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?

What He Said

While I was taking a much needed break from writing about the tragedy of gun deaths and the comedy of Congress, Douglas Anthony Cooper wrote a much better article than I was planning on writing about the NRA and mental health.

As you know, it took the great minds at the NRA only one week of seclusion to come up with a plan to make gravy out of the blood from the shooting of children in Newtown.  As I write that last sentence I feel dirty, but I am truly trying to reflect what is going on in the evil bastion that is the NRA.

Anyway, what they came up with is a two-pronged approach to the problem of innocents getting murdered by guns:  more guns, and target the mentally ill.

Lest they sound callous, and NRA Executive Vice-President Wayne LaPierre did indeed take that tone in his first crawling out from under the rock speech one week after the shooting, the NRA wants us to believe that they are simply speaking out of concern for future victims of gun violence.  How can you not agree with the catchy, "...only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."  Took him a week to come up with that, it did.

This whole focus on the mentally ill seemed to me such an apparent diversionary technique that I was put off whenever some panel on MSNBC started to talk about the mentally ill. Nice to know that there is a term for this, as per Cooper:

Trolling has become subtle, and one of the more elegant methods of subverting debate is "concern trolling." This is where you pretend to be deeply concerned about something that concerns you not in the slightest, so that you can undermine the conversation, derail it, and ultimately destroy it.

In my past life as a psychologist in a Long Island High School, I worked with a staff that was extremely tuned in to the students, and students who very much trusted the teaching and guidance staff.  So, over three years, I met with the most depressed, anxious, troubled students in the school.  There are some things you need to understand about mental illness:

1.  It is a really obscene catch-all phrase, that actually means nothing.

2.  Most of us, even in 2013, are unnerved by the thought that someone may be "mentally ill" and will do anything possible to avoid admitting that someone they know has a "mental illness."

3.  Especially when it's themselves.

Here's something that that idiot LaPierre may not know:  the more disturbed a person is, the less likely they are to be willing to seek help, the more difficult it is to be helped, and the fewer resources are available.  It also affects the way people will treat you, and your ability to live a productive life, even if you are capable of being totally functional and productive.

There's another part of this "mentally ill" issue.  Those who are depressed, psychotic, anxious, while they may be the ones who might seek help, or be referred for help, are in fact not the ones who are most likely to plot and follow through a massacre.

As Dave Cullen described in his really well-researched book about the Columbine shooting, the actual brains behind the massacre was a psychopath.  Psychopaths don't get better. They are very likely to be well disguised from authorities, and when caught, can seem to respond to treatment, while merely learning how to play the game.  Cullen describes how, when the pair who would commit the shooting were caught in a theft and referred to a treatment program, it was the depressed boy who was deemed to have benefited less from the therapy, while the psychopathic partner played the therapist and was touted as a stunning success.

The book The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, is a fascinating look at attempts to identify and treat psychopaths, with a focus on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist devised by Dr. Robert Hare, who is mentioned in the Cooper article.  Interestingly, a psychopath is more likely to make a killing at Goldman-Sachs than with a semi-automatic.  Or head up the NRA.

So what does all this mean?  It means that we can let Wayne LaPierre lead us around with promises to teach teachers how to use guns in order to be safe, and lull us into believing that all we need to do is find the mentally ill and we won't have a gun problem.  Or we can recognize the reality that identifying and treating the mentally ill will never be something that will be easy or inexpensive, and even though we should  be doing it, it will not solve the problem of gun violence.

The most effective way to reduce gun violence is to reduce the number of guns -- and to remove assault weapons from circulation altogether.