Biden promises to go after attack weapons in the new year, while the GOP announces that it will go after Hunter Biden. Let’s see, which is highest on your agenda? Do you really believe that Joe’s useless son has more of an impact on the American scene than automatic weapons that are killing hundreds of Americans all over the country? If you do, maybe you should paint yourself red and go sit on Marjorie Taylor Green’s lap.
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Why does an American citizen who plans no criminal action need or want an automatic weapon? Does it make him feel more like a man to hold that much death in his hands? As someone who has been registered as an FFL (Federal Firearms Licensee) and dealt in weapons, mostly for the film industry, I can’t begin to answer that question. Guns are a tool. Given the right circumstances guns can be fun. Guns can be protection if the owner has the skill set to use them correctly.
But none of it adds up to the need for any individual to own an automatic weapon, unless of course, they plan to shoot up a nightclub or a church, or maybe even a school.
Of the over forty-thousand-gun deaths in this country last year, more than twenty thousand were suicides, which points to the fact that the biggest part of the problem involves mental health.
And while that’s certainly true, no matter how crazy an individual is, they can’t kill multiple victims if they don’t have an automatic weapon. The weapon is the proximate cause of multiple deaths, but the real cause seems to be a complete failure of our mental health system.
I keep hearing that other countries handle mental health much better than we do. That wouldn’t be very difficult. Even though our system appears to be ass-deep in shrinks, our streets are crawling with crazies, and we don’t seem to do much about it. This is particularly egregious in the homeless community, but it also shows up bigtime among the gun nuts. You can have as long of a waiting period as you want, but unless the guy who has just applied for a gun permit is drooling all over the table and shouting how he’s “gonna get them all” he will get that permit and buy his AR-15 and you’ll probably read about him the next week.
The problem is we are a free country, and we like it that way. We don’t want people telling us what we can and can’t do, and that especially includes who we can shoot.
Our whole legal system is set up to protect people from being responsible for anything right up to an actual killing. So, an individual must act far beyond crazy before the police can take him off the streets and that usually means dead bodies.
When I was a kid, we had facilities for those who demonstrated anti-social tendencies. The problem was that they were often filled with people who had been placed there by those who were too fast on the accusation. They were also horribly run, so after a couple of them made the headlines, they were closed, and this started a run on all of them. Now we send them home where they can lay back, relax, and load their guns.
***** And while we’re on mental illness and crime, we discover that NYC’s Mayor Adams is pushing to implement new legislation that will allow police to remove the homeless from the streets if it appears that the are creating a danger to themselves or others. One ort of Adams proposal is that hospitals must create plans for continuing treatment of those patients under their care before permitting them to leave. Of course, even at the mention of such an idea we can hear the far left exploding: “Even the insane have rights!”
Of course, they do! But so does the innocent bystander who finds himself lying on the subway tracks after some sick individual exercises his supposed rights and pushed him off the platform.
Ever since NY closed its mental hospitals, leaving all the patients to shift for themselves on the streets of wherever they happened to be at the time, we have had chaos. Willowbrook was the prime mover of a disaster in politics and mental health that is probably unmatched anywhere in the civilized world. Institutions all over the state just opened their doors and pushed the patients out onto the streets, leaving hem to set up housekeeping in the local town squares. The patients had neither the capacity for leadership nor the financial ability to do anything else. So, they sat in small-town squares in all kinds of weather and medicine was delivered to them with no oversight as to whether or not they took it, and they were preyed upon by every kind of scumbag imaginable, just as they are now on the streets of every city in the country.
Yes, the mentally ill have rights, but the first right that must be recognized is to treatment, regardless of whether they understand they need it or not. If we don’t recognize that right over their right to decision make with limited capacity, we are taking away all the other rights of the mentally ill and those upon whom they may prey. And that’s where you must consider the rest of society. People who must climb over snoring hulks to get into their buildings don’t think of it as a “small” intrusion on their rights, and those who have to morn a relative pushed in front of an “A” Train are forced to deal with their lives being torn apart.
The failure to deal with this problem for so many decades is nothing but political and medical malfesence. Maybe, just maybe, we finally have a mayor with the stones to do the right thing.
, *****
In the aftermath of the conviction of two leaders of the Oath Keepers for sedition the interrogation of Stephan Miller sure points to the plan to link Trump and his gang to the actual physical invaders of the capitol. Miller is the unknown sleaze who jumped from the bottom of the toilet to the top of the shitheap by giving Donald Trump all the wrong advice on the plan to become a dictator.
What Miller’s stint in front of the investigating committee seems to confirm is, the government believes Trump actively led the hate groups into the invasion of the capitol and it is time to get the proof and put the traitors in jail.
Now that the convictions of the Oath Keepers are in the books, this can be accomplished by showing potential witnesses that jurors are willing, if not anxious, to put the people who tried to kill our democracy in jail.
With the willingness of jurors to convict now established, prosecutors can sit a Miller down and say, “There’s a jail cell in your future. But we can mitigate things a little if you tell us what we need to hear.” Miller and the like will listen, if only because they have seen this coming, and that brings the reality of a jail cell to the doorstep of Mar-a-Lago.