Guns, bullets and the Constitution

The tragedy in Aurora, Colorado has brought out the nuts in the media once again. Even Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC’s The Last Word has been braying about controlling criminals from getting guns and ammunition.

Let’s get some uncommon sense back into the discussion.  First, as with most Americans, I was deeply shaken and saddened by the senseless action of what appears at first glance as a maniac.  But is he?

The horrible thing about what happened is that it could have been prevented. Here was a brilliant neuroscientist who was shooting for his doctorate when 1. he suddenly dropped out, 2. began acting in a manner that was not his usual behavior.

Whether or not his parents, for whom I have great sadness, knew his behavior was way off base for him or whether they were unaware of his change in character we may never know.  But what about the people who were around him?  Did not THEY see what was happening to the kid?

My take on this is that he was at the right age for the onset of schizophrenia—and that is exactly what happened to him.  The disease can strike literally overnight. He was studying in the field of neuroscience…why and how his sudden uncharacteristic behavior was overlooked by his peers and his professional instructors seems ludicrous!

It is impossible for me to express the depth and breadth of how much I am hurting for those poor innocent people who were murdered and those who were wounded, some critically.  As a crisis intervention/suicide prevention counselor I’ve had to deal with people who were stricken just as their lives were beginning; believe me, it is no picnic.

Although I am not a psychologist, I do know the signs of schizophrenia and that is precisely what happened to one of the most hated men in America today.  He must be removed from society for the rest of his life, but execution?  Do we really want to kill a mentally ill individual?

Getting back to the media’s hysteria about “We have to do something to prevent this from happening again” is just plain ignorance on display.  The kid was NOT a criminal when he legally purchased the weapons he committed his heinous acts with.   But SOMEONE could have known that the number of rounds of ammunition he was buying was suspicious.

Seldom do I obtain more than 50 or so rounds of ammunition unless I’m going to do a tremendous amount of target practice.  If I was a seller of ammunition and some civilian ordered six thousand rounds of ammo, I’d certainly notify some kind of authority and ask them to check up on the buyer; wouldn’t you?

Weapon ownership is perfectly legal in this country and will, hopefully, always will be.  It has been settled by SCOTUS.   So  let us simply accept that each of us has the right to own and use weapons.

The REASON we must be able to have weapons is because any government that is strong enough to take away a people’s means of protection is strong enough to enslave those people.  Our founders knew what being able to protect freedom meant; they were not fools.

An American value is that when one of us is down, we reach down to help that person back up.  At a time such as this, we could take the opportunity to care for each other more, to remember that despite all of our differences, there is one thing that keeps us together as one family: We are Americans and when a person is down we do NOT kick them.

In a few days or weeks, I’ll return to GMO and how it is killing us.  One preview, however is this.  The FDA, what I refer to as the Federal Death Admiration has no means of testing genetically modified foods and cannot test whether or not the food we purchase are safe for human consumption.  The seed companies and other biotech companies are the ones who tell the FDA that what they produce is fine and dandy for humans to eat.  Do you really want to trust companies such as Monsanto and their competitors to tell OUR government what is and isn’t safe?  I certainly do NOT trust them.

How so-called experts can say that obese women are giving birth to autistic spectrum disordered children and not make the connection between the garbage people eat that makes the obese is filled with chemicals that were never meant for human consumption and a gestating child is being bathed in those chemicals. Duh, I’m not an expert in those fields but yet several of us have made the connection!  How ‘bout you?