Still Too Soon...

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.

The Time for Racism Is Nearly Over, Now Get Ready for Misogyny

You know it's hard to make my head spin these days.  But that it did when I heard that Wayne LaPierre, hypocrite and warmonger extraordinaire, said the following at the NRA's national convention:

"Eight years of one demographically symbolic president is enough."

Since the quote made it internationally, it appeared I wasn't the only one who noted that Mr. LaPierre had outdone himself in the categories of ignorance and gall.  The demographically symbolic head of the NRA -- old, white male -- must have chosen his words carefully, so that most of those hearing the speech would cheer at the attack on both current and potentially future presidents without really understanding just how over-the-top it was.  That's our Wayne, too smart for the common folk.

But those who really heard the words, and thanks to New York Times reporter Nick Corasaniti who tweeted them, are no doubt still considering their significance.

As we talk about racism and continue to politely ignore misogyny, it is just astounding that LaPierre would be so blatant.  Not too many steps removed, in fact, from using the words "nigger" and "bitch."  Which I imagine he feels free to use in a smaller room.

Is this election season going to be one where overt hatred of women is going to be allowed and accepted the way the not-too-veiled birth certificate "controversy" was part of the anti-Obama rhetoric?  While reporters are chasing Hillary around and debating the correctness of her lunch choice, will anyone address the sexism that is already flying?  Will we allow through our silence jackasses like Wayne LaPierre to disqualify Clinton by virtue of her sex?  Will we be silent when ugly comments and photos circulate social media?  Or will we start shouting in outrage?

Because with LaPierre's crack, we should already be shouting.  It's not going to get any better.  Hillary can handle it; she's been proving that for decades.  But we as a country cannot.

Giving Them What They Want

I just heard Dave Cullen, the author of the exhaustive analysis of the Columbine shooting, make an excellent suggestion in reference to the Washington Navy Yard shooting on Monday.  He said that he has made a point of not referring to shooters by name.  Those who have been responsible for mass shootings are seeking notoriety.  When the media reports with familiarity on these killers, referring to them by name, showing photos, interviewing their family members, they are fueling the next one.

The reaction to Monday's shooting, given all that has happened -- and not happened -- since children were murdered in Newtown last December disgusts me.  The first bit that I heard on C-Span of all places was congressional tweets expressing their sympathy for the families of the dead.  The first one listed was Senator Ted Cruz.  I'm sure the very next thing he did was ring up the NRA to assure Wayne LaPierre that he will take this opportunity to re-energize his fight to arm every American.

Gun-totin' Senator Lindsey Graham rang in his support for gun rights, saying that we need to focus our efforts on mental health legislation.  This is the guy who wants to defund Obamacare.  I'm assuming that by mental health legislation he is talking about keeping data banks of anyone who has been hospitalized or imprisoned, and tracking their movements, as opposed to actually treating troubled people.

I would like to applaud Dave Cullen for his thoughts about the media not feeding the appetites of potential future killers.  And I would like to take the proposal another step further.

I don't believe we should allow a mass shooting to become a forum for assholes like Wayne LaPierre, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham.  It is apparent that false words of sympathy are followed by words intending to incite fear and anger in those who cling to their guns.  With each shooting, they are able to play their followers like a fiddle -- or should I say, an AR-15.

So let's tell the media to stop showing Facebook photos of shooters, talking about their friends, interviewing a weeping mom.  And let's tell the media to stop for god's sake inviting Wayne LaPierre to interviews, and to stop printing quotes by right wing-nuts who are trying to stay in office by fueling their rabid base.

This morning I heard the sounds in my rural neighborhood that I hear whenever we have a shooting tragedy.  It was the sound of someone shooting.  Getting ready for the next bad guy with a gun.  And that ka-ching you are hearing is the sound of the money being made by the arms manufacturers, the NRA, and right-wing politicians.

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?

Why "The Right Is Winning"

I'm listening to commentators on the news shows talking about why we aren't winning the battle for gun control.  You probably wouldn't want to hear what I have to say back to each of them.  I have recently heard that Obama is not involved enough, Obama is too involved, the American people are not passionate enough, the American people are not involved enough, there is too much NRA money to fight them.  And on and on and on.

It's all bullshit.

The difference is that we're all wringing our hands and worrying why no one is listening.  Can you imagine Wayne LaPierre worrying about the fact that people think he is corrupt, or crazy, or the NRA being concerned that the public will reject its latest scheme?  Or any of the idiots in Congress, like our own Lindsey Graham, worrying about anything of moral value or the consequences of not controlling guns.

The radical, psychotic, greedy, narcissistic and single minded supporters of ABSOLUTELY NO GUN CONTROL aren't worried.  They are angry, they are wealthy, and they know how to manipulate.  And being rational is not on their agenda.

I keep hearing the whining and the droning of the rational who "support" gun control trying to find ways of working around and working with the gun lobby.  I hear people make excuses for red state Democrats in Congress.  Maybe if we had more people showing up at the Capitol.

Perhaps if we only required background checks on Tuesdays.  Hey, it would be better than not having them at all.

Meanwhile we are giving credence to the NRA proposing to arm teachers.  I don't know about you, but there are some teachers I recall from my children's school days that would have been right in the front of the line to get armed, and would be the last I would want carrying in the same building as my children.  And let's not forget that many teachers do not want to have to be responsible for fighting a crazed gunman to the death.  Oh, and how about the fact that none of those same people that are going to arm our schools have wanted to pay what it's worth to educate our kids.

And then there are guns in shopping malls, and on the street, and in a movie theater.  But hey, you can always arm the kid that takes your theater ticket.

Are we NUTS?  Isn't it time that we stopped trying to compromise with the lobby of gun manufacturers and paranoid white supremacists?  No, I don't think your quality of life would suffer if you had to go to a gun range to play with your semi-automatic.  And it would be a lot less risky than trying to figure out who is gun-violence crazy versus who is just mentally ill.

I don't want guns on the streets I walk, or the schools our children attend.  I don't want to for God's sake sit in a bar or go into a liquor store knowing our legislators have fought to give people the right to mix bullets and alcohol.

Enough.  No compromise.  And don't worry about Harry Reid flaking out, or what the southern Democrats need to support gun control.  Just keep yelling.

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. 

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. 

Turning Blood into Dollars

I didn't think for a minute that the NRA silence last week meant that they were worried.  True to form, they came out from under their rock with balls blazing.

As you've probably heard, NRA's evil spokesperson, Wayne LaPierre, stunned us all on Friday by taking absolutely no responsibility for the shooting of 20 children by assault weapon one week earlier.  Rather, he suggested we keep files on the mentally ill, and arm everybody else.

This is only clever in the sense that it worked.  The NRA was able to not only take back the debate with a vengeance, but round up in support every single paranoid gun wacko in the country.  AND, most important, provide a huge new market for the gun manufacturers that are the NRA's true constituency:  arming the schools.

Gun shops are doing a booming business, and the media isn't waiting to get on board.  The NBC Nightly News was happy to present a segment on how several schools are arming themselves and feeling relieved that their children are now being protected.

The NRA has stated that -- as a public service -- they will be more than happy to advise us on how best to arm our teachers and children.  Yes, they will help us find training programs for our children.

The saddest things about all this is that, the wackos may be far fewer than those of us who want to keep our children safe by outlawing weapons that might kill them, but the wacko faction is far louder.  They will be heard, and, as with the nuts that fell off the trees to attend the Health Care Town Halls a couple of summers ago, they will be showing up to fight for the right to bear arms.  The media will report it back to us, and they will drown out the moderate voices that are trying to find reasonable solutions.

My own local gun store:

is usually a quiet place, but over the past week, the parking lot has been full.  Folks out here aren't even going to wait for the next tax-free gun holiday.

And the NRA?  They're about as tickled as Chick-Fil-A last summer when all the gay bashers lined up to show their support for this good Christian organization.

Me, I just hope there are enough people that can hold onto their rage over our children and their teachers risking their lives so that Bubba can carry his erectile extender around.

All we have is words, BUT WE NEED TO SHOUT THEM OUT.