Gun Rights And Mental Health Restrictions: A Slippery Slope

This article was originally published by Brandon Smith at Alt-Market.com

In the wake of the Parkland shooting, as in the wake of any mass shooting, there has been a scramble by various political groups to place blame for the violence. Everyone is looking for the source of the evil that causes these events, to little avail. In most cases, at least when it comes to the extreme Left, the blame is placed squarely on guns themselves. This is obviously an absurd notion. Placing blame on the particular tool used in the crime does not solve the problem of the criminal and what led him to the deed. Whether or not the tool made his crime “easier” is irrelevant to the greater disturbance at hand.

After years of debate and failed legislation, leftists have discovered that resistance to the incremental destruction of the 2^nd Amendment is insurmountable, and a change in narrative has occurred. Finally, we are talking more about mental health issues and a little less about guns. This is a win for gun rights, however, there is a danger that needs to be addressed.

First, while mental health is being presented in the mainstream media more and more as a central issue in mass shootings, I find it interesting that the problem of psychotropic pharmaceuticals has been conveniently ignored. In a large number of non-terrorist related shooting incidents, assailants have been subjected to long term psychotropic drug use. Why has this factor not been addressed?

Well, consider the fact that Big Pharma has spent at least $2.5 billion over the past ten years lobbying in Washington D.C. Compare this to the NRA lobbying budget, which in comparison was a paltry $20 million over the past 10 years according to OpenSecret.

This should put into perspective the idiocy of anti-gun advocates and their obsession with the “nefarious” NRA. The influence of the pharmaceutical industry is almost universally ignored when it comes to the debate on gun violence, yet their lobbying efforts dwarf all others. All this despite the fact that psychotropic drugs are proven to influence violent and even homicidal behavior in people.

Second, the focus on mental health in terms of the Parkland shooting seems to be glossing over the vast failings of the FBI and local law enforcement in following up and investigating the dozens of warnings they received about Nikolas Cruz.  As I outlined in my recent article ‘“Mass shootings will never negate the need for gun rights,” gun grabbers love to trot out legislation on increased background check restrictions and closing the “gun show loophole,” yet none of their suggested solutions would have stopped the Parkland tragedy from taking place.

The success of Nikolas Cruz’s attack was due to the abject failure of the FBI and law enforcement, NOT the failure of background checks. Had they done their jobs, Cruz never would have been able to purchase a firearm to begin with. I find it rather ironic that gun grabbers constantly argue that average citizens do not need guns for self defense because they have law enforcement to rely on, yet it was exactly the stupidity or inaction of law enforcement that opened the door wide for Cruz to (allegedly) kill.

Clearly, the so-called “authorities” are not trustworthy enough to carry out the job of protecting us all from active shooters. The only people capable of stopping an active shooter in a fast and practical manner are armed citizens on the scene at the moment the attack begins.

Third, and most important, is the issue of mental health parameters and how they will be used to restrict gun rights. The ATF already has rules regarding people “adjudicated as mentally defective,” which includes people ruled a danger to themselves and others by a “court, board or commission or other lawful authority.” Now, these guidelines themselves can be rather broad, but abuse by government so far has been limited (though some instances have been egregious). If the Trump administration seeks to broaden the guidelines even further, then we may have a problem.

Take for example the unacceptable abuse of military veterans and their 2^nd Amendment rights by the Bureau of Veterans Affairs. The VA has in recent years placed restrictions on thousands of veterans, negating their gun rights without due process and without oversight. And all of this has been predicated on the claim that some veterans are “mentally defective” based on dubious parameters, including whether or not they let their spouse handle household finances.

This is what I am talking about when I bring up the dangers behind “mental illness” and gun rights. WHO gets to decide who is mentally ill and why they are mentally ill? Will this be done by a jury of our peers? Or, by an unaccountable and faceless bureaucracy? Will the guidelines for mental illness be strict and specific, or will they be broad and wide open to interpretation? Once a person has been labeled mentally defective, will they have the ability to appeal the decision, or will the label haunt them for the rest of their lives?

Gun rights activists should not put blind faith in the Trump administration to ensure that new mental health legislation will remain fair to the 2^nd Amendment. Unfortunately, Trump is on record as supporting the “No Fly List” gun control bill. This type of bill is something liberty activists opposed vehemently under the Obama administration because it allows the government to erase the gun rights of almost anyone without due process merely by placing them on an arbitrary watch list. A list, I will remind readers, that is a matter of national security and not subject to public overview.

Would a list of “mentally defective people” fall under the same Orwellian standards?

What about the new and disturbing designation by the psychiatric community of oppositional defiance disorder? This absurd “illness” is being applied to people as young as pre-school age and suggests that adults with the illness often display resistance to authority figures and government.

What if your opposition is not to “authority” in general, but to CORRUPT authority specifically? Is this mental illness, or the very epitome of sanity?

In the Soviet Union, it was all too common for the government to abuse “mental illness” designations as a means to silence and imprison political dissent. Anti-government agitation and propaganda were criminalized under Soviet legal codes, and these codes were frequently applied in conjunction with the psychiatric system. This was sometimes referred to as “punitive medicine.”

The problem with government and psychiatric institutions joining forces to determine constitutional rights for individuals should be obvious. Government should be as separate from the medical establishment as possible yet they are often intertwined to terrible effect. If mental illness is not adjudicated by a jury of ones peers and with extreme oversight by gun rights groups, then abuse of such laws by government is almost guaranteed. The temptation to use backdoor bureaucracy in a totalitarian manner to underhandedly confiscate guns and sabotage the 2^nd Amendment will be high.

It is also important to remember that even if you have placed full and blind faith in the Trump administration, there are no guarantees that the constitutional rules we allow him to bend today will not be completely broken by the next president in line. Gun rights are paramount to a free society. Without them, governments almost always revert to increased socialism and “tyranny creep” while violent crime continues or increases as the citizenry is left defenseless. Mental illness AND psychotropic drugs need to be taken seriously in terms of gun violence, but it is also vital that we do not allow the issue of mental health to be exploited as a subversive means to undermine our freedoms.

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With global tensions spiking, thousands of Americans are moving their IRA or 401(k) into an IRA backed by physical gold. Now, thanks to a little-known IRS Tax Law, you can too. Learn how with a free info kit on gold from Birch Gold Group. It reveals how physical precious metals can protect your savings, and how to open a Gold IRA. Click here to get your free Info Kit on Gold.

Mass Shootings, Mass Psychology And Self-Defense

This report was originally published by Brandon Smith at Alt-Market.com

There is an unfortunate correlation between crises and catastrophes and mass psychology. For those with a decent long-term memory, you may have noticed that the frequency of attacks and tragedies taking place today around the world is far above and beyond what occurred 10 years ago. So much so that many in the public have moved beyond the point of outrage and have now embraced complacency.

The mass shooting issue, for example, once inspired fevered debate over gun rights. Not so much anymore. While I am happy that the relentless attempts by leftists to exploit every shooting as a tool for their gun grabbing agenda have taken a backseat, I see a trend in another direction which is equally dangerous. That trend is a move towards acceptance that “these things happen,” instead of a healthy discussion on real solutions (and no, more gun control is not one of them).

A decade ago the Vegas shooting would have inspired media and social discussion for at least a year. Now, the story disappears in two weeks and is replaced with 10 others. I will be surprised if the latest church shooting in Texas in which 26 people were killed stays on the news feeds for more than a few days.

Where does this complacency come from?

It is a complex problem, but one that I think relates to the state of decline within any particular society. In Carl Jung’s The Undiscovered Self, Jung mentions a consistent element of latent sociopathy and psychopathy within most cultures. Perhaps 10% of people within a society are latent sociopaths and psychopaths, and around 1% or less represent full blown sociopaths/psychopaths. Most of the latent people will never become truly dangerous if they are living within a culture that is healthy and morally balanced. In fact, those with inherent sociopathic traits can become very high functioning human beings who are adept at careers that many other people avoid (surgeons and career soldiers are two examples).

However, in the event that there is cultural rot and a degradation of principles, environmental influences come into play and latent sociopaths/psychopaths have the potential to mutate into something far more dangerous. Jung examines this dynamic as an explanation for the sudden and accelerated decline of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s into totalitarianism and moral relativism. When the mentally disturbed 1% turns into 10% or more, entire nations can be dragged along into the abyss.

As a litmus test I find it valuable to look at popular culture when trying to determine if a society is on the brink of collapse into a singularity of moral relativism, because popular culture often reflects these elements more honestly than the supposed “experts” will. When examining Germany before its fall, I recommend studying the films of Fritz Lang; particularly his movie ‘M’ released in 1931, which depicts a serial killer with a penchant for children being put on trial by a group of underworld criminals, not because they abhor what he does on moral grounds, but because his activities are drawing too much unwanted attention from authorities on their own criminal enterprises. If the dark world of ‘M’ doesn’t perfectly showcase the decline of Germany, I don’t know what does.

Today, we are constantly surrounded by popular culture which leans towards the morally relative; stories in which the heroes must become monsters in order to defeat other supposedly worse monsters. At another level, our popular culture tells us that it is only the fantastical, the super powered and the government contracted heroes that have the ability to affect change and disrupt disaster. Underlying all of this seems to be a narrative of defeat; the notion that there is nothing the average person can do. And, of course, we are also bombarded with stories in which gluttony and decadence are applauded while anyone that takes a more responsible path is portrayed as unhappy or joyless in the long run.

Translate this to the developing trend of mass shootings around the world and the public reaction to them. On one end of the spectrum, in the past it was the sociopathic left that saw mass death as an opportunity to enforce political control over gun rights advocates, with the goal of eventually achieving total disarmament. These people do not care about the dead, let alone logic, they only care about furthering their agenda. They see government power as the answer to every problem.

If you were to hold up examples like the Paris or Mumbai attacks to gun grabbers and point out that disarmament only makes mass shootings EASIER for criminals and terrorists, they would not listen. Obviously, if any of the citizens including the off-duty police officers had been armed in Paris, the attack might have been stopped much sooner.

In the case of the church shooting near San Antonio, that attack WAS interrupted by an armed neighbor of the church who used his rifle to fend off Devin Kelley, forcing him to escape in his vehicle. Had that neighbor not been armed, the massacre might have gone on much longer. Had one of the people within the church been armed, the attack might have ended in seconds, as we saw in Denver in 2007.

Now, as I said earlier, there are sociopathic members of the political left that seek to take advantage of these scenarios, but these people have fallen by the wayside recently. On the political right, sadly, I have seen another brand of sociopathy rising, with some arguing that all the people within the San Antonio church that were unarmed “deserved to die.” This is just as dangerous a mentality as the exploitations of the left. If the liberty movement itself sets aside empathy and resorts to sensationalist or morally relative methods to drive forward a political agenda, then we are only hastening the fall of our culture, not protecting it. And, we become no better that the leftist disarmament thugs we abhor.

In between these two extremes sits a coagulated mass of people who simply don’t care much as long as a particular disaster doesn’t involve them. These are the folks who are uninterested in solutions and don’t really want to hear anything about it. It is these people who tend to become wreckage floating on the tides of history; their lack of concern eventually comes back to haunt them in the future.

So, if these are the wrong ways to approach the mass shooting problem, then what are the right ways?

I think it is vital that Americans in particular maintain our care and concern for the victims of these events. The solution to mass shootings is clearly a responsibly armed populace. According to all the stats on active shooters, defense by citizens is the only factor that seems to make much difference. But to convince more and more people of this requires a level of conscience and empathy that inspires confidence, and perhaps brotherhood. When people know that you give a damn and aren’t simply pursuing an agenda like the political left does, it is more likely that they will listen to what you have to say.

As I noted in my article How To Stop All Future Mass Shootings, the Vegas attack was organized by someone who was smart enough to avoid a point-blank engagement in a city and state in which concealed-carry firearms are more common. Point-blank attacks are by far the most common because they are generally attempted by people who have minimal training or because the attackers are relatively certain that their victims will be disarmed in the area they have chosen (gun free zones).

The Vegas attacker (or attackers) chose to use sniper-like tactics to prolong the massacre. However, what this shows is that an armed citizenry is a factor or barrier in how an attack is planned. With properly trained and armed security overwatching major events along with an armed population, there may never be another mass shooting again.

This is what Americans should be talking about, yet, there is no practical discussion on solving the problem. Is this a symptom of impending collapse within our society? Possibly. If there was ever an honorable task for the liberty movement today, it is to inspire solutions and to maintain moral balance. These shootings and other crisis events should not be forgotten within a week. They should at the very least be a learning process, a means by which we evolve our way of life and become more self reliant and by extension more safe.

If you are not a conceal- or open-carry proponent, then you should be. If you understand that the majority of shooting events that are stopped are stopped by average citizens that are armed, then it should only follow that you should become one of those armed citizens. In the meantime, it is not for us who are consistently armed to admonish disarmed victims as if they “deserve what they got.” Their failure is our failure as well. For if we are not working diligently to convince others of the importance of citizen self defense, then we have contributed to the conditions that led to these massacres taking place.

There are methods of stemming the tide of social collapse. There are in fact solutions. They begin with each individual acting in small ways and big ways everyday. Complacency and zealotry are the enemy, as well as those that would encourage such mentalities.

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You can contact Brandon Smith at: brandon@alt-market.com

With global tensions spiking, thousands of Americans are moving their IRA or 401(k) into an IRA backed by physical gold. Now, thanks to a little-known IRS Tax Law, you can too. Learn how with a free info kit on gold from Birch Gold Group. It reveals how physical precious metals can protect your savings, and how to open a Gold IRA. Click here to get your free Info Kit on Gold.