The difference between an armed civilian and a crazed gunman is the “crazed” part. Legislative action so far focuses on the “gun” part. That’s because if any effort was made to address the “crazed” part, two things would happen:
- America would have to confront and address it’s absolutely irrational and reprehensible system of mental health.
- The left party would lose most of it’s voter base to institutions.
(That last bit is a gratuitous political joke. But to avoid any offense, an equal number of voters from the right party would also be institutionalized. Now I am a fair and balanced commentator.)
Times-Dispatch of Vichy Earth 
“The left party would lose most of it’s voter base to institutions.”
HA! I lol’ed all up in my – very left leaning – office haha but so true.
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Stolen from a comment by “Proph” on a Zippy post from 2013:
“Heh, I made a similar observation a while ago on my now-defunct “Collapse: The Blog.” The relevant post is here: http://collapsetheblog.typepad.com/blog/2011/11/the-modern-mind-and-knowledge-management.html
I argued that leftists, being crippled by a kind of spiritual autism, experience the world as a terrifying blur of knowledge and information which they are hopelessly unable to sort out and discriminate between precisely because they lack any transcendental orientation. Their response is much like the developmental autist’s when confronted with overwhelming sensory stimuli — a kind of intellectual turtling and angry lashing-out.”
Follow through on that link if y’all have never read Collapse before -he’s got some interesting stuff.
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I suppose… I think part of the reason for giving citizens guns is that it would give them the power to fight tyranny. I’m not sure I would say “crazed” so far as “wicked”. Some people with guns are bad people. Others are good people. I do, however, see the reason to regulate guns in the possession of people who have committed violent crimes.
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Proph was once upon a time a contributor to the Orthosphere, I wonder what happened to him. He hasn’t posted or commented for as long as I’ve been reading there–which is, admittedly, not long. Thank you for the link! Interesting filter, too.
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“The power to fight tyranny”–according to whom? That is the challenge of classical liberalism: who gets to decide what is or is not tyranny? Many people who use the term in political rhetoric do not understand it or have a clear definition of it. Much of the early work of my blog was in untangling that definition. What I came to is that Tyranny is a positive assertion of some moral evil as some moral good, or vice versa. And for that, we need a coherent working definition of good or evil.
Some gunmen are crazed, some gunmen are wicked (or evil)–but it is better to assume crazed, because no person is entirely evil. Opportunity must exist for their conversion, repentance, and penance.
Yes, preventing violent criminals from owning advanced weaponry is a basic no-brainer. I am not a Gun Universalist, but neither do I give guns the sacramental value that most casual political observers in America do.
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I think I first heard that argument from Socrates (through the lens of Plato, of course). Fair points. Some people seem to think of the State as the moral-law-giver generally. Still, we know it isn’t. I agree about the difference, but we must still remember that all humans, however insane, still have free will to choose whether or not to shoot someone (unless, of course, they are so crazed that they think everyone is actively attacking them).
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I will consider myself to have stumbled into their good company if Socrates and Plato were making similar points.
“Some people seem to think of the state as the moral-law-giver”–DEFINITELY, and well said. The State has usurped that authority from God and muddied the waters on what exactly morality is. There is a difference between what is Good and what is Legal. Many people do not acknowledge that difference.
You are right, of course, that people will still have the free will–but I think properly construed mental health care would go a LONG way to screening out the actually crazy, and God willing if we make some actual reforms to our health care it would mean we as a culture have begun to adopt some set of values that one might describe as properly ordered towards God.
A guy can dream, right?
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Yes, agreed. As for the thing about mental health, you are probably correct—not that all people who are mentally unhealthy are violent, but particular mental illnesses can lead to violence.
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