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…