It is an accepted fact that mental illness occurs at a reasonably constant rate throughout the human species and human history.
The National Rifle Association and the extremely lucrative gun industry’s newest talking point/diversion proposes that it is mental illness and not foolishly simple access to very lethal weaponry that is the reason for the scourge of gun violence in the United States.
Death from gun violence in the U.S. occurs at a rate 16 times greater than in Germany, 31 times greater than in Great Britain and 310 times greater than in Japan.
If, as the NRA claims, mental illness is at the root of our gun death carnage, then it would also have to be true that Americans are 16 times more mentally ill than Germans, 31 times more mentally ill than Brits and 310 times more mentally ill than the Japanese. Of course both the NRA and its corollary are false.
Much less religious than American youth, young people in all other free democracies are exposed to the same violent video games, movies, music and glorified bad behavior as American kids but with inarguably a vastly less violent outcome. But gun violence in America is not at all limited to the young.
We can do more to help the mentally ill in this country, but the new Trump budget proposes deep cuts to Medicaid, which is a primary conduit for mental healthcare funding.
We can do a better job of limiting access by the mentally ill to firearms, but last year the NRA’s initial return on their $30 million investment in Donald Trump was a repeal of an Obama Administration regulation limiting the ability to acquire guns by those on Social Security who have been deemed mentally unfit to handle their own affairs.
At the same time we must be very wary this doesn’t turn into a literal, old fashioned “witch hunt” that viciously persecutes the mentally ill. They are, and have been for centuries, convenient and pretty defenseless scapegoats for whatever ails society. They were well represented in Nazi gas chambers.
Brimming with Christian empathy and mercy, Trump calls the mentally ill “sickos.” That might just be the shiniest glass house I have ever seen.
The Republican Party has been told in no uncertain terms by their NRA masters that their political survival depends on them spreading the highly emotional slander that we have so much gun mayhem in the U.S. because we Americans are crazier and more depraved than everybody else. It’s a lie.
We have an epidemic of gun mayhem because we have over 300 million guns in the U.S. and we need to meaningfully tighten the access to them and meaningfully ratchet down the lethality of them.
In a 1991 interview on the MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour, retired U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative appointed by Republican President Richard Nixon in 1969, speaking of the NRA and other gun rights groups stated, “the Second Amendment has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
Marty Ansley
Cinebar
