Win-Win for the NRA

I'm not really impressed with our dysfunctional Congress slowly coming around to background checks for gun purchases.  For one thing, it's nowhere near enough to change the tragic increase in gun violence.  For another thing, this is going to likely be an attack on that catchall  category of people we call the "mentally ill."

The shooter at Sandy Hook took one of his mother's guns.  Now, call me cynical but a woman who has had some problems with the school but maintains what sounds like an armory maybe was a contributing factor in this tragedy.  After all, she did take her mentally ill son out to target practice as a way of attempting to bond.  Either way, she would not have been affected by a background check law.

The Aurora shooter had apparently stolen a gun from a friend or acquaintance.

The Tucson shooter was allowed to buy a gun because his name did not appear when a background check was performed, although he had been suspended from college due to "mental health problems."

And this is where the right to own a semi-automatic weapon smacks into the right to be mentally ill.

Most people who are mentally ill, even those who are suspended from colleges, are not going to go on a shooting rampage.  Their right to private medical records is being trashed so that we can continue to buy and sell assault weapons.

In a country that does not want to pay for mental health care, we are now branding a very large and diffuse group who also have constitutional rights.

And the reason has nothing to do with the right to bear arms.  It has to do with the right of arms manufacturers to increase their profits.

And let's make no mistake about the NRA's position here.  The NRA has no particular need to be rational, much less compromise.  If the idiots in Congress can be hooked into supporting having armed guards in schools, that's easy profit for the NRA's constituency, the arms manufacturers.  To hell with the deficit, war is war.  And if we don't get armed guards, it doesn't matter.  Because every time Wayne LaPierre or Lindsey Graham open their mouths about the Second Amendment, that small percentage of paranoid individuals who own all the guns in the country just head on out and buy a few more weapons, and a lot more ammunition.

So it's a win-win for the NRA and for our gun industry.

But I would like to get back to the slippery slope of identifying who is mentally ill.  If you are going to keep arms out of the hands of irrational and aggressive people, we need to look at some of the crazier statements made by some with power and celebrity.

We have Senator Graham bragging on how fast he can reload as an argument against limiting gun capacity.

And then there is Louis Gohmert who equates gun deaths with death by hammer.

Of course, there is Wayne "bad guy with a gun" LaPierre, whose vision for American is one of everybody locked and loaded.

Please don't forget Alex Jones, who turns apoplectic at the thought of someone taking his gun.

There's a very large leap when you decide to add the mentally ill to the NICS Index.  It's a fact that the dangerous mentally ill walk among us.  It's also a fact that they have the right to privacy.  They have the right to not take meds or get into therapy.  And, in fact, it is more likely that the dangerous mentally ill will be far harder to identify than those who are not dangerous.  So background checks will either be useless or a witch hunt.  Or both.

Now doesn't it make far more sense to take assault weapons off the streets?

Identifying the Killers

Let's not talk about the stupid stuff, like how Martin Luther King, Jr., would have promoted the freedom to carry guns, and black people would not have been slaves had they had guns.  Or dumb as a hammer Louis Gohmert's contention that more people are murdered by hammers than guns, so if anything gets outlawed it should be hammers.  And let's not visit Wayne LaPierre's fictional neighborhood, where the only defense against bad guys with guns is good guys with guns.

Instead, let's talk about how to identify shooters and keep the guns out of their hands.

Can't be done.

For example, in the most horrific instance of gun violence where twenty six-year-old children were killed, the shooter did not own the guns.  The assault weapons belonged to his mother, who was presumably sane and had not ever assaulted another person.  Had the guns been outlawed, she would not have had them.

Training sights on the mentally ill rather than the ability to obtain assault weapons will not lead to less gun violence.  In fact, our ability to identify those with homicidal tendencies is just plain awful.  The better the psychopath, as with Columbine killer Eric Harris, the better they are at masking their ideation.

The craziest looking people will not ever attempt to assault another human being, although their language may lead us to believe they are dangerous.

And all too often, the most dangerous people are untouchable, with special interest groups like the NRA protecting their right to bear arms.

If we were to attempt to keep guns away from those who appear the most dangerous, this guy would be number one on my list:

Too Much Moderation

Over the past weeks since the killing of twenty children in Newtown, I have heard crazy people demand and threaten over their right to bear arms.  Talk show host Alex Jones yelled, "1776 will commence again."  While he was raging against attempts to legislate his right to bear arms, he was also organizing a petition to have Piers Morgan deported because he spoke in favor of strict gun control laws.  So apparently freedom to carry weapons trumps freedom of speech.  Unless it's the guy with the guns who's speaking.

Wayne LaPierre, NRA crazy man with the inoffensive name, will brook absolutely no compromise, under any circumstance.  Rather, he proposes armed guards and watch lists of the mentally ill, whose freedom also appears not to matter.  If you drive a car you need a driver's license, but it is an act against freedom to require a gun owner to be licensed and on record.

According to a blistering Daily Show report, in 2007 Kansas Congressman Todd Tiahrt declared that we don't need any more protection from guns because the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was on it 24/7.  That's the Todd Tiahrt who rammed through measures preventing ATF from monitoring or enforcing gun laws.  Oh, and the bill had the stamp of approval from the NRA.

While the anti-gun-control nuts are writhing and screeching, the parents of the murdered children are "urging" discussions about gun safety.

This may seem to be deja vu all over again, what with the right-wing-nuts driving the health care debate, making truly sensible, affordable health care impossible in this country.

And it would be hard not to point out that the side that is screaming about losing the freedom to carry a gun any-damn-where it wants is pretty often the side that feels the need to protect a women's fertilized egg from the women carrying it.

My point is that it is disheartening that the two most powerful components of the gun debate are the monied and the crazy.  With the NRA -- the lobby of the arms industry -- fueling the paranoid, it becomes ever harder for the reasoned and moderate voices to weigh in.  Leaving us with inadequate legislation and enforcement, and more deaths ready to be toted up.