Mental illness of gun control: Weapons bans make no sense

By Donald Allen

Guest Commentator

Never in the history of weapons has a handgun, assault rifle or a sharp blade randomly picked a crowded group of bystanders and killed at will. I think we agree that for an act of senseless murder by weapon, human intervention is necessary. But misguided education on guns and the left-wing political assault on the Second Amendment has clouded the origin of gun violence and replaced it with an abhorrent political platform.

Mass shootings has led U.S. lawmakers to introduce new soft-tissue laws that focus on keeping guns out of the hands of felons. Points in case, felons are not the problem.

To prioritize heinous oversights in U.S. social and political undertakings, we need look no further than important unaddressed issues by U.S. lawmakers. How is it that a country that can produce $1.4 trillion in less than six months to spend on “saving the economy” under Bush in late 2007 and President Obama in early 2008, but cannot sustain or organize the feeding of hungry children in the U.S.?

Prioritizing gun control over hungry children looks morally reprehensible when 19.5 million children are “food insecure” (that’s a government term). For the rest of us, it means that one out of four children under the age of 18 is hungry, as reported by the Food Research and Action Center.

Newtown, Connecticut residents still in shock over the teachers and children killed in the incident at Sandy Hook Elementary School have yet to get answers to their questions about the genius of why a young man would kill innocent adults and children. We may never know.

As of today, as reported by the FBI and Newtown police officials, there has been no forensic evidence — electronic or otherwise — that gave signals that Adam Lanza would be the perpetrator of the United States’ worst unprovoked mass homicide since Columbine. Unsubstantiated speculation around the Newtown incident sent U.S. lawmakers and the liberal mainstream media into a feeding frenzy about gun control, the size of magazine clips and somehow inserting the mental illness piece into the equation on gun control.

In November 2012, when President Obama was re-elected and after the Newtown, Connecticut incident, gun sales in the U.S. rose significantly. Smith & Wesson’s quarterly earnings skyrocketed sharply. The Wisconsin Marshfield News-Herald reported, “Background checks for firearms are done through the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System. The FBI completed more than 2.7 million background checks in December 2012, the most for any month since the FBI starting collecting background check data in 1998.” If 2.7 million weapons get on the street legally, America should brace for a revolution.

Right here in Minnesota, the DFL-controlled legislature took gun control to a new extreme. The Star Tribune reported Democrat state senator Barb Goodwin of Columbia Heights wants individuals convicted of violent crimes to have to go before the State Board of Pardons before they are granted the legal right to own firearms. Felons who have served their time would find it much harder to regain the right to possess a firearm under the first of what is expected to be several gun bills proposed at the legislature.

We come to the point now where the pivot takes place in the U.S. political and social bamboozlement on gun control: It’s not felons shooting up the malls and elementary schools.

In reviewing U.S. mass shootings, we find an interesting thread. Mother Jones has compiled a list of 62 mass murderer shooters, the total in the U.S. during the thirty years between 1982 and 2012. It says, “Many shooters do not have a history of violent crime that might help predict such an incident. Unlike serial killers, mass murderers do not often have previous misdemeanors or a felony.”

So why would local and U.S. lawmakers focus on making it harder for someone with a felony to purchase a weapon? The psychological profile of a mall or school shooter is almost impossible to determine pre-crime.

Why the focus on mental illness? There are many myths about gun control being married to mental illness. Dr. Richard A. Friedman, M.D., contributor to the New York Times wrote, “There is overwhelming epidemiological evidence that the vast majority of people with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts. Only about four percent of violence in the United States can be attributed to people with mental illness.”

The mental illness of gun control is nothing more than political rhetoric at its best.

Don Allen is the editor-in-chief of OurBlackNews.com in Minneapolis.