On the heels of the Newtown-Sandy Hook killing of 20 innocents by Adam Lanza, a predictable outcry for curtailing gun violence erupted. The same “let’s do something” demand by the grieving and the angry followed the Aurora theater shootings, the Tucson shootings, the Virginia Tech shootings, and the Columbine shootings. Of course if one wishes to follow the maniacal shooting trail back in time it would lead to John Allen Muhammad, the 2002 beltway sniper who, accompanied by his teenage partner, terrorized northern Virginia with ten random killings. Mark Barton, an Atlanta day trader, killed nine in a shooting rampage following the loss of a lot of money in 1999. Even farther back in time, Charles Whitman, the sniper who seized the University of Texas clock tower, used it as his perch from which to randomly kill 17 in 1966. We can even go back beyond the memories of most reading this blog and recall Howard Unruh, a paranoid veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, who killed 13 on the streets of Camden NJ in 1949.
While mass shootings in public places are thankfully not commonplace, they aren’t rare.
Looking at historic mass murders dispassionately – easy for me to do – two out of three guns used by the killers were easy-to-conceal pistols and 80% of the weapons used were legally obtained. The majority of the killers were mentally ill loners with a known history of acute paranoia, delusions, and depression. It’s not a stretch to call their crimes murder-suicides since the majority killed themselves and most of the ones who didn’t waited for the police to arrive so a shootout would become “suicide by cop.”
It’s understandable that the “let’s do something” reaction is not particularly thoughtful – at least at the moment – so most “let’s do something” ideas would have no impact in preventing future shootings. Mass shooting victims are essentially props in a grand exit in which the shooter has no plan to survive. The grieving and the angry can be forgiven for not being thoughtful in realizing their proposals will not solve the tragedy they’ve endured. But how about the rest of us? We can feel compassion without taking leave of our senses. Yet, mix in a large helping of politics and common sense goes out the window.
That’s what happened following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. Politics linked arms with passion. Obama got out in front of the parade that followed and shamelessly leveraged it as a means to restrict gun ownership rights for everyone – the law-abiding and the law-breakers. He used Executive Orders to get around Congress and enact regulations. His party launched the Safe Communities, Safe Schools Act of 2013 to amend the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) with typical meat-axe congressional solutions. As with ObamaCare, the legislation was rushed to a vote without a lot of scrutiny or buy-in.
One reason for the rush was the public’s waning interest in gun control in the five months following Sandy Hook. Moreover, two days before the vote, the Boston bombing and the heightened awareness of the importance of personal safety was fresh in the public’s memory. A Fox poll showed that, during the search for the suspects, 70% of Bostonians wanted to have a weapon available for self-defense.
All of the several amendments to NICS needed 60 votes to pass and advance rather than a simple majority. This had been agreed to by each party’s leaders to avoid time-consuming filibusters.
It’s well known that Obama is no fan of the Second Amendment right to bear arms. He’s never said why. My guess: it’s his wariness of any potential challenge to the power of the federal government to regulate citizens’ lives. While Obama acknowledges the constitutional right in principle, he doesn’t believe it is an absolute right. Thus, in his mind the Second Amendment is subject to legislated limitations. The centerpiece of the Democrat gun control legislation is one such limitation – expanded background checks to prevent guns from being sold to the wrong people. It attempted this by an NICS amendment expanding background check for guns sold at gun shows and sold over the Internet, but it excluded family members or friends who give or sell guns to each other.
On the surface this expansion seems to be common sense. But the devil is in the details, and as Bill Clinton famously said, “it all comes down to what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” All law requires interpretation and all law is subject to abuse – if not immediately, then ultimately.
The National Rifle Association put out a policy statement that concluded the pending NICS background check amendment would solve no problem. But it would criminalize the sale of a gun, even among exempt parties, if a gun has ever been advertised, or if a gun had been transferred, even among exempt parties. What is the definition of “transfer”? We again revisit “it depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” An article in the National Review Online may have prompted this hair-splitting definition of “transfer.” Ironically, however, the Newtown and Columbine shooters got their guns through others, so unless the Senate bill required background checks of all family members and friends – an impossible if not illegal task – it wouldn’t have prevented those shootings.
There can be little doubt that distrust of the federal government is at the root of resistance to federal gun control. The federal camel gets its nose in the tent with a benign beginning and often expands it well beyond its original purpose. No recent law is more exemplary of that than the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act whose original purpose was to combat the Mafia. Predictably prosecutors began straining at every gnat to define more federal crimes as “racketeering,” far afield from the law’s initial intent. Most recently it was used to charge the teachers in the Atlanta school cheating scandal for changing student test scores. RICO convictions can mean big-boy prison time.
The so-called Manchin-Toomey NICS amendment expanded background checks beyond transactions by federally-licensed gun dealers to include sales at gun shows and on the Internet. On its surface, it makes sense. Except when you look at history. Criminals don’t buy guns. They steal them, borrow them, or use a legit straw man to buy them in their stead.
Then you have the government’s batting record in enforcing the existing NICS background check requirements. NICS 2010 data showed 77,000 identifiable people tried to illegally buy a gun and were snared in the background check. That’s a crime. How many of them have been prosecuted? Seventy. The Department of Justice has no interest in prosecuting these violators. Attorney General Holder said he didn’t have the time or people to be going after them. Manchin-Toomey would add to the backlog of cases that Holder’s department has no time, interest, or staff to prosecute.
In the end, the commonsense purpose of Manchin-Toomey fails the reality test. Manchin-Toomey would not have prevented Sandy Hook, Aurora, Tucson, or other mass killings. It would not deprive criminals, the mentally ill, and other dangerous individuals from gun purchases. Those people don’t abide by the law. Law abiders do. Manchin-Toomey would add to the bureaucratic overhead of every citizen’s life in a time when compliance with a briar patch of federal laws and regulations already consumes billions of man-hours annually. The Manchin-Toomey expansion of background checks was conceived in the spirit of Peter the Great, “It is better to let the innocent suffer than the guilty escape.” Except in this case, the guilty would escape.
The Manchin-Toomey amendment thankfully failed to get the required 60 votes despite crossovers by Republicans Pat Toomey, John McCain, Susan Collins, and Mark Kirk. Their loss was made up by Democrat crossovers Mark Begich (D-AK), Mark Pryor (D-AR), Max Baucus (D-MT), and freshman Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND). All but Heitkamp are up for election in red-leaning states. They were joined by 41 Republicans and Democrat Harry Reid whose nay vote was procedural so he could reintroduce the bill. Thus Manchin-Toomey failed by 54-46.
Shortly afterward, the Senate voted down Senator Feinstein’s (D-CA) amendment to ban so-called assault rifles (which are little more than tricked-up hunting rifles unsuited for either combat or assault – except a hunter’s assault on an aggressive animal) and high capacity ammunition clips (apparently Feinstein thinks mass killers don’t reload.) It failed 40-60 provoking an un-senatorial scolding of her colleagues by the lady: “Show some guts!”
Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) rose in high dungeon to defend Second Amendment rights in a heated response to her “guts” slur, condemning the Feinstein amendment as the “largest ban of guns in the history of our republic.” Grassley continued to spew logic: “It did not stop Columbine; it would not stop Newtown. Criminals who steal such guns would not care if they were banned.” No fair using facts, Senator.
Senator Mark Udall (D-CO) chimed in: “In carefully studying the language of this specific assault weapons ban, it became clear that it went too far because it also would have banned certain hunting rifles and even some shotguns,” he said. “And there was no opportunity to amend this legislation to make it work for Colorado sportsmen.” Udall was among the no votes against the Feinstein amendment.
An amendment by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) to limit ammunition magazines to ten rounds also failed by a margin of 46-54.
When the smoke cleared, Obama’s gun agenda lay in tatters on the Senate floor. Four of his party had crossed over to vote against Manchin-Toomey, possibly for reelection concerns, but 15 Democrats broke ranks against Feinstein and ten voted against Blumenthal. Reelection concerns couldn’t be blamed for all of those defections. Hopefully the nays saw that the legislation wouldn’t solve the gun problem which is how to keep guns from the hands of mentally ill people.
The defeat Obama suffered in the Senate was made worse by his own puerile reaction to it. A tight-lipped, angry president stepped to the Rose Garden microphone, flanked by Vice President Biden, who looked like he was on the verge of tears, and, Gabby Gifford, one of the Tucson shooting victims, and other guests. Or were they props?
Here’s an excerpt from Obama’s outburst, blowing up another section of the bridge to his political opposition.
By now, it’s well known that 90% of the American people support universal background checks that make it harder for a dangerous person to buy a gun. We’re talking about convicted felons, people convicted of domestic violence, people with a severe mental illness. Ninety percent of Americans support that idea. Most Americans think that’s already the law.
And a few minutes ago, 90% of Democrats in the Senate just voted for that idea. But it’s not going to happen because 90% of Republicans in the Senate just voted against that idea.
A majority of senators voted “yes” to protecting more of our citizens with smarter background checks. But by this continuing distortion of Senate rules, a minority was able to block it from moving forward.
… Instead of supporting this compromise, the gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill. They claimed that it would create some sort of “big brother” gun registry, even though the bill did the opposite. This legislation, in fact, outlawed any registry. Plain and simple, right there in the text. But that didn’t matter.
So all in all, this was a pretty shameful day for Washington.
Okay. Let’s talk about lying. Just 48 hours before the Senate vote, Gallup conducted a survey which revealed that only 4% considered guns to be the “most important” issue facing the country. A Rasmussen survey conducted one month after the Newtown shooting revealed that 57% thought the government should enforce the gun laws we have rather than pass more laws. A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed that interest in stricter gun control reached a peak in February, two months after the Newtown shootings, and the support for stricter gun laws in April had decreased to 55% while 43% said laws should be less strict or remain unchanged. In another recent survey, about half (52%) disapproved of Obama’s handling of gun laws.
"The politics of gun policy are unclear," Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, said in a statement. "Despite the huge news media coverage of the issue since the Newtown shooting, only 37% of voters are more likely to vote for a congressman who votes to ban sales of assault rifles, while 31% are less likely, and 30% say it would not affect their vote."
Obama’s contention that 90% of Americans stand with him on universal background checks flies in the face of all of these respected polling agencies. Has there ever been any issue that united 90% of the American public especially on something as controversial as gun politics? High favorability rating among a public that is about equally divided on every issue from war to abortion has to be greeted with considerable skepticism. So who’s lying?
The poll that really mattered was held on April 17 in the Senate. Expanded background checks, weapons bans, and magazine capacity were all voted down in a Democrat-majority Senate.
Next point: Obama campaigned in 2008 and 2012 about being able to reach across the aisle and work with the loyal opposition – loyal not to the President but to the United States and their party’s principles. Dale Carnegie, if he were alive today, would tell Obama he’s not going to influence many across the aisle by calling them liars, calling their political positions out of touch with the public, and inferring that standing on their principles is “shameful.”
Truth be known, Obama is incapable of bringing himself to accept that people disagree with him and have good reasons for blocking his programs. In our political system, Congress isn’t compelled to obey him, which he apparently expects. Americans have a president not a king. Obama grants himself the right to hold a position he believes is correct for the country but he denies others that same right. The fact is, since he was elected, he has worked hard at creating divisiveness and the opposition doesn’t trust him.
Finally, Obama speaks derisively about the minority blocking the will of the Senate majority, a right he rose to defend, incidentally, when he was a Senator in a Republican-controlled Senate. He laments that a simple majority should have sufficed in the vote. But the Senate, not the President, makes its rules and Reid could have brought the Manchin-Toomey amendment to the floor for a simple majority vote. That would have opened it to 30 hours of debate under Senate rules. The debate would have opened the unscrubbed Manchin-Toomey to scrutiny – something ObamaCare legislative avoided in its hurry-up passage. Simple majority Senate rules allow amendments to be tacked on. Any amendments tacked on by Republicans might have forced Reid to pull the bill if Obama wouldn’t accept them – an embarrassment, wouldn’t you think ... the President forcing his bill to be withdrawn?
So Reid and Obama outwitted themselves and went with nine “unanimous consent” amendments that required 60% approval. It was well-known before the Senate vote that the votes weren’t there for any amendment. The Reid Senate proceeded anyway
So that brings us full circle. The mentally ill commit a small minority of the homicides in the country, but they commit a majority of the mass killings. That’s the stark fact. Any gun control measure that doesn’t address that problem is solving the wrong problem.
As I said in a previous blog, the way we handle mental illness in this country has taken a turn for the worse in the last several decades. The mentally ill have been released from custodial care and can’t be admitted against their will. Against the will of a mentally ill person? Interesting.
With fewer inpatients, the number of psychiatric beds has decreased. In true Kafkaesque fashion, the government healthcare bureaucracy has made it almost impossible to share medical information and forcefully treat an individual’s mental illness without a court order. Adam Lanza’s mother was trying to get such a court order when her 20-year old son learned of it and went on his murderous rampage, killing her and 20 innocent students. As for other mass killings, no court documents revealed that the shooters were insane or mentally ill. The mental health record for the Virginia Tech shooter, for example, could not have been used as a public safety warning because federal privacy laws prevented it.
So while Obama is talking about the “shameful day in Washington,” he might just take a look in the mirror at the image looking back at him. That’s the guy who has failed to understand the real problem in gun violence.
Shameful!
While mass shootings in public places are thankfully not commonplace, they aren’t rare.
Looking at historic mass murders dispassionately – easy for me to do – two out of three guns used by the killers were easy-to-conceal pistols and 80% of the weapons used were legally obtained. The majority of the killers were mentally ill loners with a known history of acute paranoia, delusions, and depression. It’s not a stretch to call their crimes murder-suicides since the majority killed themselves and most of the ones who didn’t waited for the police to arrive so a shootout would become “suicide by cop.”
It’s understandable that the “let’s do something” reaction is not particularly thoughtful – at least at the moment – so most “let’s do something” ideas would have no impact in preventing future shootings. Mass shooting victims are essentially props in a grand exit in which the shooter has no plan to survive. The grieving and the angry can be forgiven for not being thoughtful in realizing their proposals will not solve the tragedy they’ve endured. But how about the rest of us? We can feel compassion without taking leave of our senses. Yet, mix in a large helping of politics and common sense goes out the window.
That’s what happened following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. Politics linked arms with passion. Obama got out in front of the parade that followed and shamelessly leveraged it as a means to restrict gun ownership rights for everyone – the law-abiding and the law-breakers. He used Executive Orders to get around Congress and enact regulations. His party launched the Safe Communities, Safe Schools Act of 2013 to amend the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) with typical meat-axe congressional solutions. As with ObamaCare, the legislation was rushed to a vote without a lot of scrutiny or buy-in.
One reason for the rush was the public’s waning interest in gun control in the five months following Sandy Hook. Moreover, two days before the vote, the Boston bombing and the heightened awareness of the importance of personal safety was fresh in the public’s memory. A Fox poll showed that, during the search for the suspects, 70% of Bostonians wanted to have a weapon available for self-defense.
All of the several amendments to NICS needed 60 votes to pass and advance rather than a simple majority. This had been agreed to by each party’s leaders to avoid time-consuming filibusters.
It’s well known that Obama is no fan of the Second Amendment right to bear arms. He’s never said why. My guess: it’s his wariness of any potential challenge to the power of the federal government to regulate citizens’ lives. While Obama acknowledges the constitutional right in principle, he doesn’t believe it is an absolute right. Thus, in his mind the Second Amendment is subject to legislated limitations. The centerpiece of the Democrat gun control legislation is one such limitation – expanded background checks to prevent guns from being sold to the wrong people. It attempted this by an NICS amendment expanding background check for guns sold at gun shows and sold over the Internet, but it excluded family members or friends who give or sell guns to each other.
On the surface this expansion seems to be common sense. But the devil is in the details, and as Bill Clinton famously said, “it all comes down to what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” All law requires interpretation and all law is subject to abuse – if not immediately, then ultimately.
The National Rifle Association put out a policy statement that concluded the pending NICS background check amendment would solve no problem. But it would criminalize the sale of a gun, even among exempt parties, if a gun has ever been advertised, or if a gun had been transferred, even among exempt parties. What is the definition of “transfer”? We again revisit “it depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” An article in the National Review Online may have prompted this hair-splitting definition of “transfer.” Ironically, however, the Newtown and Columbine shooters got their guns through others, so unless the Senate bill required background checks of all family members and friends – an impossible if not illegal task – it wouldn’t have prevented those shootings.
There can be little doubt that distrust of the federal government is at the root of resistance to federal gun control. The federal camel gets its nose in the tent with a benign beginning and often expands it well beyond its original purpose. No recent law is more exemplary of that than the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act whose original purpose was to combat the Mafia. Predictably prosecutors began straining at every gnat to define more federal crimes as “racketeering,” far afield from the law’s initial intent. Most recently it was used to charge the teachers in the Atlanta school cheating scandal for changing student test scores. RICO convictions can mean big-boy prison time.
The so-called Manchin-Toomey NICS amendment expanded background checks beyond transactions by federally-licensed gun dealers to include sales at gun shows and on the Internet. On its surface, it makes sense. Except when you look at history. Criminals don’t buy guns. They steal them, borrow them, or use a legit straw man to buy them in their stead.
Then you have the government’s batting record in enforcing the existing NICS background check requirements. NICS 2010 data showed 77,000 identifiable people tried to illegally buy a gun and were snared in the background check. That’s a crime. How many of them have been prosecuted? Seventy. The Department of Justice has no interest in prosecuting these violators. Attorney General Holder said he didn’t have the time or people to be going after them. Manchin-Toomey would add to the backlog of cases that Holder’s department has no time, interest, or staff to prosecute.
In the end, the commonsense purpose of Manchin-Toomey fails the reality test. Manchin-Toomey would not have prevented Sandy Hook, Aurora, Tucson, or other mass killings. It would not deprive criminals, the mentally ill, and other dangerous individuals from gun purchases. Those people don’t abide by the law. Law abiders do. Manchin-Toomey would add to the bureaucratic overhead of every citizen’s life in a time when compliance with a briar patch of federal laws and regulations already consumes billions of man-hours annually. The Manchin-Toomey expansion of background checks was conceived in the spirit of Peter the Great, “It is better to let the innocent suffer than the guilty escape.” Except in this case, the guilty would escape.
The Manchin-Toomey amendment thankfully failed to get the required 60 votes despite crossovers by Republicans Pat Toomey, John McCain, Susan Collins, and Mark Kirk. Their loss was made up by Democrat crossovers Mark Begich (D-AK), Mark Pryor (D-AR), Max Baucus (D-MT), and freshman Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND). All but Heitkamp are up for election in red-leaning states. They were joined by 41 Republicans and Democrat Harry Reid whose nay vote was procedural so he could reintroduce the bill. Thus Manchin-Toomey failed by 54-46.
Shortly afterward, the Senate voted down Senator Feinstein’s (D-CA) amendment to ban so-called assault rifles (which are little more than tricked-up hunting rifles unsuited for either combat or assault – except a hunter’s assault on an aggressive animal) and high capacity ammunition clips (apparently Feinstein thinks mass killers don’t reload.) It failed 40-60 provoking an un-senatorial scolding of her colleagues by the lady: “Show some guts!”
Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) rose in high dungeon to defend Second Amendment rights in a heated response to her “guts” slur, condemning the Feinstein amendment as the “largest ban of guns in the history of our republic.” Grassley continued to spew logic: “It did not stop Columbine; it would not stop Newtown. Criminals who steal such guns would not care if they were banned.” No fair using facts, Senator.
Senator Mark Udall (D-CO) chimed in: “In carefully studying the language of this specific assault weapons ban, it became clear that it went too far because it also would have banned certain hunting rifles and even some shotguns,” he said. “And there was no opportunity to amend this legislation to make it work for Colorado sportsmen.” Udall was among the no votes against the Feinstein amendment.
An amendment by Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) to limit ammunition magazines to ten rounds also failed by a margin of 46-54.
When the smoke cleared, Obama’s gun agenda lay in tatters on the Senate floor. Four of his party had crossed over to vote against Manchin-Toomey, possibly for reelection concerns, but 15 Democrats broke ranks against Feinstein and ten voted against Blumenthal. Reelection concerns couldn’t be blamed for all of those defections. Hopefully the nays saw that the legislation wouldn’t solve the gun problem which is how to keep guns from the hands of mentally ill people.
The defeat Obama suffered in the Senate was made worse by his own puerile reaction to it. A tight-lipped, angry president stepped to the Rose Garden microphone, flanked by Vice President Biden, who looked like he was on the verge of tears, and, Gabby Gifford, one of the Tucson shooting victims, and other guests. Or were they props?
Here’s an excerpt from Obama’s outburst, blowing up another section of the bridge to his political opposition.
By now, it’s well known that 90% of the American people support universal background checks that make it harder for a dangerous person to buy a gun. We’re talking about convicted felons, people convicted of domestic violence, people with a severe mental illness. Ninety percent of Americans support that idea. Most Americans think that’s already the law.
And a few minutes ago, 90% of Democrats in the Senate just voted for that idea. But it’s not going to happen because 90% of Republicans in the Senate just voted against that idea.
A majority of senators voted “yes” to protecting more of our citizens with smarter background checks. But by this continuing distortion of Senate rules, a minority was able to block it from moving forward.
… Instead of supporting this compromise, the gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill. They claimed that it would create some sort of “big brother” gun registry, even though the bill did the opposite. This legislation, in fact, outlawed any registry. Plain and simple, right there in the text. But that didn’t matter.
So all in all, this was a pretty shameful day for Washington.
Okay. Let’s talk about lying. Just 48 hours before the Senate vote, Gallup conducted a survey which revealed that only 4% considered guns to be the “most important” issue facing the country. A Rasmussen survey conducted one month after the Newtown shooting revealed that 57% thought the government should enforce the gun laws we have rather than pass more laws. A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed that interest in stricter gun control reached a peak in February, two months after the Newtown shootings, and the support for stricter gun laws in April had decreased to 55% while 43% said laws should be less strict or remain unchanged. In another recent survey, about half (52%) disapproved of Obama’s handling of gun laws.
"The politics of gun policy are unclear," Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, said in a statement. "Despite the huge news media coverage of the issue since the Newtown shooting, only 37% of voters are more likely to vote for a congressman who votes to ban sales of assault rifles, while 31% are less likely, and 30% say it would not affect their vote."
Obama’s contention that 90% of Americans stand with him on universal background checks flies in the face of all of these respected polling agencies. Has there ever been any issue that united 90% of the American public especially on something as controversial as gun politics? High favorability rating among a public that is about equally divided on every issue from war to abortion has to be greeted with considerable skepticism. So who’s lying?
The poll that really mattered was held on April 17 in the Senate. Expanded background checks, weapons bans, and magazine capacity were all voted down in a Democrat-majority Senate.
Next point: Obama campaigned in 2008 and 2012 about being able to reach across the aisle and work with the loyal opposition – loyal not to the President but to the United States and their party’s principles. Dale Carnegie, if he were alive today, would tell Obama he’s not going to influence many across the aisle by calling them liars, calling their political positions out of touch with the public, and inferring that standing on their principles is “shameful.”
Truth be known, Obama is incapable of bringing himself to accept that people disagree with him and have good reasons for blocking his programs. In our political system, Congress isn’t compelled to obey him, which he apparently expects. Americans have a president not a king. Obama grants himself the right to hold a position he believes is correct for the country but he denies others that same right. The fact is, since he was elected, he has worked hard at creating divisiveness and the opposition doesn’t trust him.
Finally, Obama speaks derisively about the minority blocking the will of the Senate majority, a right he rose to defend, incidentally, when he was a Senator in a Republican-controlled Senate. He laments that a simple majority should have sufficed in the vote. But the Senate, not the President, makes its rules and Reid could have brought the Manchin-Toomey amendment to the floor for a simple majority vote. That would have opened it to 30 hours of debate under Senate rules. The debate would have opened the unscrubbed Manchin-Toomey to scrutiny – something ObamaCare legislative avoided in its hurry-up passage. Simple majority Senate rules allow amendments to be tacked on. Any amendments tacked on by Republicans might have forced Reid to pull the bill if Obama wouldn’t accept them – an embarrassment, wouldn’t you think ... the President forcing his bill to be withdrawn?
So Reid and Obama outwitted themselves and went with nine “unanimous consent” amendments that required 60% approval. It was well-known before the Senate vote that the votes weren’t there for any amendment. The Reid Senate proceeded anyway
So that brings us full circle. The mentally ill commit a small minority of the homicides in the country, but they commit a majority of the mass killings. That’s the stark fact. Any gun control measure that doesn’t address that problem is solving the wrong problem.
As I said in a previous blog, the way we handle mental illness in this country has taken a turn for the worse in the last several decades. The mentally ill have been released from custodial care and can’t be admitted against their will. Against the will of a mentally ill person? Interesting.
With fewer inpatients, the number of psychiatric beds has decreased. In true Kafkaesque fashion, the government healthcare bureaucracy has made it almost impossible to share medical information and forcefully treat an individual’s mental illness without a court order. Adam Lanza’s mother was trying to get such a court order when her 20-year old son learned of it and went on his murderous rampage, killing her and 20 innocent students. As for other mass killings, no court documents revealed that the shooters were insane or mentally ill. The mental health record for the Virginia Tech shooter, for example, could not have been used as a public safety warning because federal privacy laws prevented it.
So while Obama is talking about the “shameful day in Washington,” he might just take a look in the mirror at the image looking back at him. That’s the guy who has failed to understand the real problem in gun violence.
Shameful!
