First the problem was "gun violence," then the problem was "crazy people can get guns," tomorrow the problem will be something else. And, whatever the politicians and mass media identify as the problem du jour ... won't be the problem.
I think (LTC (Ret)) Dave Grossman put his finger on the real problem: "Denial." The sense that we don't need to be serious about security issues because those kinds of things "don't happen in these parts."
Then there's the fact that the anti-gun forces don't want to look at the mental health issue, because they know the only way to address it is with money, and they don't have the money. I'm old enough to have been on the board of directors of a mental health halfway house back when the push was on to de-institutionalize a lot of people. Some of those who were cast out of involuntary (and sometimes voluntary) institutions were able to survive and sort of function with the help of places such as the halfway house with which I was associated. Others, however, were clearly not able to cope with society, even with the help of halfway houses. People were booted out with no safety net, and despite all the rhetoric about how "mainstreaming is good," the real reason was simply dollars. The .gov got tired of spending the money. The .gov did the same with prisons, which is why in some parts of the country "mandatory" sentences are meaningless because the reality of prison overcrowding is that most prisoners serve less than a half of whatever their "mandatory" sentence is.
And then there are just plain lies, and parsing of the facts. December is a good example.
Immediately after the Sandy Hook incident, New York City Mayor Bloomberg proclaimed that guns were the problem, and that schools would never be safe as long as people are allowed to own guns. Yet, within the month of December, two people were murdered in two separate incidents in New York City by being shoved into the path of an approaching subway train. In addressing those incidents, Mayor Bloomberg had the following to say:
“It's a very tragic case, but what we want to focus on today is the overall safety in New York." But how can this “perspective” be such a polar opposite to the mayor’s “perspective” surrounding the school massacre? Mayor Bloomberg dismisses the two subway murders as isolated incidents, negated by an overall trend of lower violent crime. Yet, certainly, Sandy Hook was also an isolated incident. On the same day, December 14, 2012, hundreds of millions of children attended schools all across the United States and were not shot at. Logically, if we forego rhetoric and apply statistical analysis, it was far safer to attend a public school in the United States during December than it was to stand on a subway platform in New York City, yet Mayor Bloomberg’s analysis is that the schools are unsafe, but the New York subways are safe. The cognitive dissonance in that analysis is overwhelming.
In response to the second subway murder, Mayor Bloomberg also said, “I don't think you have to sit there and worry every day about getting pushed over the platform," said Bloomberg, during a press conference at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. "It is such a rare occurrence that no matter how tragic it is, it shouldn't change our lifestyle.”
But being killed in a public elementary school is also a rare occurrence, yet because of one such incident the mayor thinks we should change our lifestyle.
“I don't know that there is a ways to prevent," Bloomberg said. "There's always going to be somebody, a deranged person. You can say it's only two out of the 3 or 4 million people that ride the subway every day, but two is two too many. Unfortunately, there are people who are mentally deranged.”
Why does Mayor Bloomberg think the above statement is valid when the deranged person uses a subway as his/her weapon, but the statement is not valid when the deranged person uses a firearm? The Sandy Hook shooter was undeniably someone with mental issues, yet Mayor Bloomberg is willing to ignore that fact when it is convenient for him to focus on the gun used by the assailant so that he can use the incident to further his irrational attack on the Constitutional right to keep and bear arms. Yet, when incidents occur within his own bailiwick, the mayor is perfectly willing to parse the statistics, marginalize the victims, and proclaim that there’s nothing to worry about.
Mayor Bloomberg’s hypocrisy knows no bounds. Unfortunately, that same hypocrisy permeates the entire ranks of those who seeks to demonize inanimate objects and honest citizens in the furtherance of their own, selfish, paranoid agenda to circumvent the Constitution of the United States and to disarm the People of the United States.
