Tag Archives: Gun violence

Lock ’em up, even if it doesn’t work

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Well, the guns-for-all – some mental health restrictions apply – “thinkers” may be experiencing cognitive dissonance. That is, if they’ve found time to seriously ponder thought control advocacy. An article in today’s Washington Post describes the state of the art in violence prediction. The analysts parse patients into two groups.

There have been numerous efforts to test these violence-predicting tools in recent decades. For example, Monahan and his colleagues incorporated 106 risk factors into a software interview program and administered it to patients being discharged from psychiatric units in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Of those judged to be low-risk by this tool, 90 percent committed no violence over the next six months. Of those judged to be high-risk, 49 percent committed violent acts.

Where does that leave our thought control advocates? Lock up the high-risk group and one innocent is deprived of his/her liberty for each potentially violent offender. Release the low-risk group and 10% are potential violent offenders. The numbers suck. The NRA wants to hand those numbers to government? Seriously? Could it be hyperbole? Maybe “dark political energy” will smooth out the looming gross injustice. Or, maybe, we should send Wayne LaPierre and his defenders to the corner, with a dunce hat, to pout.

A Teacher in Every Gun Store

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Teacher, Victoria Soto, 27, misled the gunman in Newtown, Connecticut, told him her children were in the gym, when she had hidden them elsewhere; she died to save her students.

This simple phrase, “A Teacher in every gun store,” was posted on Facebook by a friend.

It was in counterpoint to the crazy idea that we should arm every teacher in every class room, with a PPK or assault rifle, and have a cop in every school – but not every classroom.

Nor should we overlook the “other” substitute initiative for gun reform, that this nation should take a closer look at those who are mentally ill. Unfortunately, we’re talking detection and discrimination, scapegoating really, not about acceptance or treatment.

Consider the fact that Asperger’s Syndrome, a developmental disorder, suffered by our latest horrific shooter, Adam Lanza, is not a disorder associated with violence.

The NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, undeterred by Lanza’s mental state, railed against the nation’s mental health: “The truth is, that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters. People that are so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons, that no sane person can ever possibly comprehend them.”

Is LaPierre suggesting a policy that every gun owner must undergo a mental examination at the time of a weapon’s purchase or transfer? Hardly!

LaPierre calculated he had to divert the nation from any discussion of true gun reform, with forehead slapping distractions. He also sought to instruct the Republican T-party members in Congress that this stratagem was how to defend gun reforms against those who rebel against the notion that the gunfight at the OK Corral should be the law enforcement model we emulate.

LaPierre railed at the media for its coverage (even as he manipulated the media to cover him), refusing to answer any questions.

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The “culture of life” that kills people

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“It was worse than if the NRA had not spoken at all,” said Gene Grabowski, executive vice president of Levick Strategic Communications, a Washington, D.C.-based issues management firm that has worked with firearms manufacturers.

Meanwhile, during that curious week of self-imposed silence from the NRA, we’ve heard just about every offensive explanation and excuse imaginable for the atrocity in Newtown, Connecticut: The gunman could have his way with the elementary school because it was a “feminized setting” without enough “male aggression” (this ignorant assertion made in the face of the heroic actions of the women who hid children and tried to tackle the gunman); this massacre and others like it are the price we must be willing to pay for the convenience to gun enthusiasts afforded by the “almost universally benevolent” Second Amendment; and of course, there was the predictable ranting from the usual suspects blaming an imaginary “war on Christmas,” imaginary “homosexual agenda,” imaginary “end of school prayer,” etc. But in the discussion of a naked propaganda post that managed to go on and on and on about a sustained, lethal assault upon schoolchildren with a military assault weapon without once using the word “gun,” one commenter takes the prize for disingenuous sanctimony by claiming the atrocity wouldn’t have happened if only, if only, we had a “universal respect for life.”

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