How do we know who has mental problems? – it all depends upon where you start. In the US public theatre, the same behaviour might be considered quirky, eccentric, around the bend, crazy, deranged, insane, or socialist – or perfectly acceptable and normal.
As a Republican web site wrote, rather unsympathetically:
When they are treated, the seriously mentally ill aren't more violent than the general population. If untreated, though, they are. The evidence is in our ongoing roll call of horrors perpetrated by the deranged.There are many types of “deranged” persons – schizophrenics, paranoids, and the list goes on. Paranoid thinking reveals anxiety or fear, often to the point of irrationality and delusion, and this seems to indicate paranoia (or is simply an eccentric point of view?):
The President will offer the Second Amendment lip service and hit the campaign trail claiming he has actually been good for gun owners. But it’s a big, fat, stinking lie — just like all the other lies that have come out of this corrupt administration. It’s all part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment. — Wayne LaPierre, “WAYNE LAPIERRE AT CPAC FLORIDA”, 23 September 2011LaPierre asks his supporters to vote Republican. From the same LaPierre, and even more controlling when we realize that he does not want a national database of firearms:
A dozen more killers? A hundred? More? How can we possibly even guess how many, given our nation's refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill? — Wayne LaPierre, NRA Press Conference, 21 December 2012 [My emphasis.]In the same press conference, we are told that “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” and for children “we must give them the greatest level of protection possible and the security that is only available with a properly trained – armed – good guy” (his emphasis). He also feels that with the advent of:
… another hurricane, terrorist attack or some other natural or man-made disaster, and you've got a recipe for a national nightmare of violence and victimization.LaPierre considers retired police, retired military or rescue personnel as potential good guys, but forgets that after Katrina a good deal of violence and victimization was due to police and allied agencies, or self-appointed civilian bands of “guardians”, over-reacting and over-reaching. It’s not that simple – who should we fear? [See “Guns don’t kill people, shooters kill people”.]
Was the Newtown shooter a terrorist? Perhaps not, but people were terrified. Was he simply a monster walking amongst us? In the press conference LaPierre asserted that American airports and other places are protected by armed security, but children are left defenceless –
… and the monsters and predators of this world know it and exploit it. … The truth is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters — people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them. They walk among us every day. … With all the foreign aid, with all the money in the federal budget, we can’t afford to put a police officer in every school? [Original emphasis, my emphasis.]LaPierre appears to be xenophobic (why single out foreign aid?), and this has been the case for many years. Terrorists who fly planes into skyscrapers were monsters (and they walked amongst us), but LaPierre used to think, in his perturbed way (“a few million illegal aliens”) that extra security is unnecessary for most people:
Who’re we fooling? Terrorists fit into fairly narrow categories of gender, age, nationality and religion. And what about the millions of people who are in this country illegally? Just because they're on American soil, are they entitled to the same degree of liberty and privacy as a Medal of Honor winner, or a high school cheerleader, or you, or me? No! I say, if anyone’s going to lose freedoms, make it the illegal aliens. Not my mother, your daughter, our pilots or war heroes. If anyone deserves a little extra scrutiny after September 11th, it ought to be a few million illegal aliens. And we shouldn't have to x-ray, frisk and humiliate honest Americans to justify it! — Wayne LaPierre, “Frightened, or Free?”, February 2002 [My emphasis.]Slippery as an eel.
In retrospect it seems obvious that there was something not quite right about Timothy McVeigh – the man (terrorist? monster?) responsible for the 1995 bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City. As far back as February 1992 he wrote a letter to a local newspaper, parts of which read:
Crime is so out of control. Criminals have no fear of punishment. Prisons are overcrowded so they know they will not be imprisoned long. This breeds more crime, in an escalating cyclic pattern. Taxes are a joke. Regardless of what a political candidate "promises," they will increase. More taxes are always the answer to government mismanagement. They mess up. We suffer. Taxes are reaching cataclysmic levels, with no slowdown in sight. The "American Dream" of the middle class has all but disappeared, substituted with people struggling just to buy next week's groceries. Heaven forbid the car breaks down! … Remember, government-sponsored health care was a communist idea.McVeigh’s ramblings seem to have many reflections in contemporary Republican and Tea Party pronouncements.
Without comment:
“If it’s crazy to call for putting police in and securing our schools to protect our children, then call me crazy,” LaPierre told NBC’s David Gregory [“Meet the Press” on 2012-12-23]. “I think the American people think it’s crazy not to do it. It’s the one thing that would keep people safe and the NRA is going try to do that.”
No comments:
Post a Comment