Trump and Cuomo: Red Flags Are Red Herrings

“Mentally ill monsters,” so named by the President, are a new target of the Trump Administration. As The New York Times reported recently, in August 2019 alone, the United States saw dozens of people die in mass shootings, including the three headline-generating tragedies in Texas and Ohio. Amid the usual calls for stricter gun control laws came renewed and intensifying appeals to remove guns, specifically from the hands of these “mentally ill monsters.” Attempts to blame the ongoing crisis of deadly violence on people with psychiatric histories is not new, but so-called “red flag” laws are a growing national threat.

The New York SAFE Act is part of New York State’s red-flag laws. The Act included the creation of a “mental health database” of people with psychiatric histories who are deemed a danger to themselves or others and who, by virtue of being in that database (based on the fraud of organized psychiatry), have legally lost their Second Amendment rights. Trump had suggested in a CNN interview that New York State was part of the problem of mass murders because it was involved in the deinstitutionalization process decades ago, having shut down state-sponsored psychiatric institutions. In a separate CNN interview, Governor Andrew Cuomo responded, “I don’t think the President knows what he’s talking about.”

However, Cuomo illustrated his own misunderstanding of the problem of mass violence, boasting (and disclosing) that, due to the SAFE Act, 139,000 people have lost their Second Amendment rights. In response, I submitted freedom of information (FOIL) requests to the New York State Office of Mental Health and the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, requesting:

“Demographics of the approximately 139,000 people who Governor Cuomo announced on CNN on August 15, 2019, who are in the New York Safe Act Database. *Please include the following demographics: county, age, race, gender, socioeconomic status, diagnosis, education, sexual orientation, sexual identity, employment, living situation, length of time in database, reason for entry to database, and any other information that is collected about people who are in the NY Safe Act database or who have been investigated for placement into the database.”

I anticipate a response toward the end of September 2019.

As the group Surviving Race: The Intersection of Disability, Injustice, and Human Rights reminds us, white supremacy and white nationalism culminating in white violence and terror must not be conflated with psychiatrized people. Curtailing the rights of people with psychiatric histories and suggesting there are “red flags”—warning signs of violence that will help stop the problem—is nothing more than a red herring, a ploy of the government and industries to maintain social control.

A Closer Look

At a press conference August 5 following the shootings in El Paso and Dayton, President Donald Trump called to involuntarily confine the “mentally ill monsters”:

“We must reform our mental health laws to better identify mentally disturbed individuals who may commit acts of violence and make sure those people not only get treatment, but when necessary involuntary confinement. Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun . . . It is not up to mentally ill monsters, it is up to us.”

On August 15, waiting to take off in a helicopter, Trump dug in further in response to reporter questions:

“I do want people to remember the words mental illness. These people are mentally ill. And nobody talks about that. . . .  And people have to start thinking about it. I think we have to start building institutions again. Because, you know if you look at the 60s and 70s, so many of these institutions were closed. And the people were allowed to just go onto the streets and that was a terrible thing for our country. . . . A lot of our conversation has to do with the fact that we have to open up institutions. We can’t let these people be on the streets.”

In response to a question about background checks for gun owners, Trump responded that he’s been talking to people about it:

“We don’t want to see crazy people owning guns. . . . Because, you know it’s them. They pull the trigger. The gun doesn’t pull the trigger. They pull the trigger. So we have to look very seriously at mental illness and we’re doing that at a level that hasn’t been done before.”

In response to the question of who, besides Sen. Pat Toomey, Trump has been talking to, Trump replied:

“…to many Republicans. . . . Republicans agree with me on that, I think, you know I would say, pretty much uniformly. . . . [We need] strong meaningful background checks where people that should not have guns, people that are insane, people that are mentally ill, people that are bad, bad people . . .”

Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo appears to agree as well. As the Albany Democrat and Chronicle reported, New York State’s new red-flag gun law took effect August 25. Championed by Cuomo, this “extreme risk-protection order” will let law enforcement officials, family members or school officials “seek a court petition that would allow the seizure of firearms from people the courts find to be a threat to themselves or others.” The law follows on from New York’s 2013 SAFE Act, created after the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, which among other things created the “mental health database” mentioned above and includes New Yorkers deemed too emotionally unstable to own or use firearms. According to the rules, mental health workers are required to report clients under their care whom they deem likely to commit violent acts.

Over the last six years this has meant that New York State has denied full constitutional, civil, and human rights to the approximately 139,000 people whose names are now in the database. The SAFE Act also significantly expanded who can be subjected to involuntary outpatient commitment, under what circumstances, and for what length of time, and instituted lenient re-evaluation extension rules.

It is true that Gov. Cuomo’s public response to Trump’s citing New York’s past closing of state psychiatric institutions as a terrible thing was to condemn such institutions:

“First, this whole concept of re-institutionalization is exactly opposite everything we’re trying to do. Right? There was horrific conditions, conditions in institutions. We now build community-based residences.”

However, he went on to boast to CNN’s Erin Burnett that the State was indeed clamping down on the “mentally ill”:

“But, put his knowledge on, on mental health aside. How does that stop a mentally ill person from getting a gun? That is the issue. And that, uh, if you want to do that, then you have to do a background check to make sure the person is not mentally ill. Uh, and that’s why you need uh, universal uh, background checks so you can see if a person is mentally ill. We have it in this state. Six years ago we passed the best gun laws in the nation after the Sandy Hook massacre, which was in Connecticut, the school shooting. Uh, and we set up a mental health data base. Erin, uh, 139,000 people could have bought a gun in New York but cannot now buy it because they are in a mental health database…”

One might think Cuomo’s appearing on the news cycle is evidence of the need to correct the public image of New York’s state-sponsored, organized psychiatric industry. It ought to be common knowledge that one of the major responsibilities of the Commissioner of the New York State Office of Mental Health is to keep these institutions out of the media and generally away from the public gaze. I believe that this obscuring of the industries from the public eye is a way of maintaining our society’s misplaced public trust in the institution of psychiatry and its outcomes.

In any case, it is clear that while someone was influencing Governor Cuomo’s comments promoting community-based residences, it was not the human rights movement of people who identify as psychiatric survivors.

Institutionalization and Institutional Corruption

We need to disarm the current “re-institutionalization” movement, a movement to re-open and build new psychiatric facilities and to identify and isolate certain segments of the population for the purpose of reducing their rights, by holding it accountable to the actual science of modern psychiatry and the history of institutions.

In a recent press release from Surviving Race: The Intersection of Disability, Injustice, and Human Rights and MindFreedom International, James B. (Jim) Gottstein, Esq., the President and CEO of the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights cautions:

“The suppressed scientific research is very clear that not only are ‘anti-depressants’ no better than placebo for the vast majority who take them, often with serious negative physical effects, they dramatically increase the risk of suicide and homicide for people of all ages. The book Medication Madness, by Dr. Peter Breggin may be the best compilation of this scientific proof.”

Dr. Breggin’s 2008 work detailed experiences of individuals involved with psychiatry and academic research, presenting the science of how and why these drugs are dangerous.

Dr. Paula J. Caplan, PhD, having had an insider’s view of the development of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) that holds all of the psychiatric diagnoses and their billing codes, has for decades been calling attention to the fundamental fraud of psychiatric diagnosis. It is the moral responsibility of all psychologists and psychiatrists to hold the media and themselves accountable to the truth of the professions they have developed. Caplan, the author of They Say You’re Crazy and “Diagnosisgate: A Major Media Blackout Mystery,” suggests, “People’s lives and well-being are at stake in this debate, nothing less . . . What is needed is to hear from someone who is an objective scientist, and knows what the research truly shows.” She also contends that the first harm people subjected to psychiatry experience is the diagnosis itself.

The history of psychiatric institutions is a long litany of oppression, foundational to the systems of slavery and eugenics. Psychiatric institutions are places that foster environments rooted in multiple human rights violations. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is consistently violated in psychiatric institutions, including documented cases of death, enslavement, torture, and sometimes all three. For most people, a decent life, let alone a life that is dignified or distinctive, is a lesser possibility when one’s life, liberty, and fortune are under the control of the State.

We ought to take it as a warning that the State refuses to acknowledge that there is not a shred of biological evidence existing for any psychiatric diagnosis. This lack of evidence creates a scenario in which anyone can easily fit the criteria for any number of hundreds of scientifically invalid disorders. We ought to take it as a warning that the State is not actively working to root out the known potential harms that psychiatric practices, products, procedures, and programming can and do lead to within its own state-sponsored service-delivery systems. We ought to take it as a warning that the State creates legislation, regulations, and policy that serve to maintain social control over local populations while bringing resources to the State. As Robert Whitaker put it in a 2017 blog, “One of the hallmarks of institutional corruption is that an institution will regularly act in ways that promote its own interests, even if that means betraying the principles that are supposed to govern that institution.”

Institutional corruption is solidified with misguided public trust. Misguided trust fuels how public resources are directed. The direction of public taxpayer resources authorizes what types of services are available, and to whom. In their book Psychiatry Under the Influence, Whitaker and Lisa Cosgrove discussed the importance of people’s access to accurate information. Sometimes, the lack of information about risk is just enough to create a willingness to forego true informed consent. Absent legitimate information about psychiatry, consent is an illusion.

If there is indeed a connection between public trust in psychiatry and the availability of state-sponsored services, we need to examine the relationship between information the public possesses about the risks of psychiatry and taxpayer support for court-ordered, coerced, or compelled compliance with psychiatry—including red-flag laws and mental-health databases.

How the voluntary or involuntary nature of state-sponsored programming and legislation varies based on what kinds of information people have about psychiatry remains an issue of concern for everyone working to protect and promote the human rights of those involved with state-sponsored mental health programs.

Another aspect that has corrupted the psychiatric industry is the persistence of racist and classist trends in involuntary psychiatry. It is crucial to call attention to these realities, particularly in light of our larger political environment where racism, classism, and discrimination of all types have been emboldened.

The Right and Obligation to Speak Out

Those of us who work toward abolishing human rights violations carried out via state-sponsored psychiatric industries are seldom if ever allowed by the State to utter aloud, much less write, phrases such as “institutional corruption,” “institutional and structural racism,” “psychiatric slavery,” “stop calling 911,” and particularly, “stop forced psychiatric treatment.”

But if advocates and allies are ever to meet the urgent need to get to the roots of constitutional, civil, and human rights violations, people at all levels of systems change and those subjected to the system must have the ability to speak freely and to question the State and guild authorities without fear of retribution. And to have those questions responded to with transparency and the same conditions of liberty.

The State, however, is not simply keeping the dark doings of the psychiatric industry out of the public eye. It is harming the public via its disinformation campaign about dangerous “mentally ill monsters.” The State is complicit in misleading people whose personal crises often stem from the environments in which they are operating and could be solved with more economic resources. It is spreading fraudulent ideas about the value of greater exposure to psychiatry, whose purpose is not to help these people but to maintain the funding the State generates via psychiatry.

A Path for Action

In response to the conflation of white supremacy, white nationalism, and white violence—of which red-flag policies are but one symptom—Surviving Race: The Intersection of Disability, Injustice, and Human Rights and MindFreedom International have called for a national campaign demanding that the media and government stop silencing challenges to the authority of psychiatry, and be held accountable for the ongoing disinformation campaign that will disproportionately affect people of color and other historically oppressed groups. It reads:

“First, the media and the government cannot silence people from speaking out against psychiatry.

Second, the media and the government must put out accurate information about the lack of science psychiatry rests on and the known potential injuries and death psychiatric practices, procedures, and products can and do cause.

Third, the media and the government cannot use acts of an individual or small group of people and extend those acts across an entire group of people that anyone can be sorted [into] based on subjective, non-biological assessments.

Fourth, the media and the government ought to expose the ways People of Color and people who are economically struggling are over-represented in state-sponsored court-ordered psychiatry and treatment over objection and under-represented in psychiatry that is voluntary in nature, with the degree of informed consent in participation unknown.

Fifth, in the current US climate, white supremacy, white nationalism, and white violence are creating a culture of terror. The government ought to take responsibility for its direct incitation of recent traumatic events. Those in the media are also accountable for the ways in which they present the dehumanization and targeting of groups of people experiencing oppression.

Problematically, the media legitimizes psychiatric diagnoses. The consistent pairing of psychiatric diagnoses and violence, particularly gun violence and mass murder motivated by white supremacy, must end.

We call to hold the media accountable for their messaging in the reporting of heinous and deliberate acts of hate. Surviving Race works to support the voices of people with disabilities and protect our communities from mentalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, antisemitism, and islamophobia. People who experience oppression are targets of psychiatry.”

Help us keep our watch over the news media and the government. In the current climate, white supremacy and white nationalism are culminating in white violence and terror, targeting and dehumanizing people experiencing oppression. We vehemently oppose society placing more trust in the field of psychiatry and the creation of national “red flag” databases of people assigned a psychiatric label. We reach out vigorously in support of those who may be experiencing trauma due to the ways the government and the media talk about people with psychiatric histories and due to the iatrogenic damages they experience as a result of their involvement with psychiatry, as well as to other groups of people experiencing oppression.

In building this movement, we would do well to pay attention to the 19th-century warnings against building institutions. The first volume of the American Journal of Insanity in 1844 (today’s American Journal of Psychiatry), cautioned the field not to replicate the asylum models of Europe:

“We hope never to see such institutions in this country. On the contrary, let no Asylum be established but for the curable, and to this the incurable and the rich and the poor should be admitted; let all have the same kind care; and all indulge the same hope, even if delusive to many, of ultimate recovery, but do not drive any to despair, and destroy the little mind they still possess, by consigning them to a house, over the entrance of which, Dante’s lines on the gates of hell might well be inscribed,

Lasciate ogni aperanza
Voi che intrate qui.’

‘Leave hope behind, all ye who enter here.’”

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Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

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29 COMMENTS

  1. This mentally ill monster knows that politicians want to have their cake (unlimited numbers and kinds of firearms floating around that anyone can own without a background check) and eat it, too (pretending to do something about mass shootings). Maybe it’s time for the Colombian clothiers who offer Kevlar fashions to expand their businesses to the US- Bogota haberdasheries might help revive the business climate in our malls.

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  2. What a refreshing read, Lauren, thank you! Some of the most disturbing material published on this site has been in the calls for tighter background checks in response to indiscriminate acts of public gun violence, which is a white, MALE, driven scourge. Given that women are responsible for roughly 3% of these crimes and yet women make up a majority of those in psychiatric care, it doesn’t follow that “mental illness” is strongly correlated with such acts. But we do not yet have the cultural will to address toxic masculinity and systemic racism, which often combine to fuel these mostly well planned heinous acts.

    I do see some value in red flag laws as applied to those with a demonstrated history of domestic violence since that is so strongly correlated with those who go on to commit public acts of gun violence. Studies have shown that women remain at risk of being murdered by their abusers for decades after they escape abusive situations. So again, I think that what is largely missing from these discussions is the risk of MALE violence. I do find some amusement in the fact that my abuser (the one who put a loaded gun to my head while drunk) can purchase a gun while I can’t. It’s a sad testament to who really runs the show.

    Can we really expect Trump and Cuomo – white men – to target their own demographic?

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  3. Great to hear from you Lauren.

    I have not read this yet, but I want to thank you from the start for including Cuomo. It’s extremely important that this not be misinterpreted as a Democrat/Republican thing; both parties are equally guilty and Democrats voted UNANIMOUSLY to pass the Murphy Bill (we both remember this from when we were trying to get survivors to flood their Congresspeople with protests). Of course it’s going to take more than protesting to abolish psychiatry. I hope to have a personal dialogue with you about this sometime soon. Will respond to your article in more depth when I’ve had time to digest it.

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  4. Great article Laren, flagging the stage of the Crime of the Century we find ourselves among.

    I find myself wondering about the American experience when it comes to laws which are supposed to protect “the public”. Here in Australia there is a conflict when lawyers come across people who have been subjected to torture by the State. They claim to be representing their client but have a duty to the licensing authority the State. So for example in my case they pretended to be helping me while the whole time they were working with the authorities to ensure that the use of known torture methods was not exposed. I believe that this is a breach of the Convention but who does one go to in order to have this examined? There is no avenue other than the torturers.
    I feel sure that this is not lawful as the Minister and the principle of the Law Centre have been removed fromtheir offices, but of course changing the names of these individuals wont stop the conduct, it merely makes it appear that someone has acted. And of course if my reasoning is correct these individuals have committed serious criminal offences carrying mandatory prison terms.
    The protection of the Convention against Torture is easily subverted by bringing a person under the ‘care’ of police and mental health workers. In my instance this was done by ‘spiking’ me with benzos and planting some cannabis and a knife for police to find. At this point the ‘target’ is now subject to lawful sanction and you can torture away and noone will do anything to stop them. And with no avenue of appeal?? Vital that the public is not made aware of this information, because they simply dont understand the difficulties faced by those in power. There is a need for torture and well ‘unintentional negative outcomes’ should their corruption be exposed.
    So where are these human rights lawyers? Coz I’ve got more than a story to tell. I’ve got what one lawyer called “proof”. Not that it has done anything more than have my Government turn a blind eye whilst criminals in our hospital attempted to murder me (in an Emergency Dept of all places. Glad old Prof doesn’t have the stomach for it). See the case of Dr Alyd Lancee re police not prosecuting doctors who kill. In fact they will dig up the wrong body to avoid prosecuting.
    Anywho, if you know anyone, have them contact me please. Amnesty Int. Would be a possibility if I was in a 3rd World country, but alas they too seem to have a splinter in their eyes when it comes to the First World.
    Regards
    Boans

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      • Good question oldhead. Happy for folk to email me but its been quite a ride since my email account was compromised. So I prefer to speak to people face to face these days. Is there some way I can get my email address to folk I would like to speak with without making it public here? I’ve also had some problems with my email since I replied to the Ministers office regarding his rather offensive renaming of the kidnapping and torture I have been subjected to as being ‘referral’ and ‘detention’. I know that calling a rape a ‘good time’ might suit the rapist, but let me tell you as the victim of these criminals it just doesn’t cut it, and offends me deeply. But a simple don’t check the documents and accept the fraud and slander seems to be the method employed by these folk.
        I did spend some time with someone from here (and who was suitably qualified to comment) that yes these were “human rights abuses”, and I believe he did what he could to help but with people who are above the law what can one do? I mean Australia doesn’t want anyone external to the place knowing how they are resolving complaints regarding torture via refoulment of victims. They have a reputation to uphold.
        Couple of folk here who know my phone number.
        And of course once these vicious bastards at the hospital enact their threat to “fuking destroy” you one becomes a little hesitant to enagage with anyone official. How good is that? Like handing back Dahmers victims to him should they escape.
        Had an interesting conversation with a Health Advocate today who tells me she would have no problem with her husband spiking her and planting evidence for police if he believed she needed mental health treatment. And of course if he could have his girlfriend around while she was locked up for the weekend whilst they fabricated reasons to force drugs down her throat?? Maybe things will look a little different from the other side of the fence for her, as so many here can attest to.
        “Many patients speak about the experience like it was kidnapping and torture” she tells me. Ah yes but did you check whether it was or simply make assumptions that lead to criminals being enabled for years and then feign shock when they are finally exposed. All I ask is that these documents and the facts be examined and it is plain for all to see. Keep slandering me for the trauma I have been subjected to and well ….. Not in the public interest to at least remove a corrupt public officer from a role where he is doing untold damage to citizens. The State has a duty under the Convention against Torture to ensure he is trained in what does and does not constitute torture. AND THATS WHY HE USES POLICE TO MAKE REFERRALS TO HIM TO AVOID BREACHING THE CONVENTION. IT EXPLOITS THE LOOPHOLE OF “LAWFUL SANCTION’. TORTURE IS NO LONGER TORTURE. I don’t consider lying to police to enable the use of torture good enough. But i’m surprised by the number of people who do.
        Wonder how the lawyers who threw me under the bus benefited? Coz believe me they didn’t want the documents I had, and were only interested in the fraudulent ones from the hospital. Human rights lawyers? Cowards and frauds more like it. Still after seeing what they did to my family I cant blame them. Best they get on the winning team and exploit their positions of trust.
        Anywho oldhead, let me know what you believe the best way to pass on my contact details to anyone (though not facebook).

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        • See to me conspiring to torture and kidnap and doing things that are unlawful to make what you are doing appear lawful is in many ways worse than just doing it. It shows clear intent to deceive.
          So this Community Nurse knows what he was doing was torture BUT he also knows if he lies to police and gives the victim the false status of “patient” he is free to torture and kidnap any citizen he likes.
          Forgive my illness getting in the way of my democracy but I thought the public would be outraged by a public officer knowingly torturing citizens. Here’s the kicker though, who could benefit from such a loophole? And who is turning their back on the victims? No Criminal Code in a large metropolitan police station? Arrested for having the proof of kidnapping and torture? Our Chief Psychiatrist and the Minister for Mental Health don’t even know what a burden of proof is?
          One wonders if it isn’t the case that this has been going on for years and they simply don’t want the work of identifying all the victims of these organised criminals and would rather not look like the fools they have been taken for. Because believe me you really need to be a fool to not see that a Community Nurse isn’t allowed to conspire to drug citizens without their knowledge and arrange to have items planted on them for police to find, and then lie to have police provide him with torture and kidnapping services.Its called procuring, though minus a criminal code he will get away with this for a long time to come.
          Drugging suspects without their knowledge before interrogations, planting evidence and then finding it at convenient times, and the ability to use ‘coercive’ methods to obtain information from doctors, psychologists, priests and lawyers (ACC v Stoddart HCA 47 of 2010) and they really have it covered. Federal Police are now doing raids on journalists who might publish anything they do not want the public to know. Democracy? Strange sort of perversion of it, more a National Socialist Democracy.

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  5. OK my first short thought — the government and the media are tools of the corporations, as you are well aware. So isn’t it a little inconsistent to “demand” anything from them that we can’t just take? A waste of breath — we need to organize to defeat them, not “watch over” them. As is correctly insinuated in your section on people of color, psychiatry and psychiatric labels constitute a parallel police force, they do not represent a wayward branch of medicine. We need to proceed from that understanding.

    Can’t leave without stressing that psychiatric neurotoxins should not simply be “evaluated” on the basis of whether they “work” to suppress consciousness and individuality (they do) but condemned as tools of mind and behavior control. I also think Mindfreedom does us a disservice at this by not formally opposing psychiatry. (A lot to throw in at the end I guess but hopefully we can dialogue some more, either here or privately.)

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  6. In Pennsylvania, when purchasing a handgun the questions ask, “Are you mentally defective?” And, “Have you ever been committed to a psychiatric hospital?” I don’t think either of these questions are adequate to ‘red flag’ a person and deny them their Second Amendment rights. Not all people with psychiatric diagnoses are homicidal or suicidal. There are people who are genuinely afraid for their safety, just like anyone purchasing a handgun for self-defense. If someone is afraid- paranoid may be the case for everyone- of being assaulted or attacked, they should have a right to protect themselves. Just is the case most people purchase handguns. Society creates feelings of unsafety- through the media, for example. Creating a database, is, foremost, an invasion of privacy, secondly, as the author states, it is a form of social control. If a handgun gives a person a sense of security from potential harm, why are we denying this right? Owning a handgun can give them a sense of security that medication may not. Recovery is possible for all and just because a person was committed, say years ago, why are they are denied a Constitutional right? This is not sense. Other measures can be put in place… other questions more to the point can be asked, “Are you going to kill yourself?’ Do you intend to murder someone?” “Do you feel unsafe?” Owning a handgun does not imply you are a homicidal actor, but that is what a database infers.

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    • There’s an element of Alinsky tactics about this David Son. Your ‘enemy’ makes moves to protect themselves from you so you label them paranoid and use this as a justification for disarming them. Then you attack them once they have been disarmed.
      I note that in my case police used the fact I claimed to have been drugged without my knowledge as a justification to make a referral to Mental Health, despite me placing documents in front of them that I had been spiked. A psychologist explained that making a claim that you have been drugged with documented proof was not a hallucination, and thus they wouldn’t pick me up and drug me sensless for them.
      This meant I was to be arrested for having the documents that proved I had been spiked. What the charge would be I have no idea, but police tell me they don’t have a copy oif the Criminal Code these days and must therefore be winging it.
      Similarly a doctor used his paranoid delusion to justify using a chemical restraint on me that would lay an elephant out for a month. Apparently I had “potential for violence but no clear intent or actual history”. This after being drugged without my knowledge have police snatch me out of my bed and transport me against my will to a hospital based on a ‘verbal’. Without clear intent or actual history what does he have? A potential? You need treating for a potential these days? Still, a Catholic priest as well as a doctor who has probably done a bit of this silencing of complaints over the years. Funny I saw this guy two days after he tried to have me ‘snowed’. Instead of drugged without my knowledge and roughed up by police in my pyjamas, I had my suit and tie on making application for documents. I said hello to him and he responded “your looking better today” and I said “yes, must have been the ‘treatment’ eh Doc?” Like magic the three mental illnesses he had given me based on a three minute interview were gone, and there I was two days later cured and in the free world again. There really is a God huh.

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  7. Your post is right on the mark, Lauren. Red flagging is a red herring. Studies show the population being targeted isn’t a dangerous population. The background checks are only a further means of harassing traditional scapegoats, that is, of diverting attention away from real issues. Background checks are not going to sweep away these weapons of mass destruction. Weapons of mass destruction, relatively speaking, are going to sweep away more people instead. In the meantime, the government is peeking into your den, and the number of names on the FBI’s list of people deprived of their second amendment rights keeps growing. I can’t help but think that before long the American people might begin lamenting the loss of even more of the freedoms that they used to take for granted before they legislated them into barbed wire holding pens and dust.

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  8. To claim that human beings are pure and innocent creatures incapable of wronging others and only a defective minority murders because of bad genetics is ridiculous. It shows a true lack of insight into humanity as a whole.

    These shooters are lonely young men living in isolation. Usually on psych drugs.

    Yet the solution offered is only larger numbers of people locked up or at least isolated and disabled through drugs. Unable to work or maintain human relationships, these lonely people will sit brooding at home all day, like young Raskolnikov–Dostoyevsky’s protagonist in Crime and Punishment.

    Finally Raskolnikov murdered the pawn broker. Yet take heart gun control activists. At least he did not obtain a fire arm, but used an axe instead.

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    • Hi Rachel,

      A person can be seriously browned off, without going out and killing lots of people.

      Practically all the shooters are on psychiatric drugs.

      Men’s amygdalas are different to women’s and this is why men are more geared up towards taking “action”. This is why men on psychiatric drugs and suffering from the ill effects of these drugs are more likely to commit suicide than women.

      Young men again are more likely than older men to “act” as young men are geared up differently, and this is why only younger men can do certain types jobs.

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  9. Of all the group’s I believe the Alcohol Abusers are proven to be by far the most “dangerous”. Jails are not full of “scizophrenic” people that have committed seriously violent acts but full of Alcohol Abusers that have committed these acts.

    Genetically Donald Trump might be tied in with Alcoholism, and he could even be the worst type of Alcoholic – the Untreated or Dry Drunk Type (of Alcoholic).

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    • I realize that.

      But in America they are really touting the “Alcoholism is a disease” on every station to sell “medicines” worse than booze.

      They have infiltrated AA urging people to get “meds.” Shrinks will serve as their Higher Power now–or the drugs they push. Shame on them.

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  10. This is scary indeed. What if this list were to be misused? Who can access the list? Your college? Your future employer or landlord? Can it be accessed if you are running for public office? Can the media access it? If you are being sued, or prosecuted for a possible crime, can being on the list work against you? Will they use it to detain people as supposedly violent criminals or monsters?

    Why don’t we all declare ourselves “monsters” and then see what happens. I got horns and a forked tail. How about you?

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    • All good questions, Julie.

      It’s hard enough to find employment or housing if you have a psychiatric history. This is more than the loss of second amendment rights.

      It’s like putting the names of people on a sex offender list though they have never been convicted. Just because someone said they look like one. A gross injustice disguised as medical care.

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    • The way it is done in Australia is they have you agree to your medical records being accessible by all doctors (with strict security measures in place) and then tell you theres been a terrible accident and the data has been breached. Sorry about that but we accidentally released your records with our negligence to everyone. Oh well, maybe you shouldnt have listened when we said it was safe.
      Doctors here are breaching peoples confidentiality all the time. They know if they keep their mouths shut no one can do anything about it. My records that were legally bound (at great expense I might add) turned up in a public hospital as a result of a breach of confidence. Do you think I can get a lawyer to have something done about it? And given that this clinic boasts a rather select clientele (the richest man is Australia, some of our politicians) they have cause for concern about what they have discussed with Doc. Especially with a psychologist releasing that information to any one who gives her a call at her other job. She tells me she does quite a lot of this ‘pro bono’ work.

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