In the wake of the Parkland shooting, as in the wake of any mass shooting, there has been a scramble by various political groups to place blame for the violence. Everyone is looking for the source of the evil that causes these events, to little avail. In most cases, at least when it comes to the extreme Left, the blame is placed squarely on guns themselves. This is obviously an absurd notion. Placing blame on the particular tool used in the crime does not solve the problem of the criminal and what led him to the deed. Whether or not the tool made his crime “easier” is irrelevant to the greater disturbance at hand.
After years of debate and failed legislation, leftists have discovered that resistance to the incremental destruction of the 2nd Amendment is insurmountable, and a change in narrative has occurred. Finally, we are talking more about mental health issues and a little less about guns. This is a win for gun rights; however, there is a danger that needs to be addressed.
First, while mental health is being presented in the mainstream media more and more as a central issue in mass shootings, I find it interesting that the problem of psychotropic pharmaceuticals has been conveniently ignored. In a large number of non-terrorist related shooting incidents, assailants have been subjected to long-term psychotropic drug use. Why has this factor not been addressed?
Well, consider the fact that Big Pharma has spent at least $2.5 billion over the past ten years lobbying in Washington D.C. Compare this to the NRA lobbying budget, which in comparison was a paltry $20 million over the past 10 years according to OpenSecrets.
This should put into perspective the idiocy of anti-gun advocates and their obsession with the “nefarious” NRA. The influence of the pharmaceutical industry is almost universally ignored when it comes to the debate on gun violence, yet their lobbying efforts dwarf all others. All this despite the fact that psychotropic drugs are proven to influence violent and even homicidal behavior in people.
Second, the focus on mental health in terms of the Parkland shooting seems to be glossing over the vast failings of the FBI and local law enforcement in following up and investigating the dozens of warnings they received about Nikolas Cruz. As I outlined in my recent article ‘“Mass shootings will never negate the need for gun rights,” gun grabbers love to trot out legislation on increased background check restrictions and closing the “gun show loophole,” yet none of their suggested solutions would have stopped the Parkland tragedy from taking place.
The success of Nikolas Cruz’s attack was due to the abject failure of the FBI and law enforcement, NOT the failure of background checks. Had they done their jobs, Cruz never would have been able to purchase a firearm to begin with. I find it rather ironic that gun grabbers constantly argue that average citizens do not need guns for self defense because they have law enforcement to rely on, yet it was exactly the stupidity or inaction of law enforcement that opened the door wide for Cruz to (allegedly) kill.
Clearly, the so-called “authorities” are not trustworthy enough to carry out the job of protecting us all from active shooters. The only people capable of stopping an active shooter in a fast and practical manner are armed citizens on the scene at the moment the attack begins.
Third, and most important, is the issue of mental health parameters and how they will be used to restrict gun rights. The ATF already has rules regarding people “adjudicated as mentally defective,” which includes people ruled a danger to themselves and others by a “court, board or commission or other lawful authority.” Now, these guidelines themselves can be rather broad, but abuse by government so far has been limited (though some instances have been egregious). If the Trump administration seeks to broaden the guidelines even further, then we may have a problem.
Take for example the unacceptable abuse of military veterans and their 2nd Amendment rights by the Bureau of Veterans Affairs. The VA has in recent years placed restrictions on thousands of veterans, negating their gun rights without due process and without oversight. And all of this has been predicated on the claim that some veterans are “mentally defective” based on dubious parameters, including whether or not they let their spouse handle household finances.
This is what I am talking about when I bring up the dangers behind “mental illness” and gun rights. WHO gets to decide who is mentally ill and why they are mentally ill? Will this be done by a jury of our peers? Or, by an unaccountable and faceless bureaucracy? Will the guidelines for mental illness be strict and specific, or will they be broad and wide open to interpretation? Once a person has been labeled mentally defective, will they have the ability to appeal the decision, or will the label haunt them for the rest of their lives?
Gun rights activists should not put blind faith in the Trump administration to ensure that new mental health legislation will remain fair to the 2nd Amendment. Unfortunately, Trump is on record as supporting the “No Fly List” gun control bill. This type of bill is something liberty activists opposed vehemently under the Obama administration because it allows the government to erase the gun rights of almost anyone without due process merely by placing them on an arbitrary watch list. A list, I will remind readers, that is a matter of national security and not subject to public overview.
Would a list of “mentally defective people” fall under the same Orwellian standards?
What about the new and disturbing designation by the psychiatric community of oppositional defiance disorder? This absurd “illness” is being applied to people as young as pre-school age and suggests that adults with the illness often display resistance to authority figures and government.
What if your opposition is not to “authority” in general, but to CORRUPT authority specifically? Is this mental illness, or the very epitome of sanity?
In the Soviet Union, it was all too common for the government to abuse “mental illness” designations as a means to silence and imprison political dissent. Anti-government agitation and propaganda were criminalized under Soviet legal codes, and these codes were frequently applied in conjunction with the psychiatric system. This was sometimes referred to as “punitive medicine.”
The problem with government and psychiatric institutions joining forces to determine constitutional rights for individuals should be obvious. Government should be as separate from the medical establishment as possible yet they are often intertwined to terrible effect. If mental illness is not adjudicated by a jury of ones peers and with extreme oversight by gun rights groups, then abuse of such laws by government is almost guaranteed. The temptation to use backdoor bureaucracy in a totalitarian manner to underhandedly confiscate guns and sabotage the 2nd Amendment will be high.
It is also important to remember that even if you have placed full and blind faith in the Trump administration, there are no guarantees that the constitutional rules we allow him to bend today will not be completely broken by the next president in line. Gun rights are paramount to a free society. Without them, governments almost always revert to increased socialism and “tyranny creep” while violent crime continues or increases as the citizenry is left defenseless. Mental illness AND psychotropic drugs need to be taken seriously in terms of gun violence, but it is also vital that we do not allow the issue of mental health to be exploited as a subversive means to undermine our freedoms.
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When we live in a nation in which each and every one of the so-called mass shootings are directly traceable to activities of the government itself, including the 09-11-2011 “attacks” in New York City and Fairfax County, Virginia, there is no reason to even suggest that government could be interested in any “solution” to the problem. The recent “decision” by the 4th District Federal Court of Appeals should serve to confirm that premise. The “decision” upheld a Virginia “law” that outlaws “assault weapons” in its effect. The basis of the “decision” is based on an interpretation of the second amendment by the court that the amendment did not intend the people to be able to keep and bear arms that were “weapons of war”. Aside from the fact that the constitution NEVER gave the Supreme Court the power to interpret the constitution (the word “interpret” never appears in the constitution), let alone any of the inferior courts, the reasoning is patently absurd. The people who wrote, and insisted upon making the Bill of Rights a part of the constitution had all lived through, and most had been a part of, The Revolutionary War; a war only made POSSIBLE by the people’s possession of the “weapons of war” of that day. In fact, they knew from experience that when a government is the only one that has “the weapons of war” that government WILL make war. If unable to find a convenient foreign government to make war against, it will make war on its own people. War is always profitable for bankster types and other unscrupulous people; and those are the types that always gravitate toward positions in government or positions that conspire to control the actions of government for their own benefit. It should be clear to even the most “mentally challenged” that we no longer have anything that even remotely resembles a lawful government, let alone a constitutional (as in the constitution of 1789, Bill Of Rights 1791) government.
We all know what’s coming but are powerless to stop it. The decline of an empire is as inevitable as the tides. Just learn to ride it through and out, somehow. The patriotic citizen is betrayed at every turn by those infesting especially the Feral government.
You are most certainly correct. Actually, all of Western Civilization is a civilization in decline. Most of the governments in Europe have no real sovereign government. Their leadership is bought and paid for with our phony dollars, and they behave as puppets of the neocons in Washington. Canada, and even Australia seem to be unable to keep from joining in the same insanity that grips our leadership and an overwhelming majority of the population as a whole.
From the website ADDitude, Question #9 on their Adult ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder) Symptom Screener Test reads (always, sometimes, never),”I can’t stand authority figures. Fight the power!” Punctuation is exactly the same. This newly invented disorder (chaos) is in the new DSM and is trending where this gun event is trending, it’s even trending here. I’d post a link, but AP no likey.
This is exactly where they’re going with us who know of their corrupt, immoral, abusive, (fill in your adjective), shenanigans since they fail at disarming us by other means. They know it’s perfectly normal to be angry with or not to “like” people who trick you into slavery, steal the rights to all your stuff including your family, and assault you for stepping out of their imaginary lines, not to mention to fight back, so they want to make it a disorder (more duality garbage) so they can take our arms.
Look at the language they used, “can’t stand”, they don’t say “I’m angry with authority figures”, which is the truth. Test aside, they’re trying to marry hate speech with gun ownership via mental health. Plan B – deem all gun owners legally incompetent (the legal term) by a very slow, methodical but slippery slope of state mental health criteria like answers to this question.
Yep, if they can label people who want to eat healthy organic food free of GMO’s and pesticide as mentally ill, then can make up anything they want.
So the government will call people who disagree with the government “mentally ill” and confiscate their legally owned guns? That is insane! Criminals aren’t worried about breaking the law, so new laws only affect the law abiding.
This about the dumbest thing that I have ever read on the issue. My VA anti depressants and sleep medications just say do not take with alcohol. I got our on a medical in 1961 for Major Depresion, which is also a part of PTSD, and that was before PTSD was even an accepted diagnosis, but I still not can be prohibited from owning a firearm even though people with my diagnosis ‘went postal’ during the 1980’s while the government was all busy claiming that if it accepted the diagnosis the US would go broke paying all of the claims, and finally caved in when the AMA told the government that it would pull the accretitation for all VA faclities if it did not. So the fact that my VA psychiatrist can declare me incompetent and take away my right to bear arms is just plain BS. One of the killers of a deputy in one of the Denver burbs had checked himself out of the VA mental health facilities in Sheridan WY, got a gun or guns, moved to suburban Denver, he did not like the sheriff or the VA and had refused VA care, made the call that got the deputy there on a 911 call and killed the deputy at the door. Why is there no warning about having arms around on the med while the Vet Centers where vets receive treatment have endless boxes of trigger locks on the floors and counters – it is because they cannot take away the weapons of those that have them. We put people in jail for driving with a .08% blood alcohol level, but we do not put people in jail who have that high a blood alcohol level while bearing arms. In CO we have big game hunting season in the fall where the hunters with licences load up their RVs for a week at home and then stop at the first liquor store they can find to go off and play hunter while drunk as skunks. Right now I have a neighbor who is over 65 who is easing into retirement by only working 4 days a week which gives him 3 to drink as much beer as he wants while sitting with his gun across his knees on the front or back porches? I could make as many calls as I wanted, but the current law does not allow the cops to even take away his gun, much less into custody for being drunk on his property because the NRA would scream like a wounded rabbit if this were made the law. Guns and alcohol do not go mix any more than alcohol and driving mix. The only drug that says that it may lead to depression and possibly suicide that I know of is Chantex – a drug that is supposed to take away the desire to smoke. If it can increase depression then it also increases both the risk of suicide or homicide and if guns are avaiable they are more likely to be used than any other. We also arrest and jail people with too much THC in their systems for driving but not while bearing arms. A guy who was hing on pot shot and killed his wife while she was on 911 trying to get a response. We also cannot have a law on having a gun and being on any other drug. Are we really the United States of the NRA or what? When am I going to buy a new tank to defend me against the boggie man?
I just saw President Trump on TV and heard him say with my own disbelieving ears…… that police should seize the guns of the mentally ill and then get a court order after the fact!
“mentally ill” is a term you can drive a mack truck through, Psychs can’t even define it, identify it, or predict it.
Most Psychiatrists are mentally ill themselves and have No Technology for treatment except Electric Shock or mind altering usually suicide inducing drugs. That every single one of the mass shooters in schools were on psych drugs is overlooked on purpose.
That citizens rarely get their guns back from police without costly legal fees to get court orders to the police forcing the police to comply with the law is also overlooked.
Gun Control is coming because it is Essential for the Government to Control the guns, just ask Comrade Mao tse Tung where power comes from.
If anyone is mentally incompetent, it is anti-gun crowd if they think taking guns from law-abiding Americans will stop crime.
On the other hand, I doubt seriously this is their reason.
It is, and always has been, about controlling the American people through whatever manner they think will work.