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If Crazy People Should Not Own Guns, Who Will Determine Which Of Us Is Crazy?

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HOLLYWOOD, FL – Responsible gun owners use guns responsibly. Despite the apparently undying tendency of the deceptive Media and other swamp denizens to blame the NRA for America’s rash of mass shootings, responsible gun owners do not commit mass shootings. No NRA member has committed a mass shooting. Only a crazy person would commit a mass shooting.

On the August 4th edition of Meet the Press [VIDEO ABOVE], in response to a statement about crazy people committing mass shootings, host Chuck Todd said that anyone who kills anyone is crazy. But is that a fact? Must anyone who kills anyone be crazy?

If that were true, then it must mean that a person armed with a gun, who used that gun to kill a mass shooter engaged in murdering innocent victims, were crazy. Or if anyone who kills is crazy, it would have to mean that the state were crazy for executing murderers. And if it were true that anyone who kills anyone is crazy, then every abortion doctor must be a psychopath, while almost every pregnant woman who got an abortion were crazy. But perhaps Chuck Todd misspoke. Perhaps not everyone who kills anyone is crazy.

There has been an ongoing effort in America to infringe the right to bear arms. Oddly, some of the rhetoric seems aimed at criticizing conservatives for suggesting that gun violence has a correlation with mental health issues, as though a mentally healthy individual could commit a mass shooting. Simultaneously, people like Chuck Todd, who some might take for a liberal, say that anyone who kills anyone is crazy. It’s complicated at times.

There seems to be no question that, in order to commit a mass shooting, a person must be in some sense unbalanced, mentally unhealthy. But when it comes to those who criticize others for asserting that mass killers must be mentally unhealthy, the criticism itself seems to smack of insanity. Do those who raise such criticism actually mean to say that some mass murderer could be sane? It’s complicated. Or is it?

That which is not complicated about it is the clear agenda of those on the left to limit, abridge, or infringe the unalienable right to bear arms, about which federal law acknowledges that such a right must not be infringed. But we digress.

Focusing on the assertion that crazy people should be prevented from owning guns, it becomes unavoidable, upon accepting that assertion, to determine which of those who own guns is crazy. It also becomes necessary to define crazy, in order to define who should not own guns. But there we run into more complications.

One of those complications has to do with what it means to be crazy, or insane, or mentally unbalanced. Does society mean that all crazy people are given to violence? If that were true, wouldn’t it be impossible to walk the streets, since crazy people must constantly be hunting for victims? Or are there crazy people who have no interest in harming anyone?

Another complication has to do with to whom society will assign the responsibility of determining which of its members is crazy and should not, in that case, be permitted to exercise the unalienable right to bear arms. Who should exercise such power? Who is apt to do so?

One answer, immediately obvious to many, might be that psychiatrists should make such a determination. Others might say that certain judges, assigned to panels convened for that purpose, should decide who must be deprived of the right to bear arms, based on mental instability. But do these options really make sense?

Consider psychiatrists, that profession whose members commit suicide at a rate five to six times that of the general population. Does such a statistic speak well of the mental stability of psychiatrists? And if psychiatrists tend to be sufficiently unstable to the extent that they kill themselves so frequently, are psychiatrists the kind of people on whom we want society to depend for the task of determining who is crazy?

But there is even more to take into account when evaluating the mental issues of psychiatrists. While pedophilia used to be considered a perverted mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association, that august body recently adjusted its evaluation of pedophilia to classify it as an alternative sexual orientation. So pedophilia, according to prominent American psychiatrists, does not seem so reprehensible these days. There does seem to have been some backpedaling and, shall we say, instability on the issue, which does not exactly inspire confidence.

Perhaps psychiatrists are not as capable of determining which of society’s members are mentally unstable as some might wish. Does society intend to depend on unstable people to determine whether others are mentally unstable?

Which brings us to judges. Should judges be relied on to give us an accurate evaluation of who is mentally unstable?

Judges have engaged in a lot of questionable behavior. Judges have invented facts out of thin air for which no evidence was presented to substantiate them. Judges have contradicted clear laws to rule that certain acts were permissible, while law disagreed. Or that certain acts were prohibited that law permitted. Doesn’t that suggest a delusional state of mind? 

Now that certain facts seem to have cast doubt on the aptitude of psychiatrists and judges to evaluate the mental health of others, on whom must society rely to determine which of its members is so mentally unstable as to not qualify to exercise the unalienable right to bear arms? How about law enforcement officials or legislators?

In 2015, Sheriff Scott Israel said that Broward Sheriff’s Office was not a law enforcement agency [that goes out and arrests people], with which he acted perfectly compatibly thereafter by acting frequently in contradiction to law. Could we depend on such prominent and powerful individuals in our communities to make reliable evaluations of the mental health of others, while being themselves so obviously crazy?

And legislators? What about the legislators, such as Florida’s State Senator Gary Farmer, who last November said, “Militias are illegal“? Or such as Congressional Representative Frederica Wilson, who now calls for prosecution of those who mock or criticize Congress on social media? Or such as the 100 U.S. senators who called for Americans to be prosecuted for criticizing Islam? Are such people mentally healthy and qualified to judge the mental health of others? Apparently not.

It will take people who are mentally healthy, sincere, and truthful to sort out the elements that must be sorted out in order to arrive at the sensible conclusions that should lead to useful measures with regard to improving public safety. So far, there seem to be an abundance of people involved in the process who appear to lack those qualities. Some of them appear to suffer from a lack of mental health.

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