Stop Pretending Gun Rights Activists Are Sane

Giving People the Benefit of the Doubt Leads to More Dead Kids

We’ve all done it. We’ve all pretended for the sake of a family member or a friendship that people who believe everyone should be able to own any sort of gun they want are absolutely not insane.

Gun activists even admit it. Not if you asked them about it, obviously.

But every time there is a mass shooting, they insist that it was a mental health issue. That no sane person would commit these atrocities. They do this for a number of reasons: deflect attention from the real issue, put Democrats who support more funding for mental health on the defensive, and to hide the truth depth of their insanity.

Let me be clear. People with depression, anxiety and even more severe mental illnesses are not the problem. Most of the people I know who have a mental illness, and there are a lot of us out here, are not violent and have not/would not/ do not commit mass murder.

But some mental illness can lead people to be more violent. A study published in 2015 says, “Reports suggest that up to 60% of perpetrators of mass shootings in the United States since 1970 displayed symptoms including acute paranoia, delusions, and depression before committing their crimes.”

But the NRA-type folks want to confuse you by co-opting terms like mental health instead of the admitting the truth about why people want AR15 and other assault-type weapons. They want to conflate depression and anxiety with paranoia and acute conditions that might actually contribute to gun crime. And they want to make it look like they have a heart when they say the answer is more mental health treatment.

It’s time for the left to stop buying their false equivalencies and outright lies.

Mental health treatment might prevent some gun deaths.

But it likely wouldn’t stop most mass murderers. It would help those who use guns against themselves. Mass shooters, however, are unlikely to take advantage of mental health care even when it is available.

In part, that is through no fault of the murderous young men who pick up weapons of mass death and use them. In the case of Ethan Crumbley, a school shooter in Michigan, the prosecution is saying that his parents created an atmosphere in his life that led to his…