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This state bill was to keep guns out of the hands of mentally ill. It achieved a roadblock when the idea was broached that mentally ill people would not seek help if it meant the loss of their guns…
The bill was voted down on this fallacy.
If someone is mentally ill and has guns, there are four possibilities… Four….
Mentally ill with guns and bullets // Mentally ill without guns and bullets.
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Mentally healthy with guns and bullets // Mentally healthy without guns and bullets
Of those four possibilities stretching across the plateau of human existence, only one is dangerous to fellow human beings…
A mentally ill person who has guns and bullets….
Now that we have isolated the problem… Let us look at it more closely….. we again divide by the four possibilities…
Mentally ill will get help and use his arsenal // Mentally ill will get help and not use his arsenal
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Mentally ill will not get help and use his arsenal // Mentally ill will not get help and not use his arsenal.
Of those four possibilities we now have two that are dangerous to innocent human beings.
Mentally ill who will get help and still use his arsenal, and Mentally ill who do not get help and will still use their arsenal….
Therefore across the panel of humanity, all races, all genders, all classes, every non-accidental shooting death is caused by the hand of a mentally ill person owning a firearm, whether under treatment or not…
Most of the more famous murderers in history have had treatment for their psychosis. Most of those being treated still had access to their firearms, and for what ever reason, choose to use them….
As of this point in history,… as far as I can find on today’s search engines,… there has never been a gun-caused mass murder by someone who had no access to guns…
Again, people in psychiatric care have blown other people away; people without guns, have never done so…..
Only one conclusion from this logical exercise can be gleaned….
If you voted to allow the continence of mentally-ill people owning guns, no matter what flimsy reason you used to assuage your guilt, you cast a vote for an upcoming future mass-murder.
If you voted to disallow the continence of mentally-ill people from owning guns, you took the only step in the right direction that would do anything to stop its re-occurrence…..
People in treatment still kill when they have guns. Without guns, one rids oneself of the problem….
The bottom line: to allow a crazy person to have a full blown arsenal, is madness. To think that allowing him to have a full blown arsenal will make him more likely to seek treatment, is not thinking straight….
There is only one solution; redo HB 88….
In passing I acknowledge that this is an emotional issue for those on both sides. When we use emotions to think, none of us think straight. If ever the time should arise where we as a society make that choice to think straight, then keeping guns out of the hands of mentally ill goes a long way to preventing mass murderers from happening: …. Logically speaking of course.
Most importantly, I’ve changed my view on mental health. I used to think it was a weakness. I now see it as a disease. I know I always accepted it as a disease, like when I talked to others, but inside, I thought since I was tough enough to beat it, others could too…. Like lifting weights to build body mass, one could rigor himself out of mental illness. Boy was I wrong.
So much came out , and particularly in the “Gun Battle” that followed, I saw that regulating guns was not the real issue. The real issue is helping those who see nothing wrong with taking other’s lives and then their own…
I used to think the rising trends of mass murders, came solely because we lost control over who bought guns… To some extent, it still is. But there was another trend of which I was then ignorant and that was how cutbacks since the Recession was and still is, ..creating more mentally unstable people…
Our society’s basic overall problems come down to this one single thing: too-little money. The self-imposed lack-of-it behind supporting government functions, means those functions are now not there, because no private entity volunteered to step up and take it on… The money needed for these programs is out there, but continues to filter up to the top 1%.
Had we had a healthy, thriving support system to deal with our mentally ill, … other choices may have been made leading up to that shooting.. Had we had the same in Aurora…. that disaster may have been prevented… Had we had the same in DC, there is a good chance the Navy Yard Shootings would never have happened….
We make choices and those choices have consequences… We consciously chose to cut taxes on the wealthy and by doing so, hasten our government into bankruptcy … I know it was a conscious decision because I was right there eloquently arguing against it… and was over ruled. Not by a lot, but by enough… It was the way they saw of making ourselves better… and often when one narrows one’s universe a little smaller, to where those things happening on the outside nolonger matter, one can make a smaller universe indeed appear better… until of course the outside comes crashing in….
As so the problems of one burned-out divorced mother trying to deal with a mentally ill child, crashed in upon the national consciousness in a sickening way. So we’ve learned:
Lesson 1: Mental illness is a security risk.. Mental illness is a disease. We need to spend lots of money to cure and contain mental illness from crashing into our lives ever again… No sliver amount of billionaire’s income is worth the loss of those children at Sandy Hook, ever again.
Secondly. Unless a shooting takes place over drugs, almost all shootings are caused by those mentally ill. Husbands, wives, children, killers, non killers, or Floridians prejudiced against hoodies… We are learning in just one year, particularly with Gun Fail publications now illuminating all the deaths around the country, that all shootings probably have mental illness at their root…..
Which practically means, if we could completely eliminate mental illness from our society, we wouldn’t have to regulate guns at all, (except for the drug warriors of course… )
But until we do… we need to keep the guns our society has chosen to make so readily available, out of the hands of those who really don’t have the same values of right or wrong as do the rest of us, particularly when it is about our lives….
In that regard, we need to hold those of red states accountable and put the blame squarely upon them, for they are the blockage of both directions at this problem… Either they open the now dry channels of dollars to fast flow towards the treating of mental illness. or they opt to tighten the free flow of guns in order to make sure that only those who are not mentally ill, can legally own them…
There is truth in the saying that criminals being criminals can always get guns if they want, because criminals aren’t worried about obeying the law…. That is entirely true.
However, the converse is also true, that if you have guns laying all over the street and readily available, more are going to get used than if it is really difficult and expensive to acquire even one… A lot of legislation designed to tighten up the easy access to guns and gun paraphernalia, was lobbied down this year…
Often by people a little mentally ill themselves (Wayne LaPierre) who fear the government of the People, for the People, and by the People, more than they fear a bullet escaping out of a gun nozzle headed their way…. Those who have the other fear, ie, guns over government, need to clarify their argument, button down the rhetoric, and state that at stake, is just keeping guns out of the hands of those mentally ill….
Mental illness is a disease… Curing it should be our first priority, and from just hearing the results of the passing of the US Budget today, that will never happen until we can get into Congress, only those who agree with those sentiments…. It’s about money. We know where it is kept, and we need more of it now….
80 percent of the cost of treating victims of gun violence in 2010 was borne in part by taxpayers, according to an analysis of hospital and insurance data.
Hospitals in the U.S. spent $630 million in 2010 treating the victims of gun violence, two dollars for every man woman and child in America. The Medicaid costs of gun violence alone that year amounted to approximately $327 million. Private insurers, and hospitals eating the cost of the uninsured, made up the remaining $403 million.
The average cost of a hospital visit for a gun violence victim is $14,000 more than that of the average hospital stay.
But is the hospital cost the only cost to society? It appears no. Gun violence cost the US $174 billion in 2010. The societal cost per firearm assault injury (includes workloss, medical/mental health care, emergency transportation, police/criminal justice activities, insurance claims processing, employer costs and decreased quality of life) … was $5.1 million for each fatality and $433,000 for each hospital-admitted patient. You as a consumer pay this cost in everything you buy; it is added in. Put in perspective that amounts to $522 dollars for every single man, every single woman, and every single child in America.
How can we save ourselves this money? How can we stop the majority of gun violence? Very simple. Register every gun to an single owner so if a gun is used to kill, someone gets held responsible. Very simple. Registering hurts no one; your car, your house, even your vaccinations are registered for example.
Isn’t it horrible we are having a big battle over something as tiny as registering a fire arm which over a decade has cost every man, woman, and child $5,220 dollars? Over “registering?” We’ve lost our senses.
Americans are paying dearly for the “privilege” to keep a gun that is non-traceable. By registering all firearms and thereby being able to keep guns out of those who would use them in criminal actions, great savings can be saved for all the millions of the American people.
We did, we almost won this with the first wave of the attack; we did far better than we expected; we suffered no causalities. Time to launch again for 2014. The truth, and money, both lie flatly on the side of registering all firearms…
Goal should be: if you are not an upstanding citizen? No Gun. Period.
We are a tired generation… We grew up with ‘Nam. Which ever side we were on during the battle here in America over that police action, or war, looking back after it was done, …. we all knew it was wrong….
After that we thought all war was wrong, and unfortunately took some of that angst out on those who least deserved it: those coming back from the steamy jungles of hell…..
Against our will a certain president soon sent Marines into Beirut; what happened then reinforced our belief that an American war was unjustifiable and that all other means must be utilized to prevent American war from ever happening again…. Against our will, we propped up a Nicaragua dictator against some rebels. Against our will, we sold arms to Iran to use for paying for our support for that Nicaragua dictator, since a Congress elected by the American people, flatly said no to supporting him in Nicaragua… We found a way to do it anyway….
I remember Senator Rudman, (R-NH) saying at the hearing while addressing Oliver North,… “The American people have the RIGHT to be wrong.”
Oliver North had been insisting that even when Americans flatly say NO, one still must do what one deems is necessary, that whatever one deems necessary, is the highest moral truth. “Sometimes one has to go above the law!” was actually said by the defense at this hearing. Only one good thing came out of those hearings: we all were introduced to Fawn Hall.
But then… The Brits quickly regained the Faulklands. Then came Grenada, which went off without a hitch. Then Panama, which was successful and almost painless. Then came General Schwartzkopf. The 4th largest army in the world, was routed in hours, and in days, had been completely mopped up. Then came the Balkans. We were on a roll. We’d finally nailed down the successful formula of how to win in battle.
Today we say Iraq is a failure. But that was so not so just after the invasion. Inside Baghdad, the pulling down of Saddam’s statue, the victory of capturing Saddam, the ability of us to hand out billions of American dollars, initially gave this campaign the luster of looking like another success story…
Until we tried to steal their oil. The standard global rate of dividing oil revenues is that the US gets a 20% cut for the development, and Iraq would get to keep 80% because it is after all, their resource. That is how we deal with Nigeria.
But Brenner announced that we’d flip that to pay for the war, and that Iraq would be allowed to keep 20% because we liked them so much, and we’d only, by our good graces, take 80% of the revenues. 24 hours after letting that cat out of the bag, the first IED went off under a US military vehicle… Before week was out, the total was in the hundreds.
The luster was gone. We were an invading army, something we have not called ourselves since WWII. We always saw ourselves as the policeman who leaves as soon as order is restored…
Afghanistan likewise, got worse. Then Pakistan. Then Yemen. On the diplomatic front instead of doing no harm, .. we could do no good. Then Libya costs us an ambassador who was running guns through Turkey. He shouldn’t have been there; it should have been a low level staffer with security clearance.
This baby boomer generation knows that war is wrong. We know from experience. The only time it can be employed successfully, is a) when the whole world is united behind you, b) you go in and get out, and c) you have a structure that stays in place long after you are gone.
The only time it goes badly… is every other scenario.
Which brings us to Syria. Syria has no importance to anyone. (They couldn’t even defend the militarily advantageous Golan Heights in ’67!) Which is why we let the Russians have them.
People are going to die in Syria if a): Assad wins, b): the rebels win, or c): no one wins. The only thing changing upon this wars outcome, is which side will be massacred at war’s end. Hence the battle for survival over there now.
So by having the US intervene or not, we are choosing which side gets to kill the other after the hostilities die down.
The weakest argument for going in still left with standing, is that they used chemical weapons. In WWI, the British, French, and Germans all used chemical weapons. Are chemical weapons really worse than being burned alive? Or asphyxiated as a bomb blast sucks all the oxygen out of your lungs and the room? Or a milk jug sized piece of jagged metal shrapnel ripping and leaving a hole through your body? Or a mine being stepped on? I’m trying to think why chemical weapons are so much worse, except for the fact that we’ve been told” they are so much worse”?
A causality is a causality.
We understand “why” some say we should go into Syria. Because if we do not respond to chemical weapons in a big way, someone else will become confident and use theirs. There is only one way to keep the genie inside the bottle, and that is to never leave a opening for it to escape….
We also understand “why” one of our beloved School districts had a policy that suspended, and expelled those who brought weapons to school! Not just guns, but knives too. After all, the argument for punishing Syria, applies to soon-to-become high school felons too.
But, there came a time when the response generated by a policy, actually became the crime, You remember the little boy expelled who brought a cake to school, and his grandmother thoughtfully sent a knife knowing teachers usually don’t have utensils in their classrooms. The teacher actually cut the cake, served it, thinking nothing of it.. it was someone higher up, reviewing the situation, who said, “wait, that can be interpreted as a breach of regulations. Let’s make an example out of this little boy”. He was suspended and could have been expelled, except it eventually became news and public outcry was solidly on his side. The policy makers were laughed out of town.
Which is why, if you are making this decision, you need to stall. Acting quickly and decisively is equivalent to acting on rumor and innuendo. So what if Syria lied and shot the gas cannisters off?
Does a military strike create enough excellent good will to neutralize this bad act?
Ironically what is best for the US in this situation, is for Assad to stay in power, to have a zealous change in heart, to work closely with the USA to get his economy working, to becoming a partner in that region with the US, and to signing a treaty with Israel, as did the Egyptians many, many years ago…
What is worse for us, is if the jihadists win, push out the moderates and take over the reform movement (they always do), then go to war with Israel, Jordan and Turkey. Making ourselves into the evil empire will only create more explosions everywhere, flare-ups which would not have occurred had we taken the Jedi way, and used the “Force” in our possession, to make events on the ground turn our way and happen in our favor….
Realistically such a rosy scenario probably can’t happen; but if it did, were this to come about, there would be no doubt: Obama would be lauded as the best president we’d ever see in our lifetimes. The cost of failure is so low that it just might be worth the try.
The second point… which all us Viet-namers will well remember, is that you may win every engagement you participate in Syria, but you won’t win the war at home, and that… will suck all your energy away from all the good you plan to do before 2016.
It broke LBJ. It broke Bush II. Don’t let it break you….
The officers shot in the New Castle County Courthouse shooting speak out, for the first time since the tragic event, in support of the federal Bulletproof Vest Partnership. Their vests were purchased at half the cost to Capitol Police through the federal Bulletproof Vest Partnership, which expired last summer. Senator Coons is fighting to bring the grant program back.Coons doesn’t believe law enforcement should have to stand on street corners with a tip cup to get funding.
“I think the federal government owes this to local and state law enforcement,”
So we will make them beg for dollars in a tin cup, but we are too cowardly to ban high capacity clips and assault weapons?
Do you know who the biggest pushers of these two bans are? Not parents but our first responders…. They were during the 1990’s and are now the ones asking our legislators to do the right thing and step up to ban high capacity clips, and ban automatic weapons….
(Delaware Law will only regulate new purchases and will not impose any hardship whatsoever on current owners )….
But isn’t it the height of hypocrisy that we can’t muscle the stamina to help out a first responder with passing two trite pieces of legislation, but we can certainly fan the flames to get press coverage of them begging for money so they can please, please have 14 times a better chance of living through a firefight? Think about it.
Just ban the sale of high capacity clips and assault rifles… Help a first responder out……
I was just challenged by the owner of a gun blog to illustrate how well gun control works.
Challenge Accepted.
US = no gun control == 14078 gun homicides==0.00446% of the population==. 4.69 per 100000
Somalia = no gun control== 138 gun homicides==0.0000138% of the population==1.38 per 100,000
Yeman = no gun control== 990 homicides (by any means)==0.0000413% = 4.304 per 100,000 (this total includes deaths by swords, stonings, long curved knives and guns).
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Japan = good gun control == 11 gun homicides== 0.00000866% of population == 0 per 100,000
S. Korea = good gun control ==14 gun homicides == 0.0000290% of population == 0 per 100,000
Spain = good gun control == 67 gun homicides == 0.0000565% of population == 0 per 100,000
Finally, Australia. a single country on both sides of the spectrum! One that had no gun control, then passed legislation which controlled guns. In similar terms out of 100,000, it went from a high ratio of 4.71 to 1.06…. Gun control where you make it illegal to own a military grade weapon works deliciously well…
Now, Mike W. Prove how homicides go down when you give everyone a gun … Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha…
The stupid NRA has their head wedged so far up their butt, I bet it hurts bad when they try to sit down…
There is a dual application of interpretation going on. The new head of the NRA James Porter, an attorney who defends gun manufactures in lawsuits, is quoted as calling our president a fake president; he once termed the Civil War of Southern Disobedience, as the “War of Northern Aggression,”; he believes that one of our highest priorities should be to train and arm all our citizens so that, when the time comes, they can “fight tyranny” and impose their will upon the rest of the population; who believes white is right, brown goes down, and guns are the way to achieve that end…..
He is now the new head of the NRA, an organization once dedicated to outdoor sportsmen and hunters.
If he were Muslim, he’d be under surveillance for fear of blowing up people at a Marathon.. James Porter’s words are more inciteful than any mullah.
Either we back off all Muslims, or we treat the NRA as we would Al Qaeda under Osama Bin Laden….
Not to do so is simply continuing a double standard…..
The NRA … IS the new Muslim…. Anyone who condones Newtown Connecticut as a great secret United States of American plot is simply put, … untrustworthy. It is time to round up all NRA members in put them in internment camps for observation just as we did for the Japanese during WWII..
Although it was not as they envisioned. The gun was brought inside a backpack of a middle school aged child. Relax, no one died. He was a good kid and never had any intention of using it. Just thought it was super cool and wanted to show it off along with the ammo to his friends… (He didn’t even know it was a real gun.)
The 13 year old as of Friday was being held in the New Castle County Juvenile Detention Center on $39,000 secured bail. And the courts will determine the severity of his penalty.
Of course parents are concerned. In typical parental fashion they said…. “we need metal detectors at every school. .
So, let us work through that premise. Start with how can that be done? Electronic metal detectors are expensive, and we have a lot of schools. Currently the Department of Educations website is listing 213 schools... Now for economic reasons, we would at first need only one security site or pass-through site per building, through which everyone enters, and everyone leaves… Once the initial investment is paid for, then incremental units at other entrances and exits can be later added.
So the number is 213 security machines… Here at Detectronix we have an assortment of walk through metal detectors. Since most of our state’s students are familiar with jails from visiting family members, perhaps the one that is most secure for our schools would the same brand use for jails, sensitive enough to detect a loaded revolve inserted up the anus or vagina. That costs $4199. However, recognizing a future need after the December 14th Newtown shootings, Detectronix has made a commitment to mass produce a cheaper version which will pick up a hand gun and pinpoint it to a general area of the body. That reduced rate is $2499. This cheaper version is more than adequate to isolate incoming weapons, in all but the most sophisticated ploys. Considering the savings, it is the one I would recommend, the Detectronix 6-Zone Walk Through Metal Detector …
Total state cost for walk-through metal detectors? Pretty cheap, just a half a million or exactly $532,500… ($894387 would be the more expensive choice) This does not include the fee charged for the entity that places the phone call, at 10% that would be another $53,250 dollars….
A electroinic security system needs to be manned to be effective. Otherwise it could beep on every student passing through with no accountability. One must assume the station should be manned all day. Even though nothing much happens at any schools entrance after the opening bell, still, if one were intent on bringing a gun to school for say, the purpose of revenge. he would obviously time his arrival at some point after he knew the metal detector was shut down. So personnel must be stationed until close.
The average school day is 7 hours… Multiplied by 5 days per week and it is a thirty five hour job, add half an hour every day to set up and tear down, and it becomes a full time position. At salary it averages $39,000 per year. Add the FICA and supplementary benefits costs, the total package runs to: $40,677 per school…. If contracted out to a guard service, the average rate if including fees and contract costs, averages close to $50 per hour used. The contracts per year would range around $78,000 per school… but at the benefit that all liability falls upon the service and not the educational department of the state of Delaware.
So for manning these position, Delaware has two options, government versus private, and as it always works out in everything in life, government is the cheaper. $8,664,201 versus $16,614,000
So for a minimum of $8,664,201 a year in personnel costs plus the $532,500 in buying and installing the metal detectors, the first year estimate for that should be close to $9.200,000 dollars with $8,664,201 being spent every year thereafter.
If this is levied to property owners, the average property owner will be charged, of course assuming that Senior Citizens don’t get out of the fee for policies they support, the fee is $0.0001 per square foot or one/hundredith of a penny per square foot. {$8,664,201/(2490 X 27,878,400)} If one exempts state land, or makes other exemptions, that cost will rise per private property owner as is to be expected. …
Or if one wishes to allocate that cost per resident, then the assessment rounds up to {$8,664,201 / 917,000} = $9.44 per inhabitant. That is the price of security. A family of 4 should be willing to ante up $37.79 dollars for keeping children safe…
But, the argument gets quickly raised, as it does with money, … shouldn’t those responsible for creating the problem be the ones to pay for its solution? Those would be owner of guns. We can’t publish the amounts for confidentiality reasons. But the gross sales of Miller’s Gunshop alone as reported this quarter to the Delaware Dept of Revenue, argues that a fair assessment on all gun and ammunition sales at at sales tax rate of 10% would be more than adequate to cover implementing the security of all of Delaware’s schools.
The $8 million a year should not out of a child’s education. It should come from those those actions are the direct creation of the problem in the first place.
So lets securitize our schools, and make the NRA and all gun owners pay for it… Fair is simply fair. If we had a registry of all weapons in this country, we wouldn’t be having this problem. As history will one day determine, the fault lies with no one but the NRA that this common sense legislation was never implemented …..
Recently the Senate voted 54-46 in favor of extending background checks. And as we all know, under the current rules of the Senate, for anything to be passed over the minority, it has to have 60 votes as a minimum,
Although that may seem like a setback, it actually should scare the NRA and 2nd Amendment Activists our of their shells. The equivalent metaphor was having a MOAB dropped on top of you that for some reason did not go off….
Let’s explain.
Ideally to get something done, you need 50 votes in the Senate. There are a hundred Senators, so 50 plus the VP should give you passage as it did for Clinton’s tax package in ’93. Yes the one that gave us 8 years of continuous growth!
50 Senators would equal 25 states since there are 2 Senators per state…. So if we take a look at a state population table, and measure up the population in the lowest 25 states, we see that amount comes to just under 50 million people, which represents 15.8% percent of the whole population of this country.
Contrary to popular belief, this nation’s government is based on geography, not population. Which means that 15.8% of the population controls the agenda of the Senate even without a filibuster.
With a filibuster, we need only 40 votes to control the Senate. So that means we back off the top 5 states since there are 2 senators per state, and the population of the lower 20 states amounts to…. 32 million or …. 10% of our population….
Therefore 10% of our population controls the Senate if we go with a filibuster of 40 votes….
Which if one reads the polls that 90% of Americans favor gun control and 10% don’t, and one would assume those who don’t certainly don’t live in a urban area, then the Senate vote is just about right. It matches up to the polling data almost exactly.
But, what is interesting? Is that Toomey and Manchin were the ones who created it, both A+ members of the NRA, and that a majority of Senators despite coming from rural America, all voted for it….
So to use a WWII analogy, in 2014 we have a race for the bridge at Ramagen… The Republicans have to hold that bridge across the Rhine at all costs, whereas 90% of the population is racing as hard as they can right at them to take it back….
Using their stance on guns to get out the urban existing in those rural states, could just be the deciding factor in ridding us of Republicans forever!….
Courtesy of Obamarmy
The future looks dark ….(man I tried, but there was just no way I could let that thought go without saying that, lol)…..
Courtesy of Obamarmy
Just the amount of the increase in gun sales since we got ourselves the best President ever, is more than all the guns sold during the Bush Administration….
If you currently have investments in American (or foreign) gun manufactures, time go get out is now. With such a glut on the market, who is going to buy a new household gun anytime after 2016 when the president is again white? You’ll be able to get them for free on Craigslist….
And, on a completely unrelated topic, with all those guns now out there, without establishing a registry how on earth are we going to keep from having a gigantic bloodbath at some future point? Just imagine if we didn’t have any laws, registration, or insurance pertaining to cars, what a mess we’d have now?
Gun Registry is common sense and one day will be put into action. It is similar to all the great things this nation has done, like freeing the slaves, banning desegregation, breaking apart monopolies, banning tobacco inside of buildings; it is just one of those common sense things that will eventually rise through the filters and become the law of the land.
Without the NRA being so stupid, I don’t think I’d have ever come to that conclusion independently…. So maybe it is a good thing they are daft with brains as smart as pigeons placed inside of boxes…..
kavips 
