And Banning Firearms Will End the Shootings?

We have had a rash of violence with handguns as the weapon of choice. This has led many to call for some tighter control on firearms while not really considering that the problem might have more to do with some of the particular lost souls who use them for antisocial purposes. The problem with weapons all throughout history has not been their abilities to maim and murder but the ability for people of ill intent to apply them in a violent release of their twisted and vicious perceptions. Jack the Ripper did not even use the most lethal of weapons of his time; he simply used a blade on people over whom he had a physical advantage. Some of the worst murderers in all of history did not use a weapon at all, they used other people who enacted their evil and used some of the most horrific means to cull the presumed unwanted from among the population. Stalin starved hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians while Mao Tse Tung simply allowed millions of Chinese to starve due to his errors, assuming these events were a mistake. Caligula used the might of Rome to execute his insanities on innocent people. Could somebody explain with such knowledge any sane people could honestly claim that guns are what have caused the calamities we have witnessed lately. Equally to blame are the reports which are played hour in and hour out raising the perpetrators of these heinous crimes to a corrupted form of notoriety. Unfortunately, the same people who report these stories and posthumously give these perpetrators their moment in the light are the same people who are rallying the populace in the pogrom to blame guns for the horrendous events which they have been reporting on every half hour in every newscast.

We have been hearing the clarion call to once again ban those scary looking guns, those assault style weapons, those weapons that resemble outwardly military style weapons and all will once again be right with our society. Never mind that the Columbine High School massacre near Littleton, Colorado, was committed while the last Assault Weapons Ban was in effect. How in all that is holy could such a crime take place with the near perfect weapons ban was in place making such terrible events supposedly impossible? The reputed first ever murder where Cain murdered his brother Able and did so without a gun, a sword, a knife, or even a club, he used his own two hands. But now we can end evil, we can heal every sick mind, every wayward emotion will be rendered harmless simply by making certain weapons that some self-appointed authorities assure us will solve all of the problems and illnesses of our society and everyone after we take this one small step will live happily ever after. Of course history and simple experiences have proven that this promise is as empty as are all the arguments offered as the solution to such mass killings as we have experienced recently. Problems whose source is the human mind and the potential twists and corruptions which can afflict such minds will never be resolved by placing the blame on a tool and banning the tool. The problems of men can only be resolved through compassions and inventiveness of the rest of mankind.

Perhaps in the distant future there will be tools with which we can predict and help those people who have a predilection towards embracing and enacting such violence as these horrific mass murders but unfortunately today we cannot yet predict all such people. We might want to rethink the path we have embarked upon where we favor the placement of people with mental irregularities within the real world in the hope that being among those we consider normal will be affected in a positive way. Unfortunately, some of those that we place within our societies might not be better served to be kept separate and in a controlled environment. These repeated events where some of the most innocent among us pay the price for an experiment which we had no input or vote in instituting where we no longer have a special place for those who might potentially be dangerous and simply place them within the public and expect it to simply be just wonder bread and bubbles. Perhaps instead of banning certain weapons that make some people hold unbridled and unfathomable fear we should instead demand that the government and the medical community no longer use the public place for their experiments in treatment of those our society would very likely be safer with them not within our daily lives. Perhaps ending the use of asylums was one experiment we need to ban and leave the firearms alone.

Beyond the Cusp

Gun Ban Whiplash Coming from Anti-Gun Progressives

The sides are being drawn and the arguments built with a generous assist from the Progressive mainstream-media along with anti-gun, anti-freedoms and anti-right NGOs with full intent of doing compromising damage to the United States Constitution. Even the spate of recent shootings in malls and movie theaters before the horrid event at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut had not raised the ire and expectations of the anti-Second Amendment forces to the point where they had visions of making the United States just like much of Europe with strident anti-gun laws in addition to the other areas where it appears that Europe is the perfect model that our government is attempting to emulate. But with the death by the most vile and heinous actions by a deranged and sick mind beyond the ability of most people to grasp and get their mind around is now going to be utilized by people who almost appear delirious in their anticipation of an opportunity to finally force their weapons restrictions on the rest of the country almost standing on the corpses of these children. They have not even been placed in the ground and their eulogies given and the mourning begun to wane and these vultures are already swooping in and taking advantage of the raw emotions of the moment. This is nothing more than a sick and revulsive opportunism using the tragedy of twenty innocent young children having been gunned down by a young man with deep mental problems who experienced something in his life that triggered his violent and hideous acts that resulted in the carnage of which we have seen too many photos and now our raw emotions are being leveraged to pass laws before reason and normalcy returns allowing for rational, logical, fully thought out debate to be possible. This is pure exploitation of the deaths of these children and is a more ghoulish perversion of the national mourning than polite and respectful people would ever consider allowing, but these people are willing to use any serious crisis and refuse to allow such to ever be wasted.

If people want to make sure catastrophes and crisis such as what happened at the Sandy Hook Elementary School from ever reoccurring, banning guns will not suffice and it would be more effective and equally effective to outlaw severe anger. It would be more effective to incarcerate people who have a likelihood of turning violent due to mental disorders, especially if they go off their medications. But that is no longer an option thanks to many of the same Progressives who are now decrying this tragedy and demanding we ban firearms and have argued starting in 1955 and continuing to the present that the vast majority of those we consider to have some form of mental illness or instability would be better served if allowed to live within our society, as being isolated in an institution removed them from examples of normalcy, making their opportunity to find role models impossible. They brought psychiatrists, psychologists and numerous other “experts” to testify that closing the mental institutions and other such facilities and placing the patients from these places into society where they would find role models and have to learn to cope with reality. The legislators were told that the institutions only served to guarantee that those with mental illness and related difficulties if left in institutions would likely never be cured and thus we were doing a great disservice to these unfortunate people by leaving them in a situation that simply reinforced their conditions and disallowed for recovery. The idea was put forth that if we simply treated these people as outpatients they would continue to receive the same level of supervision and care as they would in a State institution and even in the majority of the private institutions and their living in the real world would restore them to a normalcy unavailable in the accursed institutions. As a result, since 1960 we have closed in excess of 80% of the houses and institutions which held the mentally ill, mentally challenged, and the absolute psychotics and others who suffered from some form of mental troubles of maladjustments.

Some of those who were returned to the real world and were just dropped into society ended up living with relatives or others who attended to them and made sure their medications were kept up and that they visited their counselor, psychiatrist, or other care professional on a regular basis and were present to note any changes in their behavior and could arrange additional care when necessary. Others ended up in less appropriate conditions including a number who ended up being homeless and off of their medications and fell through the cracks and were no longer monitored. This is currently getting worse as President Obama has the Department of Justice applying a strict interpretation of the  Supreme Court’s Olmstead decision forcing states to work with the Department of Health and Human Services to move even more patients from being institutionalized into outpatient treatment programs. Needless to say, not just allowing but forcing the deinstitutionalization of people with mental disabilities and the placement of them into the society in an attempt to give them a more encouraging setting that would allow for easing their transition into societal normalized lives will have some failures which can have disastrous consequences. But woe be the anti-firearms proponents to even mention that this could possibly be a contributing factor. It is not the troubled individual who is the problem to these fanatics; it is a half-pound of metal formed, cast, bored and machined without a brain or any compulsions of its own that grabs these mentally unbalanced people and drags them into a target rich environment and makes them shoot people randomly and even possibly repeatedly.

The final item is the locations that these shooting take place. They happen in schools, movie theaters, malls, and other places where absolutely nobody except officials of the state, sometimes referred to as police, are permitted to have a firearm on their person. These bans include even those who are licensed by the state to carry a concealed firearm in public and force them to become as unarmed as everybody else who decides to make use of these premises. For reasons that escape my limited abilities in logic; I have never ever heard of one of these shootings taking place at a gun store or a gun range. I wonder why that is?

Beyond the Cusp