After hearing yet another Republican claim that gun violence is actually a “mental health issue” I decided I agreed, but questioned whose mental health is at the root of the problem. Google “what is a sociopath?” and here’s part of the answer you’ll get:
“A mental health disorder characterized by disregard for other people.”
Keep reading and you’ll come across this:
“A lack of conscience and empathy, disregard for rules and norms, and impulsive and aggressive tendencies are all common traits of a sociopath.”
According to choosingtherapy.com sociopaths also have a hunger for power and dominance, deceptive tendencies, are ruthless, hostile and aggressive, are irresponsible in their decision-making, are superficially charming, have a broken moral compass and are emotionally detached and opportunistic.
All of which sounds an awful lot like the Republican Party or at the very least, what the Republican Party has become, because there was a time when Republicans believed in working with Democrats and getting things done.
Richard Nixon (who would later become famous for his portrayal of Luke Skywalker’s father in the Star Wars movies) wasn’t afraid to do things that could be labeled “liberal” like helping start the Environmental Protection Agency or admitting that China was a country or using wage and price controls or desegregating schools, while today’s Republican Party appears to have sold its soul to the Devil, but on the upside I understand Mitch McConnell can play blues guitar like a motherfucker.
(Just kidding. One look at that face and I think it’s way more likely that Mitch actually enjoys listening to Lawrence Welk records, played at 78 RPM on his Victrola, but I thought you blues fans would appreciate the Robert Johnson reference.)
And speaking of musical references, in 1932 Groucho Marx sang what was destined to become the Modern Republican theme song:
Anyway…
In 2019, 69.5% of all gun deaths occurred in just six countries; Brazil, the U.S., Venezuela, Mexico, India and Columbia.
You know where gun deaths are extremely rare?
Japan, the United Kingdom, Norway and Australia and maybe that’s because those countries have incentives or legislation designed to decrease the number of guns in circulation.
According to the internet, in 2019 Japan had a gun death rate of only .02 per 100,000 people (we can beat that on a bad weekend with one Glock tied behind our back) and maybe that’s because Japan has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world.
If you want a gun in Japan you have to take an all-day class, pass a written exam, complete a shooting range test, score at least 95% on accuracy, have a mental health evaluation performed at a hospital (as opposed to getting the okey-doke from some guy named Clem at a gun show), have a comprehensive background check and after jumping through the required hoops, all you can purchase are rifles and shotguns and the whole thing has to be done every three years. If Republican really believe gun violence is a mental health issue, why do they resist things like background checks which might reveal a prospective gun purchaser is a few lights short of a Christmas tree?
As someone smarter than me (so you’ve got a lot of people to choose from) has already pointed out, every country has mental health problems, but the countries that have a lot of gun violence have – you guessed it – a lot of guns.
If you want to read more about this, here you go:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-deaths-by-country
And here’s an article that says Republicans are scared shitless that if they do anything at all to restrict guns they’ll be voted out of office, so if the choice is between some dead kids and them losing their cushy jobs in Washington, D.C. they’re definitely going with the dead kids:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/26/us/republicans-gun-control.html
Nevertheless, the Republicans want to at least look like they’re doing something while they wait for the rest of us to get distracted by some other issue, so they’ve suggested “hardening” our schools which seems to mean setting up a Checkpoint Charlie at school entrances, but as someone who actually works at a school pointed out, kids are in and out of school buildings all day (it’s called “recess”) and if some nut job with an AR-15 wants to kill a bunch of third graders to make some less-than-understandable point, he can do that while the kids are outside playing kickball.
Also…
Do the Republicans also advocate hardening our grocery stores?
According to a Justice Department website, the majority of mass shootings happen at a workplace (30.8 percent), then retail establishments (16.9 percent), then bars or restaurants (13.4 percent), residential locations (8.1 percent), outdoors (8.1 percent), K-12 schools (7.6 percent), places of worship (6.4 percent), colleges or universities (5.2 percent), government buildings or places of civic importance (3.5 percent), so do the math and hardening schools as an answer to gun violence ignores the fact that 92.4 percent of mass shootings take place somewhere else.
As you might have already noticed, Real Life bears little resemblance to Hollywood Movies and if you Google “how many M-1 Abrams tanks were destroyed during the Persian Gulf War” (which I did for a different story) the answer is nine and seven of those tanks were destroyed by friendly fire, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about how crazy and confusing things get when people start shooting at each other.
There are numerous reports of how the Uvalde, Texas police bungled their response to the school shooter and let’s remember the police are trained for this and deal with emergencies all the time and yet when the shit hit the fan they still made mistakes, so what makes anybody think a fourth-grade teacher armed with a Beretta is going to handle things any better?
The police were unaware that the shooter was still active so they didn’t go in immediately and it struck me that part of the “poor communication” problem was what the Founding Fathers originally intended when the arms whose keeping and bearing should not be infringed would fire three-to four-rounds a minute, as opposed to a semi-automatic weapon that can be fired just as fast as you can pull a trigger.
According to the Texas Tribune, shortly after his 18th birthday the Uvalde shooter bought two AR-style rifles and according to CBS News he also purchased 1,657 rounds of ammunition, all of which is totally legal and Texas does not require a license to openly carry a rifle in public, so the teenage gunman could walk down the street carrying an AR-15 legally, but would be in trouble if instead of a deadly weapon capable of killing dozens of kids without reloading, he was holding a Lone Star beer.
That’s because the drinking age in Texas is 21 and here’s a link to a state government website that warns against underage drinking and tells you just how seriously they take it and how much trouble you’ll be in if you get caught and if you think it’s Batshit Crazy that an 18-year-old can’t buy a beer because he’s not mature enough to handle the responsibility, but can buy an AR-15, join the club.
https://www.tabc.texas.gov/texas-alcohol-laws-regulations/underage-drinking/
So let’s circle back to where we started and if you think mass shootings indicate a “mental health issue” all I can say is I totally agree with you.
Great article! Very informative and honest!
Any human that can actually kill another human with a gun or whatever is not human.