in the middle of quite terrifying situations of which they have no memory.
As a recovering AA, I have zero sympathy for this piece of shit. Nobody else should, either.

@8 I have plenty of sympathy for him; but he still needs to fully accountable. I just feel like, it's gotta be tough to essentially wake up and realize you're going to spend the rest of your life in jail for something you have no memory of doing.

@9 is on point. "Blackout drunk" does not necessarily mean just passing out - it means having been so drunk that you just can't remember large portions of things that happened while incredibly intoxicated. And sometimes, people this drunk seem to be high functioning - not sober, perhaps, but not so drunk that you'd think they're so incapacitated, but they are.

No, it's not a "get out of jail free card", and I don't know anyone trying to say it s, but as someone who quit drinking before it got to that sort of blackout point, I can only imagine if he's being serious, and this is the way he's going to have to spend the rest of his life knowing that he has no memory of the thing that's going to ruin the rest of his life. Or maybe he's bullshitting. None of us will ever really know for sure, but I can't dismiss the idea completely out of hand, either. Alcohol is just like that, more than almost any other drug.

I'm a firm believer that intoxication, no matter what intoxicant you are talking about, does not turn people into assholes who are not on some level already assholes. Their assholism might not be apparent to a casual acquaintance when they are not wasted but in most cases if you just scratch the surface it is easily revealed.

Regulate Alcohol like we regulate Cannabis with limits

There should be no reason anyone can buy that much booze in a day to black out before 12:30pm

@11 we have more than enough evidence that that's basically not the case.

I've told me own blackout story in a previous thread. It's not the only time I blacked out; but I will say, I was so embarrassed (I also tend to believe I'm the most attractive man on earth when I'm drunk and sometimes hit on people inappropriately/sloppily) that I've become pretty good about not reaching "the point of no return". To be honest, I wish I could cut loose a little harder, but on a fundamental level, I don't enjoy the taste of alcohol, so even if I wanna get hammered, the process is not enjoyable for me.

@13 We do? Who's we?

I've known several people over the years who were blackout drinkers and all of them didn't think they had a problem with alcohol, in spite of close calls with the law. This guy knew he had a problem yet instead of calling his AA sponsor or going to a meeting, he decided to buy booze at Fred Meyer.

Decisions are powerful, he needs to face the full consequences of his, he owes that to the people he hurt and killed at the very least.

If the guy was a consistently heavy drinker, maybe he shouldn't have had a gun lying around the house.

When I was in the military, that was one reason all weapons were accounted for and locked in the armory. Soldiers don't wander around the base or the barracks armed without a specific purpose. Alcohol often flows freely in the barracks when off duty. The military is well aware that alcohol and guns are a terrible combination.

Of course, one can have sympathy for the shooter yet feel he needs to be held accountable for his actions. And one can have more sympathy for those who were injured and, or who lost loved ones. Indeed, imagine the trauma of learning a loved one died because of such a shooting.

11, yes. Alcohol does not automatically turn a good, happy person into an asshole. There are plenty of good, happy people who become good, happy drunks hic.

If someone is an asshole when they're drunk, that means they're also an asshole when they're sober, but they're able to hide it better.

Wow! Even for Katie this is a new low in journalism and science reporting.
So many issues misinterpreted and confounded, so many false assumptions. Let's review the most obvious:

(1) Yes "blacking out is a very real phenomenon," even "en bloc blackouts," but there are many ways to black out and alcohol is not special. You can suffer a complete blackout due to a wide variety of brain traumas, including a simple hit on the head. I once suffered a concussion falling off my bike while riding with a friend, completely splitting my helmet. I did not loose a second of consciousness (as determined by those around me), immediately getting back on my bike and riding for another hour or so. However, there was a complete hole in my memory, remembering nothing from shortly before the crash until about 30-40 minutes after getting on my bike. Important point here: I did not shoot my riding companion or anyone else, nor did I act particularly strange or out of character.

(2) The way Katie uses the term "blackout" is confusing because it confounds simple retrograde amnesia with a popular conception concerning fugue states (or dissociative fugue): with the later a person can act in strange ways that are completely out of character, e.g., as a result of multiple personality disorder, dementia, ingesting psychotropic substances, etc. If one suffers from just retrograde amnesia it has no bearing whatsoever on their culpability for committing heinous acts during the time they forgot.

(3) Assuming that alcohol was the cause of the shooter's blackout is absurd given that the crime ended with a high speed car crash, almost certainly producing a concussion (which can happen absent any loss of consciousness).

(4) Katie states that an alcoholic blackout "is a truly dangerous state to be in, because when you've drunk enough to blackout, your decision-making faculties aren't exactly going to be at their sharpest." While obviously true, I think firing numerous bullets at three strangers, with clear intent to harm, is not a question of bad decision-making. There is the widespread -- and repeatedly scientifically debunked -- implicit assumption here that alcohol stimulates or releases aggressive behavior. Research in the 1970s at the University of Washington demonstrated that disinhibited behavior, including aggression, increased almost solely as a function of whether the subject believed they had ingested alcohol and not the actual amount. That is, people felt freer to act irresponsibly and like idiots when they believed they could later "blame it on the bottle." Here is a more recent study that indicates that alcohol intoxication only increases aggressive behavior in people that, when sober, show a poor ability at considering the future consequences of their current actions, see:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111219135215.htm

So, as is typical with Katie, opinion and supposition add far more heat and confusion than light and insight to the situation.

Meh. He’s guilty and will hopefully spend the rest of his life in prison.

what does "white guy" have to do with any of the other information? Katie you have a problem and are also part of the problem.

How come you never hear of people blacking out and volunteering at soup kitchens or rescuing kittens out of trees? Or why that insane guy on the bus in Canada didn't administer foot rubs instead of decapitation? It seems that the stripped-down human psyche is pretty damn dark. In vino veritas.

so..... i understand the quitting drinking thing were all trying to pour less of the milk of human kindness down our throats..... SO WHY THE GLOCK SEMI-AUTO IN HIS HAND, THEN RUNS OUTSIDE TO SHOOT INNOCENT PPL IN TRAFFIC, AND EVEN CARJACKED ONE AFTER BLOWING HIS HEAD OFF?
Oh.
u can perform a carjack while blacked out.
(k)