The NRA, today's useful idiot

In the June 21, 2013 Watchdog.org article, ‘Dems join NRA to push gun restrictions for mentally ill,” the author outlines the new alliance between the NRA and the Democrat Party of Florida. The article exposes the new liberal Trojan horse, i.e., “preventing firearms from falling into the hands of the mentally ill.”

No matter how innocuous the attempt to legislate away guns from anyone may appear, mentally ill or otherwise; these assaults should be aggressively fought. This is particularly so for the organization entrusted with defending the most important of all our Amendments in the Bill of Rights, without which no other right can withstand assault. If liberals have taught us anything, they have taught us that any inch yielded will ALWAYS be perverted and twisted into an unwieldy mile.

Everyone educated in how the liberal establishment operates knows only too well that this mental illness angle is nothing more than a Trojan horse for future mental gymnastics by their federal and state bureaucracies that THEY OWN lock, stock, and barrel. Liberal bureaucrats WILL change the definition of what is mentally ill over time, to increasingly green light seizure of personal weapons. Under such compromises, it’s only a question of time before we, and/or our children, are labeled mentally ill. They will label us such if we show reverence to the Judeo/Christian world view, hold dear the Bill of Rights, hold fast to the proven fact that Global Warming is nothing but a hoax, and/or don’t believe in elevating the animal kingdom to be on par with humans, etc. Only those with extremely limited intellectual horizons will suggest otherwise. Liberals are liberals. They will pervert whatever compromise we foolishly initiate with them.

Obviously if you have a “mentally ill” person living in your home, you should not have firearms.

Likewise if you have a “mentally ill” person in your apartment building.

To prevent a “mentally ill” person in your neighborhood from gaining access to firearms through burglary, you should not have firearms.

At a minimum you might be OK with a Class 5 safe with electronic dial, with 24/7 monitoring by an alarm company. unless you ever took an antidepressant or said “I am anxious” to an MD.

My sister has schizophrenia. She hears voices telling her to do things. While married to a man with about 50 guns and a carry instructor, she had a particularly bad time. She pulled a gun on a cop and was arrested and held for 3 days to see if she was a danger to herself or someone else. THEY LET HER COME HOME! Her husband left her and she basically became homeless. She moved in with my mother later and lived there for a couple of years. I told my mother she need to get some help, but mom said she could handle it. She griped to a neighbor about something and called the cops. The police showed up and she began to fight with the police. They again held her for 3 days. She called mom to come get her and they let her go again.

My mom later had a stroke and died and my sister had no place to live again. Mom's house was repo'd and I got to go clean the house out. In my sister's room, she had 2 pistols the whole time she lived with my mom. It was a miracle, IMO, that they were never used.

I'm as Second Amendment as you can get, but there needs to be something done for the mentally ill. No one could handle her and she would have had to admit herself into an institution. I couldn't do it, her sons couldn't do it, or her mother couldn't do it.

I'm old enough to remember when you could have someone "put away". It was abused to some extent and the places were straight out of hell. But today, the opposite is true. You can't get anyone committed and if you do, they are full.

Today, my sister is in government housing on her Social Security. I don't trust her with a butter knife but she is allowed to live in an apartment on her own. She won't go to a doctor for fear they will poison her and her sons have almost nothing to do with her. Luckily she doesn't have the money to go to a gun store to get a gun. I'm not sure if her mental illness diagnoses would even show on a background check. She's never been hospitalized for her condition, it was just on a doctor's evaluation at the jail.

As gun owners, if we don't do something in this area, we will lose our rights. People that have no feelings or can't discern what they feel will murder again. There are more and more mentally ill people coming up than ever before. I hate the idea of the government diagnosing whether or not I can defend myself, but I don't have an alternative. To allow the mentally ill to have access to weapons of any type is just asking for it. It won't surprise me if I get a call that my sister has stuck a butcher knife into one of her neighbors because God told her they was a demon. How would you like living next to that because you were poor?

No one is more pro-Second Amendment than I am. But seriously mentally ill people should not have unencumbered access to guns, for the same reason they should not have unsupervised access to knives or alcohol. Common sense dictates otherwise.

The problem is that "mental illness" is subject to abusive definition at the hands of an oppressive government (see: the history of any communist autocracy, where mere political opposition was adduced as evidence of "mental illness").

Our present Federal government is not to be trusted in this respect, and I would include many members of both parties in that group. But local authorities in large measure still can be trusted, and that is the level at which such decisions ought to be made.

I’m in a similar situation, only it is my baby sister.

She started using marijuana when still quite young, age 13, and it has affected her neurological system to a very great extent now at age 59.

She is borderline schizoid, manifesting paranoia and, by Oregon law, cannot possess firearms.

I had custody of her son, who is really reluctant to visit his mother.

Due to her being in constant pain, her doctor has prescribed daily morphine doses. To deal with the nausea, she has a license to smoke marijuana. So, she is stoned all the time at taxpayer’s expense as she is on Social Security and disability, gets State of Oregon housing allowance and food stamps.

Thankfully she doesn’t have access to firearms, and I have a restraining order against her, so she knows better than to come to my house.

I’m so sorry that your family faces this issue. It’s disheartening.

With respect, I must disagree with your conclusion. I would much rather risk the excesses of one individual against his/her small community than this government’s excesses against our entire country.

Liberals will abuse whatever extra power you give them. It’s in their nature.

Sincerely and Respectfully,

Rich P

I agree with your conclusions about libs, but my concern is about the mentally ill. It overlaps onto the Second Amendment, however. There are about 37 million people taking SSRI's( Paxil, Effexor, ect) If you look at the statistics, most of them either think of murder or suicide at some point. The docs seem to think they are helping when they write a script, but for me, it appears they just want the entire population to act like Stepford Wives. Ask someone on these if they have ever tried to get off of an SSRI. It is almost impossible for most. Most of the mass shooters are either on SSRI's or trying to get off of them. Why isn't more made out of these numbers? Many cops are on SSRI's and the drug lobby want to keep it in the background.

Now if you look at Autism and Aspergers that covers another large group of people that have difficulty relating to others.

A liberal would have a field day using meds and diagnosis to implement gun control, I understand that completely. But do gun owners keep these people in the closet just to keep the libs quiet?

I don't pretend to know what the answer is, but I do know that we, as Constitutionalists, say that evil people find a way to get a gun no matter what the law. Hiding the sick people in a corner won't work for very much longer, IMO. They will find a way to escape the corner and do damage again. I know many here would just say, "I have my carry license so I would draw down on her and per her down before she could empty her magazine on innocent people", but how often do you see that? How many innocents would fall before you got your shot off? Would one of them be you or your family? If a sick person brings 60 rounds and you get them after 2 rounds, they have still killed 2 people.

For me, the answer is to deal with these people before they become the problem. We need laws to have people like my sister evaluated and held beyond their will if they are determined to be ill. The laws could be written to be evaluated by a panel of 3 doctors to make sure it's not some sort of Star Chamber, but the power should be there to help these people even if they don't want it. The abuses back in the '50's and '60's were usually family members trying to get parents property just because they lost their keys one day. Then when they cried because they were in asylums, they were lobotomized, aka One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.

I don't think the issue will go away until we do something about the ill people that have no business being free around our children. It's not good for us and it is certainly not good for them to be homeless and persecuted. It ALWAYS ends in some sort of tragedy. The gun controllers will feast on the next tragedy and we will lose whatever credibility we might have had after the next Newtown. I say deal with the mentally ill now before gun control is forced on us. The status quo won't last.

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