I just had my breakfast, a fine Seafood Medley Quiche that the gudwife whipped up. While gobbling two servings of the delicious dish, Fox News was droning in the background, and the morning show hostess Megan Kelly was blathering on about the CT shooter's mental state. Autism and Asperger's kept coming up.
Two things:
We can only infer his mental state, we can't actually test it or quantify it.
We are entering onto a slippery slope here, and one that historically has led to implementation of dictatorship.
Josef Stalin, the worst dictator the planet has ever had to suffer, developed "Mental Health" in the USSR to mean adherence to his rule. "Mental health standards" were then enforced on the population of Russia and it's immediate neighbors. According to those "Mental Health Standards", everything from going on a local watch list to death at hard labor were sanctions for not being "Mentally Healthy".
We are but a short step away from Stalin's system.
Yes, we need better methods of delineating dangerous crazies, getting them help, seeing that they take the help offered, and keeping guns from them until they are well again. I think we all can accept that.
What we can't accept is any form of political control in the disguise of a "Mental Health" initiative. The Administration has already done that, defining PTSD as "crazy" after the Virginia Tech mass murder. The military, under orders of the Commander in Chief, then developed a system of assuming that everyone who has seen combat has PTSD until proven free of it. That's wrong, but after the horror of Virginia State, even the NRA was schmoozed into buying off on it. Now we prepare to do the same with various mental states, the majority of which are very minor, and which cause few problems in the perople who have these conditions. You may yell "Whoopee" as you slide your tobaggan down this slippery slope, President Obama, but those of us with historical perspective, and especially those of us with some Russian blood, are convinced that there is more likely to be dictatorship than salvation in this onrushing system.
Got that, Mister President?
I knew you would understand it. Dictatorship in any form is unacceptable in the USA, and it matters not whether the dictator's men wear soldier's coats or white coats. Ignore this, and soon we will be pining for the relatively-peaceful days of Columbine, Virginia Tech and Newtown.
Oh, by the way, Mister President, Scotland had a school massacre a while back, resulting in even stronger gun regulation in that already disarmed part of England. Gun crime has shot up since then, It has likewise shot up in Australia, Mister President.
As I said right after Newtown, this isn't going to be about gun control unless it's just a pretext for that. The discussion needs to be about Crazy control, but there is just as much danger to the USA's freedom there. We tread very carefully now, or we lose it all.
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