I think background checks are important. I don’t want to put guns into the hands of mentally unstable people, or people with rage or hate, sick people.
(The Washington Post, August 7, 2019)
This, coming from a mentally unstable person who has his hands on nuclear weapons. Not to mention his hypocrisy, which invariably rears its head as the evil twin of his projection:
President Donald Trump responded to the El Paso and Dayton mass shootings by insisting Monday that ‘mental illness pulls the trigger not the gun,’ but shortly after taking office he quietly rolled back an Obama-era regulation that would have made it harder for people with mental illness to buy guns.
(NBC News, August 5, 2019)
Of course, making mental illness the focus of gun control is rather like making headaches the focus of cancer research. Put another way, the only mental illness at issue here is that of psychos who think they need assault weapons for protection and recreation. Frankly, where America’s gun problem is concerned, we just have stupid doing as stupid does …
Meanwhile, the NRA has so perverted the debate on gun control, its water-carrying Republicans are even championing the right of gun nuts to keep and bear weapons of war.
Granted, no less a person than Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has opined that it’s probably constitutional even to keep and bear ‘hand-held rocket launchers that can bring down airplanes.’ But I find his legal reasoning on so many points of law anachronistic, even specious.
If this self-professed ‘textual originalist’ were more rigorously intellectual, and less vigorously partisan, he would insist that only muskets, bayonets, and single-shot pistols can pass constitutional muster. After all, these are the only types of arms the framers knew of and could have (originally) intended when they drafted the Constitution in 1787.
(“The Second Amendment and Gun Control,” The iPINIONS Journal, December 19, 2012)
Unfortunately, in lobbying for its maximalist position, the NRA has bullied Democrats and gun-control activists into patting themselves on the back just for getting Republicans to consider ancillary (false-flag) issues like background checks. This is rather like shooting for the moon, but settling for the stars, no? #BanAssaultWeapons! #BanHigh-CapacityMagazines!
Related commentaries:
debate on control...
El Paso latest mass shooting…
Projection…
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