Independent, UK, March 2017 - President Donald Trump has signed a resolution blocking an Obama-era rule that would have prevented an estimated 75,000 people with mental disorders from buying guns. The rule was part of former President Barack Obama's push to strengthen the federal background check system in the wake of the 2012 Newtown, Connecticut shooting.
3 comments:
As so often the "liberal" press loads the dice.
While having someone manage their benefits might be a flag, if Asperger's and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder are on that list, it's good that Trump cancelled it.
Because Asperger's is the sign of a slightly different neurological organisation, not a "mental impairment". Einstein is thought to have had it. Its most prominent symptoms are an unusual literal-mindedness and difficulty decoding social cues, and often considerable slowness on the uptake. People with it usually prefer technical and scientific fields because the content has stronger definition: physical law doesn't change much. People with the condition are not dangerous; at worst they upset people by violating the unwritten rules about behavior because they've never learned or even been aware of them.
Obsessiveness and compulsiveness are good traits for engineers and scientists, because problems in those fields tend to be very resistant to solution. The traits become a problem only if the person can't let go of something. But it's not a dangerous condition, just annoying and at worst, disabling (hard to do anything else if you're compelled to touch a doorknob or your nose, wash your hands, or perform some similarly pointless ritual. Feeling compelled to touch someone else's nose, of course, would cause social problems, but the person still wouldn't be dangerous)
Rather than go on and on about Asperger's and Obsessive-Compulsive why not find out what the actual lawdid. Let me take the 30 seconds for you, friend.
The law required the Social Security Administration to send records of some beneficiaries to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System after they’ve been deemed incapable of managing their financial affairs because of a disabling mental disorder, ranging from anxiety to schizophrenia.
Need more? NICS Improvement Amendments Act of 2007 (published
at 81 Fed. Reg. 91702).
Start here and look at evidence required and what-not.
Yes, I knew that already. The Independent used the example of Adam Lanza while completely missing the damned point, effectively blaming his act on his Asperger's and OCD. I was responding to that.
The reality is that his Asperger's and OCD diagnoses were completely, totally, 100% irrelevant. The relevant diagnosis would be paranoid psychosis (or, if he also had a thought disorder, paranoid schizophrenia)
People act out in such a sudden, terrible way only when they feel so threatened that it's life-or-death. Eventually they do what anyone would do, faced with such a threat: they kill the ones threatening them, if they can.
But the act of relieving their literally-unbearable stress that way often gives them a moment of clarity in which they realise what they've done, and that it was not just dreadful but useless too, and some then end their own lives in remorseful despair.
In Lanza's case, as in Thomas Hamilton's, who shot up the primary school in Dunblane Scotland, the precipitating problem was almost certainly sexual attraction to young children. Someone who is well-socialised but rigid will not be able to tolerate the knowledge that they have such an attraction because it's socially condemned in the strongest possible way and they rightly see themselves as "not that kind".
But the impossibilty of accepting it doesn't make it go away! So they gradually lose their mind as they learn to impute their desires to the object of those desires. Then they're free of self-loathing: it's not they who want to have sex with small children, it's the small children who flirt with and tempt them, constantly trying to make them do something that is, to them, totally wrong, unethical, and a symptom of the worst depravity.
But the flirting and demands grow more insistent and threatening til it becomes too much for anyone to bear. And that leaves them no choice but to kill themselves or fight back, killing their tormentors to save themselves. Any healthy person will try to kill their tormentors.
So they do, but then the realisation of what they've really done comes crashing in on them, and they kill themselves in hopeless despair.
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