Agenda Driven False Dichotomy

Here’s an interesting article:

The National Institutes of Health estimates that over ΒΌ of persons 18 years and older in the US suffer from some type of mental health disorder. The World Health Organization indicates that this is the highest percentage in the world. Even though the statistics may be somewhat biased because mental health issues are likely reported more frequently in the United States than elsewhere, it is still an alarming number.

The US percentage compared to the world is a total crap number. This all depends on how much a nation cares and treats mental illness, as well as how they define it. I remember being told by a Georgian exchange student that the nation of Georgia had NO (ZERO) homosexuals. None, just how it is! NO! It just meant that homosexuals were (and still are) persecuted so much that they are forced to hide their sexual identity for their own well-being.

Now let’s talk about what defines “Mental Illness”, in the United States it covers just about EVERYTHING! Your’s truly is “Mentally Ill”, tho I don’t label myself as such. I have ADD, Oh no, the horror! These illnesses can range from debilitating diseases like severe schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, to simple anxiety and attention deficit disorders. This leads to the next part:

The issue becomes even more concerning when you combine the mental health problem with the wide availability of fire arms. There are currently about 270 million firearms in the United States, and they are relatively easy to acquire.

How concerning? I mean how much of the violent crime is related to mentally ill people with guns? Sean added to a recent post of mine showing that the majority of violent crime in America is directly related to criminals in the drug trade and the related gang system.

This isn’t people shooting because there are voices in their head, these are people operating outside the rule of law protecting a business that is banned by the United States Government, and heavily enforced at the local level.

If you sell cars and somebody fails to make the promised payment for a vehicle sold you can call the police or take them to court. If somebody fails to pay for the kilo of coke you sold them, your only recourse is to take matters into your own hand.

It’s anti-social, but it’s also highly logical. It’s SANE violent behavior. This is just made-up agenda-driven fear-mongering.

If you couldn’t tell what flag this author is flying there’s this:

The NRA and the irrational cult of fire arms in our country has contributed to not allowing background checks to be implemented for people wanting to purchase fire arms.

Ahh gun owners are an “Irrational Cult”, sounds like they’re a bunch of nut-jobs!

This is the no-true Scotsman fallacy! You see if you want guns, or support the Second Amendment as it is written and interpreted by the courts you’re crazy…and probably shouldn’t have guns!

He also goes on with the tired “Well we register cars!” crap…yeah we’ve played that game!

Why do they make all these convoluted arguments when they could just say “Let’s ban all guns!”

We all know why!

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9 Responses to Agenda Driven False Dichotomy

  1. Jack/OH says:

    That does look like a no-true-Scotsman, equivocation, shifting ground, not sure of your premises deal.
    Statement: Only NRA members and irrational people want firearms.
    Reply: Joe Six-pack down the street owns firearms and he seems rational.
    Rejoinder: Only TRULY rational people reject buying firearms.
    Conclusion (I guess): The only people who ought to be allowed firearms are those who do not want to buy them.

    Whatever, y’know. I read his essay, and his suggestion elsewhere for a “rational” gun policy. Standard-issue back-door confiscation stuff. Then, again, he adds “maybe we are all affe

    The question of government registration of property (vs., say, personal registration of serial numbers and other identifying marks), and licensure needs a real pro, which I’m not. Registration of property and licensure of property users are not slam-dunk, no-brainer good things, as the anti-gunners seem to think.

  2. Jack/OH says:

    My bad above. I meant to add that the anti-gun essayist writes, “maybe we are all affected by mental disease . . . .” Whaddya gonna do?

  3. Anonymous says:

    Well, remember also, that “mental health” is a huge, enormously profitable industry in the US. We put four-year-old Timmy in a preschool classroom and try to force him to sit still and learn to play the violin, or conjugate Japanese verbs. In a sane world, any child who didn’t fidget under those circumstances should be checked for a pulse. But we get out the big rubber stamp that says “MENTALLY ILL: ADHD” and pump him full of speed. Ding! goes the cash register. Count that money, Chumley.

    All of this is hard-sold to us, pushed by the agitprop box in the living room, not just by television commercials for prescription drugs but also by this stuff getting written liberally into the script of damn near everything on TV since the 1990s. That makes being dependent on your daily dose “normal,” because the fictional characters on TV do it too. That makes parenting-by-pill “normal,” because the fictional characters on TV do it too. It’s a hundred Sunday supplement articles, and pop-psychology paperbacks, their online equivalents, saying “Unleash the creative power of your multiple personalities!” and “Embrace your autistic gifts!” and “Unlock the creative wellspring that is depression!”

    Looking through an encyclopedia or a textbook of clinical psychiatry from around 1970 is sobering. “Autism” was only the label for a tiny, tiny number of severely disturbed children who never learned to speak, communicate, dress, or feed themselves, for example. “ADHD” wasn’t stuck on every fidgety kid whose lazy parents failed to discipline him. The very concepts didn’t exist a century ago.

    I believe that there are two major underlying causes driving this phenomenon. The first, and by far the more significant, is the Gramscian social Bolshevism of the far Left. A culture of self-reliant individuals would object to Scientific Socialism. So, they seek, in nihilistic fashion, to destroy every pillar of our society. They declare the sane, normal, and honorable to be insane, and champion disgusting people and practices as normal. Out with the responsible, self-reliant individual. In with the bleating hind-gut fermenters that can’t function from minute to minute without Prozac in the drinking water, who for their own good and the good of society require constant supervision by the compassionate Nanny State and could never be trusted with guns, or letter openers, or a book of matches, or…

    And they’re the ones writing the scripts for the soap operas and the sitcoms and the “reality television” shows that people Krazy-glue their eyeballs too for half their waking lives. These are the people who still, more than twenty years after the Berlin Wall came down and all the world got to see the horrors of the Gulag and the Lubyanka, still openly express admiration and nostalgia for the Soviet model–which model included as a feature I get the impression they especially like, state psychiatrists labeling anyone who disagreed or objected as a madman who had to be imprisoned to protect public safety.

    Secondarily, and by a significant amount, this is all tremendously profitable for Big Pharma and the Therapy Racket. Everyone, everywhere, is mentally ill! It’s an epidemic! Have you had your PILLS today? Will that be cash or charge? Ding! goes the cash register.

  4. Jack/OH says:

    Thanks, anon. You’re right. Does it take any brains to imagine an aggressive and mischief-making anti-gun bureaucracy insisting on a full medical work-up with current prescriptions plus a psych eval to be placed in some data base before purchasing a firearm? Toss in an ever-increasing list of red flags requiring a denial of transaction. Yet, none of the red flags may have anything to do with the capacity to lawfully use a firearm. My sister has occasional migraines–should she be denied a firearm? There’s a blind guy I know who lives in a rough part of town. Although blind, he’s capable of a belly shot against an assailant who’s right up against him. Should he be denied a firearm because it’s “just plain obvious” blind folks shouldn’t have firearms? (I’m willing to be corrected if I’m wrong about blind folks and guns.)

    Again, Weer’d and all the commenters are dead on. The anti-gunners are big-time dishonest–they want confiscation: front door, back door, any which way.

    See “Raging Against Self-Defense: A Psychiatrist Examines the Anti-Gun Mentality” for a psychiatrist’s look at anti-gunners. It’s on the Web, multiple sites. If my memory’s okay, the doctor’s name is Thompson.

  5. Bubblehead Les says:

    Beware! These are the types of Junk Science Studies that get used to write Legislation.

    So, if the Uber-Libs ever get to control the House, Senate and 1600 Penn. Ave like they did from Jan 2009-Jan 2011, look out! Recall that the Soviet Union used to Lock up Political Dissenters in the Psych Ward, because “Anyone who was against the Communist Utopia MUST be Insane.” And since there’s a whole lot of Lenin-Wannabees in power nowadays….

    • Weerd Beard says:

      That is how they frame it. “Mentally Ill People have committed acts of mass murder. America is one-quarter ‘Mentally ill’ by a very loose and broad definition. We NEED to ban guns from the mentally ill! IF IT SAVES JUST ONE LIFE!!!11!”

      It’s the same thing with vets having a higher rate of suicide due to PTSD….so the anti-rights solution is make everybody who has served relinquish their 2nd Amendment rights!

      They want to ban ALL GUNS, and they’ll take whatever means necessary to reach that goal.

      • Jack/OH says:

        Bubblehead, Weer’d, you got it. The anti-freedom people are shopping for any opportunistic arguments. The guns-as-public-health model of thinking seems to me completely unsupportable and deranged. What concerns me is whether they’ll get something out of nowhere that makes their lunatic thinking politically possible.

        I’m thinking how the Prohibitionists capitalized on WWI feeling against Germans (beer), Italians during the first year (wine), and Russians during the Revolution (vodka, other hard liquor) to drive their agenda until they got the 18th Amendment.

    • Anonymous says:

      Pretty much. And the Internet is full of “scholarly discussion” already.

      Go to your favorite search engine and search for “autism” + “conservatism.” You will find lots of scholarly papers, published in respected journals, stating rather baldly that the symptoms of “autism spectrum disorders” include a distaste for government meddling in one’s life and lack of “empathy,” by which they mean, enthusiasm for being held at gunpoint by the State and forced to subsidize other people’s ill-considered life choices.

      Once upon a time “autism” meant a child had reached the age of five or six and never learned to speak, or dress himself, or feed himself, and did nothing but sit on the floor and spin around, or sit in the corner and smack his head repeatedly against the wall. Now it’s a term of opprobrium used against anyone who’s insufficiently enthusiastic about The Movement.

      And these people have the ears of the ones who write the laws.

      The groundwork is being laid. It is later than you think.

      • Jack/OH says:

        Anon., I half-agree. I agree because Joan and Mr. Salazar both seem shameless or unaware that they’re just tossing out word salad. Maybe they actually do have an audience for that gibberish in their own minds.

        I disagree because I believe there are enough people who recognize just how much trouble there’d be if their thinking were taken seriously.

        Theodor Adorno’s “The Authoritarian Personality”, I’ve been told, is one of the earliest books to say something like “your political rival isn’t misguided, he’s clinically nuts”. Adorno was way Left.

        Bubblehead’s reference to the Soviet Union’s “psychiatrization” of dissent is right on point.

        BTW-if the whole apparatus of gun control were repealed, and lawful gun culture re-popularized, would America be a better place or a worse place? Just a thought experiment question.

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