Two things converging

in the shooting of Representative Giffords that I do not understand.  

Guns. I don’t think for a moment after re-reading the Second Amendment to our Constitution that that language has anything to do with an individual’s right to carry a weapon except in the context of participating in a state sanctioned militia. Furthermore, if it is not possible to ban hand gun ownership outright, why then can’t we as a society take the time to consider the implications of issuing a permit to someone to own a gun. If someone sensible had met this crazy bastard before he was given a gun wouldn’t they have suggested he not get be allowed to get one.

Which brings me to my second point: everyone seems to have known this guy was crazy. One lady from a community college class even wrote about how he was likely to appear in the news for killing people! She asked that he be removed from the class. The army, for Christ’s sake, wouldn’t take him! His parents certainly must have known he was paranoid and schizophrenic. Do they live under a rock? Why was there no record of how crazy he was so that he could have been stopped from buying a gun. More importantly, why wasn’t he locked up? Perhaps because deciding such unpleasant things doesn’t appear to be anyone group’s responsibility. Certainly the community college he attended and that asked him to leave and not come back until he had undergone mental health therapy didn’t feel they should report that to anyone and maybe, in the current framework, there was no one to report it to.

This society is terribly afraid to offend nuts who insist on the “right” to own guns and just plain old nuts in any context. The gun lobby, on behalf of gun manufacturers, is a big political bully. Probably the first and worst of the groups to start this intimidation approach to politics. We listen to sophistry like “guns don’t kill people, people do” and allow that foolishness to cause us to give every crazy person in America who wants one a gun. We decry the violence by drug gangs in Mexico but praise our gun laws that allow all those machine guns to be sold to the drug cartel’s straw men in Arizona and Texas and New Mexico!

We eliminated the State Hospitals for the mentally ill because they did such an awful job. Everyone in future was to receive care in their community. But at the same time we developed this mistaken notion that admittedly crazy people should be the only ones making decisions about their care, medication, lives in general. A noble, very noble thought, but ridiculous on the face of it. Crazy, even.

One of our current failings as a society is this general, immobilizing feeling that to infringe on anyone’s civil rights, even for a moment of reflection, even when the right claimed is exceedingly questionable, is wrong. Whether the person in question is a Muslim at an airport, an obviously deeply disturbed student in a classroom or an angry person demanding a gun, we fail to take a moment to discover if any danger exists. And then we wonder why nine year old children get shot outside a supermarket.