Yet once again our country is faced with its absolute impotency when it comes to gun violence in our schools. The NRA’s highly bought politicians on the right are jumping through the same shrill, disingenuous hoops. We can all recite their lame responses:

Our thoughts and prayers…bla, bla, bla

Mental illness…bla, bla, bla

Now is not the time…bla, bla, bla

In this case, law x would not have prevented it…bla, bla, bla

Their faces tense with a well-rehearsed, pretentious crack for the nth time while they are all too happy keep funding their campaigns with NRA money. Have they no shame?

There is no factual doubt that gun control legislation works. We have only to look at the data, per capita gun death rates between Massachusetts, Connecticut and other states with stricter gun control laws and the more gun crazy, shoot-um up, anything goes states show indisputably that these laws make a difference (not to mention the radical difference in England with much more radical gun control laws).

For 2013, the 10 states with the highest firearm age-adjusted death rates were: Alaska (19.8), Louisiana (19.3), Mississippi (17.8), Alabama (17.6), Arkansas (16.8), Wyoming (16.7), Montana (16.7), Oklahoma (16.5), New Mexico (15.5) and Tennessee (15.4).

The 10 states with the lowest firearm age-adjusted death rates were, starting with the lowest: Hawaii (2.6), Massachusetts (3.1), New York (4.2), Connecticut (4.4), Rhode Island (5.3), New Jersey (5.7), New Hampshire (6.4), Minnesota (7.6), California (7.7) and Iowa (8.0). ¹

Only politicians, where facts don’t matter or money matters more, try to distract, defer and change the focus.

For example, the focus on mental health is one of the favorite cards they play with their losing hand. For no-touchy-feely folks they sure get that way about mass shootings. They see the perpetrators as victims themselves. Perhaps they are. However, when we address the issue of murderers we do not focus primarily on their unfortunate past.

Republicans are the first to tell us to build more prisons and lock them up. As a society we have decided that first and foremost murder should be against the law. We embody the deterrent of law and punishment first and foremost for the ‘crime’ of murder. We did not contemplate the psychological pathology of murderers before we made a law against murder. We made murder a crime and social conscience reinforced that law. There are still places in the world where murder does not offend the conscience.

We even have laws which go as far as to impose criminal liability on conspirators to murder. Yes, we can imprison mass gun murderers after the fact but let them buy mass quantities of weapons of war and ammunition without any effective deterrence and checks. Even further, these perpetrators find a positive relief from their woes with their socially sanctioned and blessed sacred AR-15 and massive magazines. So much so they brag about it on social media for years before they commit these atrocities. Conspirators for murder go to jail while braggarts with weapons or war are ignored.

What is more, when it comes to mass murderers with guns we seek to address their woes with mental health solutions to prevent future occurrences. First, this presupposes that enough money could be spent on programs to reorient these future offenders if we could identify them. Second, it is up to the therapists if they want to report a serious threat to law enforcement. As with client-attorney privilege, priests and confessional, patients and medical professionals there is a legal right to privileged protection and it is up to personal discretion whether or not to report a possible perpetrator. And, of course, there is the financial incentive in the case of ongoing psychological treatment. So, this is the right’s answer to prevention-not stricter gun laws which have been shown to reduce NOT eliminate gun violence and mass murder. Effectively, we send the ‘soft’ message in our response to these tragic events that mental health is key, not gun control.

If the Republicans really gave a damn about guns and mental illness, why did Trump sign a bill revoking an Obama regulation that made it harder for people with mental illness to buy a gun? ² Additionally, Trump has proposed cutting 1 trillion dollars from Medicaid.

Trump has proposed cutting Medicaid subsidies by more than $1 trillion. More than 25% of non-elderly adults with severe mental illness received medical coverage through Medicaid in 2015, according to a report from the Kaiser Family Foundation. ³

Why don’t we make the background checks bullet proof including gun shows? Why don’t we fine and imprison those who do not lock up their guns when not in use in legitimate pursuits. We fine people that do not wear seatbelts. Why don’t we have a national registry of gun owners? Why are we so afraid to infringe on gun owner’s unabated rights or make it harder for them in any way to acquire and maintain a militia of weapons until their financial credit runs out?

The answer is twofold: First, we have a whole segment of society that has been brainwashed to distrust the government while they are all too willing to trust Fox News. Second, we have made guns more than simply implements of hunting or target shooting. We have made them into a symbol of power and male virility. We have made them a totem in Freud’s terms not a taboo.

Let’s take the case of MADD-Mothers Against Drunk Driving. I was never crazy about the group that seemed to me to start initially as a right-wing group but I have to admit there was a lackadaisical attitude toward drunk driving before they came along and through a concerted grass root effort they changed laws from the most regional to the national level with much stricter laws, fines, imprisonment for driving drunk. They did not tell us the drunk drivers need detox and therapy. Nor did they ban alcohol. They made it known through law and deterrence that it was not ok to drink and drive. More importantly, they made it a social taboo for people to drink and drive. No one told them that increasing the laws and penalties would not stop all drunk driving so why make the laws. They made something that many folks treated with a caviler conscience into a common sense, conscience violating behavior.

In the case of guns and mass murder we have not taken this tact. We are afraid to offend gun owners and have conjured up a whole bunch of rationalizations (bought and paid for by the gun industry) like historically recent Supreme Court decisions which counter the previous history of the Second Amendment.

The NRA has been around for a long time. It used to be an organization that focused on hunters and on training. In 1977, at the NRA’s annual meeting, activists pushed out the leadership and installed new leaders who were very intense, very dogmatic, and very focused on the Second Amendment as their cause. It was called the “Revolt at Cincinnati.” From there, the NRA and its allies waged a 30-year legal campaign to change the way the courts and the country saw the Second Amendment. And they started with scholarship. They supported a lot of scholars and law professors. They elected politicians. They changed the positions of agencies of government. They got the Justice Department to reverse its position on what the amendment meant. And then and only then did they go to court. So by the time the Supreme Court ruled, it sort felt like a ripe apple from the tree. ⁴

We have made gun ownership into a badge of unabated honor which must be absolutely guarded at any cost. Reason, facts and common sense can have no thread of a chance to succeed against such a sacred truth. In short, we have made drunk driving, with regard to guns, an absolute and constitutionally protected pride of every red blooded American drinker. How dare we impose any restrictions on the free right of every American to drink. If they drink and kill people we get them treatment for abusing their privilege. We ask them politely not to drink and drive even after statistically significant fatal car wrecks caused by too much alcohol consumption. For politicians that are generally trained as lawyers, you would think they would know not to make stupid fallacious arguments. To suggest that making the levels for intoxication lower would not have prevented a particular accident so therefore, we should not make the law is the height of lunacy and deceit. The idea is not to stop every drunk driver but to make an impact on some drunk drivers.

I don’t care if baseball bats were the statistical choice for mass killings, it would be simple sense to make baseball bats harder to use for devious purposes. The point is not to eliminate baseball but to make sure we as a society do not sanction, condone, look the other way when baseball bats are massively abused. I am so sick of hearing the stupid fallacy that since we cannot eliminate all gun deaths by laws and severe deterrence we should simply give up. We have a serious problem and bought and paid for Republicans have no answer. Only when we recognize that and quit electing them will we have a chance to crawl out of this tragic quagmire. Whether they accept responsibility for their indolence or not we as voters must accept the ultimate responsibility for this anemic and inadequate avoidance which kills kids by far more than all the terrorists attacks on American soil have ever done.

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^{Note 1}
Gun Laws, Deaths and Crimes
^{Note 2}
Trump Signs Bill Revoking Obama-Era Gun Checks for People With Mental Illnesses
^{Note 3}
Donald Trump Blamed the Florida School Shooting on Mental Illness. Here’s What He’s Done on the Issue
^{Note 4}
The Second Amendment Doesn’t Say What You Think It Does
This is an interview with the author of “The History of the Second Amendment: A Biography” by Michael Waldman. This book is a very good read. It is thorough and will give you a real sense of the history of the 2^nd Amendment instead of the Fox News, NRA sponsored cliff notes we have come to assume. At Amazon the hard cover is here:
The Second Amendment: A Biography

Thoughts and Prayers Funded by the NRA…

Targeted Candidates, 2016 Cycle

2014 Election of Corey Gardner

Targeted Candidates, 2014 Cycle