Stop the Blamestream!

The events of last Saturday, January 8th, were heinous. A lone psychopath took the lives of 6 people and wounded several others, including an Arizona Congresswoman. As the smoke has cleared from this senseless act, it has become more and more apparent that this murderer, Jared Loughner, was indeed a mentally disturbed individual.

It took less than a day for the left, the statists, the Democrats, the ‘usual’ fingerpointers, and the mainstream media to start pointing fingers at everyone from Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh to the Tea Party movement. Demands for a return to the Fairness Doctrine as well as new calls for gun control legislation followed. But Jared Loughner had no affliation with any of these people or movements. And his association with Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords dated from before the advent of the Tea Party movement.

Jared Loughner was apolitical. His many mindless ravings on Myspace, Youtube, and gamer forums prove that. He lists among his favorite books Mein Kampf and Communist Manifesto, two diametrically opposed books. He simultaneously espoused a disdain for the Second Constitution, a term sometimes used to describe the post-Civil War amendments that ended slavery, extended the right to vote and required equal protection under the law and for what he terms as the government’s attempts at mind control using grammar. Clearly, Mr. Loughner is all over the place in his ‘convictions.’

But the Left has vehemently attacked talk radio, the Tea Party, and Conservatives as the source of Loughner’s motive. According to Democrats, the vitriol that the Conservatives in this country have ‘unleashed’ is why Loughner took up arms to assassinate Gabrielle Giffords. And the Left continues to deliver this ‘new’ mantra despite all of the mounting evidence that none of this has anything to do with the case. Can’t let a good crisis go to waste, can they?

Lost in this mindless attempt at political mudslinging is the fact that the only political figure that was ‘successfully’ assassinated by Loughner was a Conservative judge, John Roll. If Conservatives were as petty and shallow as the Left, they would be crying foul over Loughner’s ‘obvious’ Leftist connections because he killed a Conservative judge and the congresswoman just happened to be in the way. If that example sounds ludicrous, it is because it is ludicrous. Just a ludicrous as their contention that the Conservatives made him do it. The incendiary speech of Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh made him do it. The Tea Party made him do it.

Jared Loughner is no different than Seung-Hui Cho, the perpetrator of the massacre of 32 people at Virginia Tech, except he survived and is in custody. We have all of these Leftist blamestormers spewing their vitriol regarding Loughner’s motive but Loughner is alive and perhaps we should withhold that judgement until someone is able to extract that motive from him personally. We could not do that in the case of Seung-Hui Cho because he took his own life. The common thread between these two ghastly murderers is their mental illness.

I’ve said in the past that more gun control will not prevent these types of events. It won’t. Banning ‘high capacity’ magazines or specific types of firearms will do nothing to make the public safer. It takes about 2 seconds to eject an empty magazine and insert a loaded one. The size of the magazine bears little on the potential for carnage. What the root cause here is not the method of carnage but the perpetrator of the carnage. We allow the mentally ill to matriculate in our society.

The rise in violent crime in this country can be traced to two occurrences: the rise in illegal drug use and the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. That deinstitutionalization began in 1955 when there were around 560,000 institutionalized mentally ill patients in this country. Compare that with the 80,000 that were institutionalized in 2006. Our overall population has burgeoned in this same time period and yet the percentage of the population that is institutionalized has shrunk disproportionately. The explanation is that those that we formerly deemed as too mentally ill to function in society now live amongst us.

So much of this mental illness is treated will psychotropic drugs and most is self-administered, as in Seung-Hui Cho’s case. Cho was prescribed psychotropics to stabilize him but Cho stopped taking his meds. We don’t know yet if Loughner was under any psychiatric care or if he was on any medications but we do know that he had a very consistent history of run-ins with authorities over his mental state. And nothing was done.

Signs were ignored in Cho’s case. Cho should have been institutionalized but was not. 32 people paid for that oversight with their lives. Jared Loughner should have been institutionalized and now 6 people have paid for that oversight with their lives. These deaths have nothing to do with politics. These people died because of a failure to address mental illness in a way to keep the public safe. End of story.

Hoplophobia is a mental illness as well and any politician that advocates further gun control over this tragedy needs to have his head examined. I have begun to believe that liberalism is a mental illness as well because it leads to irrational behavior and disjointed thought. Anyone that would link conservative political rhetoric with the events of last Saturday is incapable of rational thinking and should perhaps be under the care of a licensed mental healthcare professional. But then again, maybe that’s why we have liberals – we emptied out the insane asylums.