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

Observations on the School Shooting in Connecticut

Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut was the scene of a horrific and senseless slaughter of twenty innocent children whose wonder and amazement of the world came crashing to a violent end. All their and their friends, parents, siblings and all who knew them hopes and dreams of what could be will now be unanswered and unfulfilled. My condolences go out to everybody affected by this vile, heinous and senseless violence wherever they may be found. The facts at the time of this writing are still woefully incomplete and still I feel I know all that is necessary to come to the realization that Newtown, Connecticut, the entire nation, and many around the world will never be quite the same after gaining knowledge of this wanton waste of innocent and precious lives. The news story is still in flux with the information changing with every update and unanswered questions still being added proving that at times the more information you get, the more questions there are to answer. Before this story will thankfully fade with time, though its effects will never completely dissipate, we will hear every possible reason and excuse for what happened. The young man, I am tempted to call him a monster and not a man, will likely be a troubled person on medications and this will be given as the mitigating factor. This will be used to place the blame on society, medical science, our lack of programs for those with mental difficulties, lack of sufficient supervision for people suffering from whatever ills drove this person’s actions and other such justifications, as if there can be any justification for such evil. This may be the sole use of the word “evil” you are likely to see as evil has become more of a four letter word than those that pepper so much of the entertainment mediums of today’s society. There will be numerous demands for restrictions of our freedoms and rights going forward all claiming to be reasonable demands if it saves a single life, and it is this direction I wish to explore.

 

Right up front I want to make clear that with almost universal application, none of the expert reasons and explanations are worth a thin dime and will be mostly long on educated language and terms that have important sound but mean little to most of us. The hosts interviewing the people who will be coming out of the woodwork will all nod and shake their heads knowingly as if they actually understand the theories and ‘eduspeak’ spouted by the experts. Some will blame the culture of guns in the United States, others the violence in the video games and entertainment of American society, still others the lack of sufficient numbers of people who deal with those with troubled lives and unhealthy mental states. There will be recommendations for gun control, more spending on social services for troubled people, placing police in every school or even every classroom, arming teachers after a training course, and anything from a catalog of subjects that can be imagined. All the solutions will require either the need for the surrender of rights by the population or a great additional expenditure by government making them inappropriate or ill-advised. Few will come up with suggestions which are workable in today’s world.

 

My suggestion is that perhaps we should look to what has been utilized in places where such threats have existed. The place I am thinking of went through a period of years where the main targets for violent attacks were the schools, the elementary schools being the preferred target. This was the situation in Israel for decades starting in the early 1960s. The Israelis found an affordable and innovative solution that eventually made such attacks so difficult that targeting moved on to other targets where people congregated. This eventually led to every business and institution becoming security conscious and employing armed guards who searched all containers including purses, bags, or any object that might contain a bomb or firearm. But initially, when the full extent of the problem was the targeting of the schools and the children attending classes, the Israelis applied an innovative solution. The Israeli solution was to have a special IDF unit provide special and targeted training for volunteers who were then allowed to guard the school of their preference. The people who made up this cadre of school armed guards were grandparents who volunteered to stand guard at the schools where their grandchildren were attending. This prevented numerous attempted terror attempts and soon ended the threat because those guarding the schools were highly motivated and well trained. Before anybody claims that such is insane let me explain that the IDF also screened the volunteers for mental and physical fitness to provide intelligent and proper security. What makes this use of retired and concerned people was not the idea of any government bureaucrat, no, not at all; it was initiated at the insistence of the grandparents who demanded the government allow them to guard and provide the safety that they did not expect the government to provide in a manner anywhere near as adequate as what these concerned volunteers knew they could provide. Perhaps the time will come in the United States when the people demand to be given the tools and training to make their schools and even the malls and movie theaters and all other public places susceptible to such attacks safe from the random violence from some disturbed person who managed to arm themselves. It is our society and our responsibility to safeguard the places from all evils, both carefully plotted in a sane and meticulous manner and the acts of an insane lunatic who goes off the deep end. If we the people are unwilling to take measures to assure our own safety, please do not depend on the government to provide such, just look at the past few weeks and realize this is the level the governments are willing to provide and we can do better.

 

Beyond the Cusp