Another Plague

[RANT]

This is different that the COVID plague that we just went through, this one is a mental health illness. It is a fetish that is not in the DSM but should be.

How Insane is Gun Insanity?
HuffPost
By Charlie Allenson
March 3, 2017


It’s hard to describe. There’s no listing in the DSM 5 (that’s the big red book shrinks use to diagnose mental, emotional, and psychological conditions). There is a listing in the Handbook of Clinical Sexuality for Mental Health Professionals. It’s called hoplophilia.

I think that people who have a compulsion to own dozens and thousand of rounds of ammunition, I am not talking about people who own a couple of guns for protection. I am talking about those who are paranoid about the government, those who worry about the “black helicopters.” Those who must always be carrying automatic weapons I think have a screw loose.

At least 22 people shot, 2 fatally, after assailants get out of an SUV and fire assault rifles at a club, police say
CNN
By Raza Razek, Holly Yan and Laura James
May 30, 2021


Police are asking for the public's help in finding whoever opened fire at a Florida club Sunday, killing at least two people and wounding at least 20 more, Miami-Dade police director Alfredo Ramirez III said.

Shortly after midnight, a white Nissan Pathfinder pulled up to the El Mula Banquet Hall near Hialeah.

That's when three people "stepped out of the vehicle with assault rifles and handguns and started firing indiscriminately into the crowd," Ramirez said.

A Miami-Dade officer covers a body outside a club that was rented out for a concert.

As a country we are insane.

I am in my early 70s and I never had a need to own a gun, I have used guns. At a friend’s house we used to shot woodchucks in his corn fields, I took skeet shooting in college.

The latest insanity comes out of Texas…

Texas State Rep. Moody On Bill That Would Allow Anyone To Carry A Handgun Without A Permit, License
WBUR
By Peter O'Dowd and Allison Hagan
May 28, 2021


Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has said he will sign the permitless carry bill headed to his desk, which would allow anyone over 21 in the state to carry a handgun without a permit or license.

The majority of Texans oppose the measure, as do many state and local police. Texas would be the 20th state to adopt a permitless carry law.

Critics of the so-called constitutional carry law, including many in law enforcement, say it will put citizens and first responders at risk at a time when there's a nationwide surge in gun violence. But supporters maintain it protects Texans' constitutional right to carry handguns to defend themselves.

Connecticut has some of the toughest gun laws in the nation and so far they have passed mustard in the courts and ranks 45 in gun deaths, while Texas ranks 28 in gun deaths and the top five states with gun deaths… Alaska, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Montana.

When the US banned semiautomatic weapons the death rate dropped.

The U.S. Has Restricted Assault-Style Weapons Before. Did It Work?
NPR
March 28, 2021


In the wake of recent gun massacres, President Biden is renewing calls for limits on assault-style weapons. What impact did the ten year federal ban on those weapons have on mass shootings?
[…]
WESTERVELT: Mass shootings, Brown says, are a smaller part of the nation's much larger gun problem. Some 70% of gun homicides involve a handgun, not an assault-style rifle. And more than half of all suicides involve firearms. And there are nearly 400 million firearms already in circulation in America. But in at least 10 mass shootings in the last decade, including four of the Top 5 deadliest, some form of semiautomatic assault-style rifle was used, and most of them involved large-capacity magazines. New restrictions, Brown argues, would help protect the public.

And now Florida.

WESTERVELT: John Donohue, who has studied the issue, is the Carlsmith Professor of Law at Stanford University. Recent research, including his, shows that in the decade after the ban was lifted, mass killing fatalities increased dramatically, even as overall violent crime trended downward. And in the last five years, Donohue points out, if you remove the lost pandemic year, mass shooting fatalities in which assault-style rifles were used have mushroomed.

The Republicans have been packing the courts with anti-abortion, anti-:GBTQ+, and pro-gun judges since Reagan. The website Thoughts CO reported that…

A more lasting impact of Reagan’s policy on guns was the nomination of several Supreme Court justices. Of the four justices nominated by Reagan—Sandra Day O’Connor, William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy—the latter two were still on the bench for a pair of important Supreme Court rulings on gun rights in the 2000s: District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008 and McDonald v. Chicago in 2010.

On this Memorial Day let us not only remember our service men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country but also all those civilians who lost their lives to gun violence, and let us all work to end gun violence.

[/RANT]