Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:
Problem: people who are mentally ill and dangerous commit crimes with firearms.
Potential Solution 1: remove firearms from society. Objections: Unconstitutional under Second Amendment, difficult to implement door-to-door and as impossible to enforce as prohibition of alcohol, drugs and illegal aliens.
Potential Solution 2: remove people who are mentally ill and dangerous from society. Objections: Difficult under 1970’s Supreme Court equal protection rulings and current Minnesota law because the legal standard of proof is so high.
Recommendation: try the easier one first. Convince the Supreme Court to change the law back to the earlier standard, making it easier to remove people who are mentally ill and dangerous from society leaving the rest of us free to use firearms responsibly.
Joe Doakes
Como Park
I think Obama is going to use the classic totalitarian means of splitting the difference; calling dissenters “insane” and locking them all up.
Both problems solves – if you hate freedom.
Well, with the exception of locking them up, the Dear Leader’s regime is already doing this to veterans returning from combat. They are secretly marking them down as having mental issues and preventing them from legally purchasing firearms because they might be a risk. Sounds like a violation of the very laws that the lefties created.
1. ” impossible to enforce”. Not even close. Ever other major country manages to do it quite well. Australia even removed large #s of weapons from circulation.
2. So what percentage of the population counts as “mentally ill and dangerous” and needs to be “removed” from society? 5%? 10% We already have the highest incarcaration rates in the world, can we afford to put more people under lock and key?
Your ‘freedom’ seems to exact an ever higher cost on the rest of us.
3. How can you even begin to keep the mentally ill off the street without some system of universal healthcare?
RickDFL, you want to rid the US of guns? Fine, tell me how.
Pass a law? Few comply. Buy-backs or amnesties? A few more. Door-to-door searches, dig up gardens, probe attics, search woods? More still but what’s to stop me from moving guns out before the search and bringing them back afterwards? Declare martial law, lock down the nation, curfews, roadblocks and bring in the military to enforce it? Impose draconian penalties, suspend habeas corpus, build concentration camps to hold offenders . . . who would be willing to implement your measures and who will “cover” them while they do it?
Having seized all existing guns, how will you keep out smuggled guns when your own administration can’t keep out tons of drugs and thousands of illegal aliens? Forget the Constitutional implications, just describe the procedure that will create and maintain your gun-free utopia.
Nice chanting points, Ricky! Your libturd buddies in education have been so bent on making sure that no kid experience real life, push to mainstream kids with “special needs” as they classify them, that this is just one of the results! But, as true left wing hypocrisy has shown the rest of us sane people, the teachers blame everyone else for their failures. I know first hand the stupidity of school administrators in this state with children with learning disabilities and they are just as responsible for incidents like this as the parents are! Nancy Lanza was worried about the changes in Adam and did nothing, at least not in time, which is what most of you lazy ass libturd parents do! We’ve all seen it played out! Even with kids that don’t have the problems as you define them, God forbid one of them loses a game, because now, no one keeps score so everyone’s a winner. Sorry, but you seekers of utopia can’t change the rules-there are always winners and losers, so the sooner a kid learns that, the better they will be able to deal with life. As much as you and your ilk want to make things “fair,” life will never be fair. As far as incarcerations go, they are largely criminals, regardless of why they are there.
“Ever other major country manages to do it quite well.”
Really? Working quite well in Mexico………eh Ricky?
How many are mentally ill and dangerous? Probably about the same percentage we formerly confined in state mental institutions, before Liberals convinced us it was more humane they should be let out to wander the streets, homeless, until they commit some atrocity and we lock them in prison, which accounts for why our incarceration rate is so high. Put the mentally ill into treatment centers and prisons will have plenty of room for actual criminals. The cost should be about the same but the public safety benefits would be enormous.
“Universal health care” is a red herring. Before 1970, mental hospitals were government funded but that changed to community block grants for outpatient treatment. We don’t need universal health insurance to pay for insane asylums, just change the funding back.
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Nate for the win.
“How can you even begin to keep the mentally ill off the street without some system of universal healthcare?”
Universal, residental mental hospitals. Another problem solved!
“RickDimFrickingLeftist” opined: “Australia even removed large #s of weapons from circulation.”
Duck, dimwit…incoming:
“A young man has been shot dead in Punchbowl, the latest in a string of shootings to hit Sydney’s south-west.”
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/sydney-shooting-man-dies-at-the-scene-20121219-2bloj.html#ixzz2FRDRRr4B
“One man is dead and another is fighting for his life after a shooting in a suburban southwestern Sydney house.”
http://news.brisbanetimes.com.au/breaking-news-national/man-dies-in-suburban-sydney-shooting-20121127-2a5os.html
Another moonbat slapped to the floor with the facts….
Rick,
Fair points, all – provided you don’t dig into any of the context:
1. ” impossible to enforce”. Not even close. Ever other major country manages to do it quite well.
Right, but comparing countries is really dodgy. Leaving aside the cultural homogeneity of other countries, or differences in the way they enforce laws that lead to violent black markets, do we really want to switch to a system like Germany’s, where the accused are considered guilty until proven innocent? Or give the police powers like Japan does, which’d make the ACLU yak up their skulls?
Speaking of violent black markets…:
Australia even removed large #s of weapons from circulation.
From among the law-abiding. But gun crime has been rising – not necessarily homicides, but robberies and hot burglaries. And it’s worse in the UK.
And did you see the piece about Israeli gun laws? They “tightened” their gun laws recently – and the number of illegal guns doubled.
2. So what percentage of the population counts as “mentally ill and dangerous” and needs to be “removed” from society? 5%? 10% We already have the highest incarcaration rates in the world, can we afford to put more people under lock and key?
As has been answered elsewhere – we need to return to something like the system we had before the late ’70s, when the dangerous mentally-ill could be institutionalized. We can be more enlightened, sure – but we screwed up bad.
It’ll cut down on the number of spree killers. And leftybloggers. Win-win.
Your ‘freedom’ seems to exact an ever higher cost on the rest of us.
Not at all. We – the law-abiding gun owner – are net contributors.
3. How can you even begin to keep the mentally ill off the street without some system of universal healthcare?
Nate answered this one. Which see.
Make Medicare the default “Universal healthcare” and bag two birds at once.
You can’t reform Medicare because to do so is an attach on seniors, which they will fight. You can’t means test Medicare because middle class seniors (the ones who vote the most) know that they will be paying more. But if you offer Medicare to all, reform is absolutely essential, and it will be harder for the seniors to argue about means testing when the young are paying 80% of the premiums and the old are taking 80% of the services. The social spending which is growing fast is almost all transfers from the working young to the idle old.
So if you are a conservative, you start by offering Medicare to all. You make the annual dues for young people astronomical for the full plan, so you offer them cheaper versions of Medicare which are not fee-for-service, or high deductible and co-pay, and/or run through private insurers. Then you tell the seniors that they have to move to the cheaper versions of Medicare if they want to avoid fees, fees which are means tested. This will take a decade or more, but if we don’t pursue a path like this, the politics become impossible.
The takeaway lesson is that you can’t privatize or otherwise reform Medicare unless you make it universal, first.
Sorry to post and run, but busy.
Nate: I don’t think the desire for guns is as strong as the desire for booze or cheap labor. Pass a law and most people will comply.
BossHoss: If I wan’t to make the US more like (in one respect) other existing countries, accusing me of trying to build a “utopia” is really dumb. I seek to model real existing countries. It is the pro-gun folks who assert there could be a society with US levels of gun ownership and Euro/Japan levels of violence. Such a place exists nowhere.
Scott: If pro-gun folks are reduced to saying the U.S. can expect no better than Mexico, I will take the win.
Nate: Smarter comments, seperate post.
1. The population of people with serious mental illness is far larger than the population we could confine involuntarily to mental hospitals. You are going to need a plan for those who are mentally ill, but not confineable.
2. So, any comprehensive mental health solution would have to include outpatient treatment, conseling, and especially Rx drugs. This will be a huge price tag.
3. Do you really think it would be workable to provide mental health services and not treat other condititions e.g. diabetes? Any metal health system would have to provide comprehensive medical services.
4. I don’t think it was “liberals” who gutted the public mental health system. Ronald Reagan had a lot to do with it.
That said, if conservatives want to make a massive investement in mental health lets go for it. If you want to divert the bulk of the prison population to the mental health system full speed ahead.
Mitch:
Interested in why you think lack of “cultural homogeneity” makes it hard for the U.S. to enforce it’s gun laws? How does racial diversity drive a desire for firearms?
Germans does not presume guilt. The Continental/Inquisitorial system both sides start equally vs. the Anglo presumption of innocence. But I think our current criminal and civil procedures would be sufficient to enforce gun laws.
But again if you want to pay for a bulked up mental health system, full speed ahead.
Mitch:
Interested in why you think lack of “cultural homogeneity” makes it hard for the U.S. to enforce it’s gun laws? How does racial diversity drive a desire for firearms?
I said cultural, not racial. Our country has a lot of different cultures, with a lot of different views of violence. See the Scots-Irish, whose bellicose traditions (dueling, honor-killing) still track much higher than the rest of the country. They did before Independence, they did when the south was Democrat, and they do today. That’s one example.
Germans does not presume guilt. The Continental/Inquisitorial system both sides start equally vs. the Anglo presumption of innocence.
Yes, I mixed that up with Austria. But the fact remains that many European countries, and especially Japan, allow police powers and given the prosecutor powers they don’t, and shouldn’t, have in the US.
But I think our current criminal and civil procedures would be sufficient to enforce gun laws.
Sure, they should. If they use the gun laws. In Ramsey County, Susan Gaertner had access to one of the better gun-crime laws in the country. She dealt it away in every single plea deal. The “extra time for the gun” was never, ever imposed. I think it was to avoid having to share any credit with the NRA, which had helped craft the law in question.
RickDFL, thanks for the thoughful replies. A few responses:
“Nate: I don’t think the desire for guns is as strong as the desire for booze or cheap labor. Pass a law and most will comply” I disagree. You’re talking about different strata of society. These gross generalizations define the issue:
Upper-class Whites run corporations that desire cheap labor to maximize profits. They support amnesty for illegals, they use alcohol sparingly and if they shoot at all, it’s birds or simulated birds (skeet) with $5,000 shotguns. They don’t have guns for protection, they have people with guns for protection. They don’t worry about gun laws because they know there always will be a “body guard” exception so they’ll always be safe.
Middle-class of all races fear losing what they have. They worry about losing their job, about losing their pension, about someone stealing their flat screen because they know they can’t afford to replace it. They hate amnesty for illegals because cheap labor undercuts them. They use alcohol to ease the worry. Some self-segregate to Nice (read “White”) neighborhoods hoping insulation will buy protection: they own few guns so they don’t care if guns are banned. Others live where they can afford to live and buy guns for self-protection. They Will Not gladly give up their guns
Lower-class honest people of all races don’t have much to steal, they’re more worried about being injured or killed by robbers or gangsters. They don’t care about cheap labor, use alcohol to obliviate and can’t afford guns for protection. Lower-class criminals use guns as tools the way a mechanic uses wrenches: they buy the best and Will Not gladly give them up.
The people who will comply are the ones who don’t Need a gun or don’t own one anyway. The rest Will Not gladly comply. Ridding society of guns will be far harder than ridding it of alcohol, tobacco, drugs or illegal aliens.
RickDFL,
What Nate said. Beyond that? A large proportion of gun owners, myself included, add activist zeal to the mix.
The NRA exerts political clout because it has four million members that will it to. The National Beer Association or the National Single Malt Association do not.