However, there are countries like Japan and England without easy access to guns and these societies have a lot fewer of these problems. Freak single incidents are a lot more salient than statistics, so I can’t blame people for using the freak single incidents as an occasion to make gun control arguments. For 2nd amendment and cultural reasons, all feasible gun control laws in the US are too weak/avoidable to make much of a difference though.

In some sense the question about unbalanced vs. jerk is about tolerable dimensions of diversity, and categorization again. The mentally ill are a stigmatized minority who legitimately need protection from discrimination as such. Jerks and incompetents are also stigmatized minorities (arguably) but not subject to protection. So it goes.

As with other forms of disability it’s tempting to make reasonable accommodations around rigorously neutralized standards of performance. You’re entitled to your delusions and/or annoying personal quirks if you can get the job done with some regularity. But that seems like a license to make the workplace wicked unpleasant for everyone else, and when there’s tenure, for a long long time.

What I’m groping for is a way to distinguish meaningfully and morally between racists booting colleagues because they’re Black and a pragmatic decision not to plague yourself with interpersonal misery for the next twenty or thirty years. Not even getting into the goin’ postal scenario, which is a true outlier.

I’m not sure what to do about Amy in a more personalized sense. Beyond the sort of obvious portmanteau mental health diagnoses the specialized contours of individual psychoses and their convoluted relationships with a more conventional reality are pretty hard for outsiders to sort out. I feel like the best I can do is say ‘that chick is wicked messed up’ and insist on the sufficiency of that explanatory domain for addressing the case.

Something that might be amenable to more focused and informed attention is what to do when colleagues become or reveal themselves to be unbalanced. There were two in my undergrad philosophy department and tenure kept them on staff for years.

It’s kind of textbook though on selective perception and narrative emplotment. Oops, there’s the historiographer making it yet another instance of a larger pattern… dang.