Mental Health Wake Up
POST 1099
CAUTION! THIS IS NOT SNARK
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Ugly Truth
We all know it’s a mental health thing, right? I mean, who but a mentally sick person would kill two kids and two teachers and wound 9 others? Who but a wacko dad would give an assault rifle to his mentally messed up 14-year-old kid?
“You don’t have to have been physically injured in this to be a victim,” District Attorney Brad Smith said outside the Barrow County [Georgia] courthouse. “Everyone in this community is a victim. Every child in that school was a victim.”
Who but someone deranged would blast away 20 first graders at Sandy Hook Elementary School? Or get bump stocks for his combat weapons, so he could fire over 1,000 bullets into concert attendees in just 10 minutes? He murdered 59 people and wounded at least 700 more at the Music Festival in Las Vegas.
They would be incoming freshmen right now. Thanks go to JN for this banner.
How crazy would someone have to be to massacre 17 kids at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School (Parkland), or murder sabbath service attendees at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh or kill grannies shopping at Topps Supermarket in Buffalo or murder the bible study people at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston or the County Environmental Health and Public Health employees in San Bernardino? Something must be mentally wrong with a person who would do such things.
And there’s plenty more insanity.
The political slaves to campaign contributions from the big bucks firearms industry will only admit that our daily slaughters can be blamed on mental health. Surely, they say, there’s no connection to our insane interpretation of the Second Amendment that allows combat weapons to be in the hands of anyone with the strength to lift one. But that excuse is insane. It’s a lie and they know it. We know it.
We are by far the world’s leader in firearms homicides and it isn’t because our kids watch more violent video games or because we are more mentally deranged than people in other countries or because we make and watch more violent movies. There’s just one reason:
We have more firearms per capita than any other nation on Earth – 120 of them per 100 Americans, including babies. That’s double the rate of the next most gun crazy country.
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It’s murderously easy to get a gun and am
munition. And that’s why we’re Number 1 in murders.
Are we massively mentally deranged, suffering from various violent behavioral anomalies, disorders, psychoses and apathy, too? Of course we are.
We’d have to be mentally ill to continue to elect people who will not do what 80% of us send them to office to do, like pass tough, common sense gun safety legislation. But we keep sending murder weapon enablers to Congress. It’s the very definition of insanity.
Of course we’re crazy, as we gasp at the atrocities and see the faces of the shell shocked survivors who will forever suffer from their trauma. But then we do nothing to stop the next shooting. That’s insane.
We ignore the paralyzing, knee collapsing shock that assaults our first responders who are first to the bloody crime scenes and have to face the horrid truth of the massacres and pick up what is left of those slaughtered. Then we move on and let those heroes fend for themselves. That’s insane.
And we ignore that our flag waving politicians have voted to further de-fund our mental health facilities. That’s insane.
Yeah, we have a mental health problem. It’s us.
Solutions
The Second Amendment is:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The reason for the amendment is spelled out in the first 13 words. It was included in the Constitution to placate southern enslavers who feared a slave uprising. That got Southern states to vote to adopt the Constitution. But the need for protection against a slave uprising no longer exists and it hasn’t since the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865.
Those 13 words call for not just any militia, but a well regulated militia. That means a force of trained troops under the command of a regulating authority. We have that. It’s our National Guard and every state has one. We have no need for vigilante militias or vengeance seeking wackos. So, second Amendment enthusiasts and the gun industry conveniently ignore all 13 words, focusing only on the last 14.
Those 14 words tell us that We The People may keep and bear arms, meaning firearms. In the Founders’ time there were only flintlock pistols and muskets. They didn’t have semi-automatic pistols or AR-15s or bump stocks or large capacity magazines. The right to keep and bear arms guaranteed by the Second Amendment applied to muskets.
So, let’s be strict originalists, just as our extremist right wing Supreme Court justices think of themselves. Let’s change our understanding of the Second Amendment to mean exactly what the Founders meant.
American citizens may keep and bear all the musket ball firing flintlock pistols and long guns they want. And those are the only firearms that we originalists should allow.
Muskets have a repeat firing rate of possibly one ball fired every 30 seconds. If the Las Vegas shooter had used a musket instead of his bump stock-modified AR-15 he could have harmed only about 20 people in his 10 minutes of carnage, instead of over 750.
For our gun myopians:
- The Second Amendment wasn’t about showing what a tough guy you are, taking your AR-15 to Starbucks or to a bar or to polling places to intimidate voters, so don’t do that insane thing.
- Put trigger locks on your firearms and lock them up unloaded so that your aggrieved kid can’t grab them and kill other kids at his school, like that deranged 14-year-old kid at Apalachee High School in Georgia did last week. Same for the shooters at Sandy Hook, Parkland and Uvalde.
- Try being a good dad instead of a pretend soldier with a warped notion of patriotism. And get into therapy that focuses on anger management.
Wake Up
This is a wake up call to all of us to elect representatives who will do what We The People want them to do. Doing anything less is insane.
Wake up.
Are you registered to vote? Check it out here:
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https://www.vote.org/am-i-registered-to-vote/
https://www.usa.gov/confirm-voter-registration
https://www.rockthevote.org/how-to-vote/am-i-registered-to-vote/
“Friends do not let friends vote for con artists.”
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– Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), 2016
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