Boulder - Gun rights advocates planning huge high capacity magazine giveaway in Colorado

[HereSince1628]

38. Sorry you feel it's derailing...I think it's at the heart of recent proposed legislation

I am not proposing policing words.

I accept that words like 'crazy'and 'lunatic' and 'insane' are parts of common speech. True, I don't really like the chauvinistic use of 'crazy', etc, as adjectives to disparage political and rhetorical opponents, but I accept that using such words is too common to prevent.

So, I accept that everything that Congresswoman Bachmann or Rand Paul, etc says is going to be considered crazy. The GOP leadership is going to be discussed as a bunch of insane lunatics. That's the nature of the ignorant/uneducated/unsophisticated language of the streets and consequently of blogs and bulletin boards.

But,

There is something quite different about the way that 'crazy is used by Wayne LaPierre, and meme-repeaters of NRA positions, who are literally mounting a political pogrom against the mentally ill. That pogrom exploits ignorance and promotes fear. And in that pogrom protection of millions of mentally ill hangs on the meanings within "crazy, lunatic, monster' etc.

The focus of the NRA on mental illness has been reasonably argued as a distraction: a slight of hand if you will. An effort to point the blame away from the tools without which mass murderers would be much more difficult.

In that context an ambiguous 'crazy' is VERY useful to make a "guilty other" as big and as risky and obvious a target for suppression as possible.

In that sense 'crazy' and 'lunatics' and 'monster become very effective in their nebulous pointing at something misunderstood, something that seems all the more scary when is left ill-defined and free to morph according to the fearful products of imagination.

A truth is that the unconditioned risk of a mentally ill person committing a mass shooting at a school is almost identical to the risk of a licensed American gun owner committing the same crime. BOTH hover around 0.00004%.

Yet, undeniably, persons who possess guns do sometimes use them in crimes, and persons with mental illness do sometimes commit gun violence. Being able to keep the tools of destruction away from them is an objective that is completely a matter of common sense.

The gun lobby and it's lawyers play with parsing the language of the law and definitions of 'assault' and 'military style' weapons. The reason they argue about details such as the presence or absence of a bayonet mount is to find a 'work around' what would otherwise have been a banned weapon legal under previous law.

That sort of parsing really isn't the object of getting it right about mental illness.

Some mentally ill persons REALLY shouldn't be in the possession of firearms. Even those they purchase legally. But the majority (literature says is greater than 95%) of mental illnesses--which in facile laziness can be called 'craziness'--really don't contribute to gun violence. Even among diagnoses that have patterns of association with gun violence (for example depression) millions of people depressed people aren't killing themselves. And they are not killing others.

We really do need to get guns out of the hands of those who would hurt themselves and/or others. Developing within society a capacity to recognize, report, and thereby achieve intervention for such events really depends upon accurate diacritical distinctions that split apart and make distinguishable rather than lump together and cloud perception of the risky and the unrisky.

Consequently, facile use of words like 'crazy' and 'lunatic' and 'monster' associated with bigoted and uninformed speech aren't useful to a meaningful discussion.

Those words inject what could be called purposeful 'stupidity' or 'dumbing down', as is the case of Wayne LaPierre and the NRA, that confounds rather than helps resolve the problem.

Consequently, stigmatizing terms leave their user looking variously non-serious, obstructive, and/or bigoted. None of those adjectives would seem desirable within the framework of participation in a discussion of a serious problem.