Why Do Republicans Hate Americans With Mental Illness

Why Do Republicans Hate Americans With Mental Illness

Among the vulnerable populations Friday's automatic cuts affect, the mentally ill will be among the hardest hit.

If you've been reading The New York Times, The Washington Post and hearing statements by Republicans denouncing the sequester "hype," you may have been lulled into thinking that it won't be so bad after all. The country has apparently reacted with a "collective yawn" to the $85 billion across-the-board cuts that began last Friday, the Associated Press proclaims. "The sword of Damocles turns out to be made of Styrofoam," the Times reports.

But the sword feels much sharper for families, advocates, and local officials who rely on government funding to treat and care for those with mental illness. Starting April 1, cuts to the Mental Health Block Grant program alone will deprive over 373,000 seriously mentally ill and seriously emotional disturbed children of services, according to a White House fact sheet. Experts also say that nearly 9,000 homeless people with serious mental illness won't receive the outreach and social-work assistance offered by PATH, a vital federally funded program that helps 90,000 people a year to transition to permanent housing. The big picture for the crisis: Disoriented, suffering people may end up jailed, or resort to suicide because the wait for treatment is too long. "We know fewer people will get services and more people will end up in the forensic [justice] system and on the street," says Debbie Plotnick, senior director of state policy for Mental Health America (MHA), a mental-health advocacy group.

While the sequester cuts are projected to harm the beneficiaries and employees of a broad array of programs, the mentally ill are perhaps our most vulnerable citizens. All flat cuts aren't created equal; a furlough for a Reston, Virginia, Defense Department worker doesn't have the same consequences as it does for a young man with severe bipolar disorder waiting an extra month to see a psychiatrist.

But hey that is what freedom is right? Using economic means to make people suffer. Let the mentally ill survive or die is the conservative creed. Pretty much the same think Stalin, Hitler and Mao believed.

Guns Don't Kill People, Video Games Kill People

NRA Blames Everything Except Guns: Outdated Video Games and Hurricanes. Everything except guns.

The National Rifle Association, the nation’s largest gun advocates lobby, attributed the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, to “school free zones,” arguing that “genuine monsters” are attracted to schools because its administrators and teachers are not armed. “Politicians pass laws for gun free school zones, they issue press releases bragging about them,” NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said. “And, in doing so, they tell every insane killer in America that schools are the safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk.”

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” LaPierre declared and urged Congress to “act immediately to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation.” The lobby will create a “National School Shield Program” that will help schools respond to attacks, led by former Rep. Asa Hutchinson (R-AR).

In a news conference repeatedly interrupted by protesters blaming the NRA for “killing our kids,” LaPierre shoveled out blame far and wide, going after reporters for glorifying killers like Adam Lanza, violent movies, video games, and music videos. He tore into gun safety advocates for exploiting the tragedy for “political gain,” targeted President Obama for underfunding police initiatives in schools, and said that the media demonized “local gun owners” and spread “misinformation and dishonest thinking that only delay meaningful action and all but guarantee that the next violence is a new cycle away.” “Add another hurricane, terrorist attack, or some other natural of man-made disaster, and you’ve got a recipe for a national nightmare of violence and victimization,” he said.

Only gun owners and gun lobbyists — who have spent years easing gun regulations across the country — were spared any responsibility.

All of this weird and wacky blame games is to fight against, not some reasonable restrictions on guns -like renewing the assault weapons ban ( originally signed into law by Bush 41), but Wayne is arguing against any and every kind of restriction. We have some reasonable limits on speech - like you cannot call in fake emergencies or accuse an innocent person of something that affects their ability to make a living. Conservatives seem incapable of having any rational discussions about almost every issue, especially guns that they worship like hand held gods. 4 dead in Blair Co. shooting; 3 troopers injured.

Postscript: Robert Bork, 1927-2012. Bork was a reprehensible conservative reactionary.

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2. Guns don't kill people, people kill people.

Maybe, but people with guns kill many, many more people than they would if they didn't have guns, and guns designed to kill as many people as possible. We don't know if the murderer in Newtown was suffering from a suicidal depression, but many mass shooters in the past were. And guess what? People suffer from suicidal depression everywhere in the world. People get angry and upset everywhere in the world. But there aren't mass shootings every few weeks in England or Costa Rica or Japan, and the reason is that people in those places who have these impulses don't have an easy way to access lethal weapons and unlimited ammunition. But if you want to kill large numbers of people and you happen to be an American, you'll find it easy to do.
3. If only everybody around was armed, an ordinary civilian could take out a mass killer before he got too far.

If that were true, then how come it never happens? The truth is that in a chaotic situation, even highly trained police officers often kill bystanders. The idea that some accountant who spent a few hours at the range would suddenly turn into Jason Bourne and take out the killer without doing more harm than good has no basis in reality.
4. We don't need more laws, we just need to enforce the laws we have.

The people who say this are the same ones who fight to make sure that existing laws are as weak and ineffectual as possible. Our current gun laws are riddled with loopholes and allow people to amass enormous arsenals of military-style weapons with virtually no restrictions.
5. Criminals will always find a way to get guns no matter what measures we take, so what's the point?

The question isn't whether we could snap our fingers and make every gun disappear. It's whether we can make it harder for criminals to get guns, and harder for an unbalanced person with murderous intent to kill so many people. The goal is to reduce violence as much as possible. There's no other problem for which we'd say if we can't solve it completely and forever we shouldn't even try.
6. The Constitution says I have a right to own guns.

Yes it does, but for some reason gun advocates think that the right to bear arms is the only constitutional right that is virtually without limit. You have the right to practice your religion, but not if your religion involves human sacrifice. You have the right to free speech, but you can still be prosecuted for incitement or conspiracy, and you can be sued for libel. Every right is subject to limitation when it begins to threaten others, and the Supreme Court has affirmed that even though there is an individual right to gun ownership, the government can put reasonable restrictions on that right.

We do have the right to have guns. That in no way means that we cannot have sensible gun laws - background checks, limiting the size of ammo clips, or having gun free zones. Better gun laws will not solve the problem by itself,  In the Wake of Another Mass Shooting, Let's Talk About America's Dangerously Gutted Mental Healthcare System

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