So this story has gotten a HUGE amount of play last week by all sorts of bloggers, and Bob and Linoge both emailed it to me.
NEWBURGH, N.Y. — A 10-year-old boy clambered out the window of a minivan and swam to shore after his mother drove into the frigid Hudson River, killing herself and her three other children, officials said. A relative had called police to report a domestic dispute shortly before.
Lashaun Armstrong was the only survivor after his mother, 25-year-old Lashanda Armstrong, plunged the van into the river late Tuesday in this city 60 miles north of New York City….In the van with Lashanda Armstrong were Landon Pierre, 5, Lance Pierre, 2, and 11-month-old Lainaina Pierre, police said. Her husband and the father of the three dead children, Jean Pierre, was questioned. Police would not give details of the interview or say if the father had been charged with anything.
So 4 kids, one survived, and psycho Mom committed suicide…yet no guns were use, so this isn’t a “Gun Death”. Doesn’t count I guess. So this isn’t a tragic story?
Have your noticed the complicity of the media in the “gun death” hype?
Here is a tragic story, which admittedly had gotten some air time, but how many more stations, how many more times would the story have aired if she had used a firearm?
The Antis can talk about gun control all they want but they show their true stripes when they talk about requiring everyone to have mental health exams — they don’t want to control firearms they want to control people.
Love their hypocrisy though — every time I ask a gun owner like Joan Peterson if she has registered her firearms, if she submitted to a background check or mental health exam — silence reigns.
Yeah well Bonomo has been pushing a “One Strike and You’re Out” buzz…except it ONLY counts to gun owners….because if it counted for OTHER crimes he might be in jail.
I think the big failing with mental health checks is that they don’t work for everything. It’ll catch the very obviously crazies, but not the more subtle ones. They’re looking at violence in the wrong way; it’s not strictly a mental defect or some kind of disease, some people are simply evil. They’re also going to know enough not to let anything bad slip. Mental health checks for this sort of thing are a feel good measure.
(Note: my comments below only deal with practical concerns, rather than with philosophical concerns about mental health checks as a condition to exercising one’s inherent right to self defense, as enumerated in the Second Amendment.)
The much larger failing with mental health checks as a condition to exercising one’s rights is the likelihood that many mental health professionals would view an interest in owning firearms as self-evident evidence of mental unfitness to own firearms. As Exhibit A in support, I submit the frequent use of terms like “gun nuts” and “gunloons” in Reasoned Discourse [TM].
Another huge problem with mental health checks is the possibility that a mental health professional might be held responsible, in civil and/or criminal court, for passing someone who then goes on to use a firearm in the commission of a felony. With such a disincentive to give a prospective gun owner a psychological upcheck, how often do you think that mental health checks would actually pass someone without political or other connections?
And you will note that while the pro-rights webloggers have held this up as an example of the double-standards displayed by the anti-rights cultists, those same hoplophobes have hardly mentioned this incident, if at all.
Why is that? Oh right. Because this one incident, and the four unfortunate deaths in it, completely perforates their entire argument, and without that argument, they are nothing (thanks to their inherent narcissism). Nice little microcosmic example of the differences between one side and the other, this…