Since the church massacre in Charleston, committed by a paranoid psychotic young man with a weapon he should never have had, I have been stunned, and then disgusted, and now enraged. In attempting to do some cursory research for this post, I found that there is absolutely nothing I can say that hasn't already been said. The same clowns and NRA puppets are coming out and saying the same things they said after the movie theater shooting in Aurora, after the massacre of children in Newtown, after each and every obscene mass murder in our country since Columbine. When that asshole Mark Sanford was asked about gun control on MSNBC on Thursday, he said, "I think it's premature. I think that advocates on both sides of the gun debate will use this tragedy to make their case." He called it a "tug-of-war, if you will, that goes with the world of politics." I wish I could just say what I am thinking, but the string of obscenities that come to mind just don't advance my position on this, so I won't. Although obscenity would certainly be warranted in response to the obscenity of Sanford's bullshit. Fact is, as usual, Sanford is not saying anything new. I am sure that since Wednesday the NRA has been in high gear, reaching out to all its politicians in South Carolina and the rest of the country, soothing raw nerves, giving Nikki Haley a figurative tissue to dry her eyes. I'm not sure she was choked up over the tragedy, or over "the humility" she was seeing. A normal human being might consider that she had been wrong about her staunch advocacy over gun rights; after her all too recent prayer day, she might even wonder if God was trying to tell her something. But what will come out of this, after she congratulates herself on being there for the families of the victims, is more certainty that what we need is more law and order, as well as more guns. Just like her buddies at the NRA want her to believe. It's appalling -- appalling doesn't even approach the word I am trying to convey -- that these protectors of the weapons can pretend to be protectors of the people. The NRA bullshit spouted by Lindsey Graham about a mother needing a high capacity gun to defend her children, the bullshit by Wayne LaPierre that has been parroted by all our gun-totin', NRA worshipping officials:
This morning The Onion did an angry and ironic spoof, not of the violence, but of the NRA's Charles Cotton who was front and center telling us why we should not cause this tragedy to infringe on our constitutional rights. In the words of The Onion: “While we mourn those killed, we should never let an incident like this distract from our defense of [the fact that I myself am a pile of human waste who is fundamentally incapable of responding to the deaths of innocent people without raw, putrid sewage gushing from my mouth].” And keep your eyes on Lindsey Graham, who is now saying that the reason this happened is the failure of the national background check system. I wonder why the system failed... maybe it's because the last time it was up for debate in Congress people like Lindsey Graham played politics with it, hoping to slip in some nasty amendments and maybe water down the language. It seems to me that basically what Graham wanted to do was track people who were mentally ill, and under no circumstances allow universal background checks. If there was money involved here, I would say keep your hand on your wallet. But it's only about money for the NRA. They are again twisting this tragedy around to promote the kind of fear that actually armed people like the young man who committed this horrendous crime. After Aurora, it took the NRA about a week to come up with the line that it is too soon after the tragedy to debate gun control. By the time of the Newtown massacre, they were armed and ready, successfully convincing politicians and too many of the fearful public that what was needed was more guns, not less. And the taste of success was green and gold. Billions of dollars were made by the arms industry from the blood of innocent and fearful Americans. So now the lines are well rehearsed. The NRA has actually, as spoofed by The Onion, assigned blame to pastor and state senator Clementa Pinckney for failing to support bills that would allow people to carry guns in churches. While Charleston mourns the tragedy, Nikki Haley has come out armed and ready for revenge, saying that the gunman deserves the death penalty. I don't know what god she prayed to last weekend, but it was not the one that was being studied at the Emanuel AME Church on Wednesday.
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?
