The Mental Health Myth and the Danger of Red Flag Laws

"Placing some physically healthy persons in the class of sick people may indeed be justified by appeals to ethics or politics; but it cannot be justified by appeals to logic or science." (Szasz, T. 1974. The Myth of Mental Illness)

The National Association of Gun Rights has reported that President Trump's White House has endorsed the use of red flag gun confiscation orders. To the average person, perhaps even the average gun owner, the idea of passing laws restricting access to guns for those diagnosed with mental illness has merit. People have a tendency, according to Thomas Szasz author of The Myth of Mental Illness, to show an intolerance to uncertainty. Therefore, in the minds of the public, it is rational to allow law enforcement to infringe upon the rights of law abiding citizens if there is any question pertaining to their behavior. Over the past several years, American's have been exposed to a rash of mass public shootings followed by an unending barrage of anti-gun propaganda. These stories were certainly designed to raise consciousness of the dangers of mentally ill people obtaining firearms. Many stories highlighted the failure of the background check system and of local authorities to identify persons who may pose a "danger to themselves or others." The desired effect has been gaining public acceptance of an infringement against the second amendment and the due process rights of those who may be considered mentally unstable.

The question no one is considering is the legitimacy of mental health diagnoses. Take ADHD for example. Millions of children are diagnosed and prescribed powerful drugs for a so called disease that no one can prove is real. According to neurologist Dr. Richard Saul, the disease as defined in the DSM simply does not exist because the described symptoms are so broad that the entire U.S. population could be diagnosed with them. Of eighteen possible symptoms listed in the DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Manual) an individual only needs to exhibit five. These symptoms include everyday behaviors such as forgetfulness, being easily distracted or being unorganized. Another good example is Operational Defiance Disorder, or ODD. According to the DSM V an individual only needs to display disagreeable behavior one day a week for a period of six months to be considered operationally defiant.

The truth is that science has no idea what happens to the brain of a person diagnosed with mental illness. According to Psychology Today, it is understood that mental problems can develop from traumatic instances or drug use; however, there are no biological indicators which prove there is abnormal functions in the brain, and most disorders are diagnosed through observations of behavior rather than pinpointed, scientific tests which are used to identify physical illness. The same is true when it comes to schizophrenia, a disease that many people associate with psychotic behavior. According to Loren Mosher, a psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health, there is no medical evidence that supports the idea that schizophrenia is caused by chemical abnormalities in the brain. Thomas Szasz alludes to the idea in the Myth of Mental Illness that psychiatry, as a profession, fell into the habit of classifying behaviors that were misunderstood as mental illness simply because it is in man's nature to classify things. He says that if we fail to take into account the rules made in classification systems, which according to him do not occur naturally and are always made by men, we run the risk of mistaking our own systems for naturally occurring events. In other words, psychiatry over the years has become to dependent on their own systematic way of understanding; therefore, we have a system where illnesses are diagnosed off of observed behavior instead of something that can be proven to exist through medical tests.

This is important to understand because under many of these red flag laws the ability to quickly assess behavior and make determinations of some one's mental status is being left in the hands of law enforcement. This is troubling in many ways because according to the Crime Prevention Research Center psychiatrists and other mental health specialists routinely miss the signs that may, according to the government, indicate someone may pose a danger to themselves or others. Their research shows that many of the recent mass shooters we have bore witness to have been in the care of psychiatrists and determined to not pose a threat to society. Furthermore, they highlight that only 13 out of 25 mass shooters were known to have mental health diagnosis' such as schizophrenia. This means that the probability of a schizophrenic committing a mass shooting is one out of 123, 077, according to The Crime Prevention Research Center.

"To put it differently, if a psychiatrist was asked to screen 100,000 people with schizophrenia and identify the 1,000 most dangerous people from that group (the most dangerous 1 percent), less than 1 of that 1,000 would actually commit this crime and this assumes that you did accurately pick the 1,000 most dangerous individuals.  To put it differently, you would have hopefully caught at most one real dangerous person, but at the expense of 999+ “false positives.”  Again, note that this is 999 false positives out of 1,000 people is an overly optimistic number.  The true false positive rate will be much, much higher." (The Crime Prevention Research Center)

What this means is that it is incredibly difficult, even for mental health professionals, to identify dangerous people based on the methods used to diagnose mental health. Under the current system of observing behavior, people can be deemed mentally ill for any action that may seem questionable to anyone with authority to make such a determination. If mental health professionals have had difficulty in determining the intentions of their own patients, how can law enforcement or any other part of the justice system do so successfully? If we drive on with this idea then we will be setting a precedent that will leave us with no freedom at all and a society diagnosed as crazy.

Anti-Gun Narrative Continues to Develop Against Laser Sights

 On Friday, February 15, just hours after the President declared a national emergency, there was a mass shooting in Aurora Illinois.The timing of this shooting, as is the case with most of them, is extremely suspicious. Not only have the Democrats been exposed in their fake Russia collusion story for trying to orchestrate a coup, there are several gun control bills in the house and senate. These bills include high capacity magazine bans, universal background checks and of course, national red flag laws. H.R 5717, for example gives the Attorney General the power to give states tax payer funded grant money to implement their own red flag laws. President Trump's pick for attorney general has just been confirmed by the senate and he is a proponent of these unconstitutional confiscation schemes. Will this shooting, under the pretext of a declared national emergency, be an excuse to push these bills through? We will see.

Gun control has proven over and over to be a failure. If it worked there wouldn't have been a shooting. Not only does Illinois have some of the strictest gun laws in the country, the individual in question was convicted of felony assault in 1995 for stabbing a woman. This means he was already a prohibited person and likely obtained the gun used illegally. A study conducted by the Department of Justice has determined that fewer than 1 in 50 prison inmates convicted of gun crimes purchased their guns through a licensed dealer, meaning that universal background checks would do nothing to stop gun crime. This of course will be ignored by lawmakers because their agenda doesn't revolve around safety, but disarming the citizenry.

After every shooting there is a developing narrative designed to reinforce the notion that more gun laws are needed. For instance, we often hear that the shooter was a normal everyday guy who no one suspected was capable of going off and committing such a crime. This creates the impression in gullible minds that their gun owning neighbor is also such a person. This narrative reinforces the idea that there is a need to confiscate someone's guns if there is any behavior that seems to be questionable. Another example is the one from the Church shooting in Texas. The shooter in that case was able to purchase his gun legally because the U.S. Air Force failed to report his name to the criminal database after being convicted of domestic violence. Like most other systematic failures, this is completely the government's fault; however, it reinforces in the public's mind the idea that our gun laws need to be revamped and more back ground checks are needed. This is all propaganda aimed at  getting the general population to demand change.

The shooting in Illinois is no exception. There is a new narrative developing though and it is dangerous in the sense that it goes along with an executive action taken earlier in the year by President Trump, one that has divided the gun community to be honest. President Trump's bump stock ban is not fully understood for the danger it really presents to the second amendment. It is unconstitutional in the sense that the attorney general essentially re-defined the existing definition of the word machine gun in the 1968 gun control act to include devices like bump stocks, or anything which increases the rate of fire on a semi-automatic rifle. Machine guns are already illegal and are defined as one pull of the trigger for a continuous rate of fire. Bump stocks do not even achieve this as they only use the energy of the rifle's recoil to allow the trigger to be continuously pulled. The trigger, when using a bump stock is still being pulled every time a round is discharged.

Based on this article from CNN, it is safe to assume that laser sights will be next on the list of things to ban. Laser sights allow a shooter to acquire their targets more quickly enabling for more rapid fire. So, there you go. The CNN story describes the shooter as running down the hallway just shooting everybody with a pistol that had a green laser sight. This story is designed purposefully to create fear and possibly add laser sights to a growing list of things democrats want to ban.

The CNN article also described people in the factory running for their lives when they heard the shooting start. People panicking, not knowing what to do. In this writers humble opinion this is part of the problem. This nation was founded on the idea of being a warrior culture. A population trained in the use of arms standing ready in defense of their families, communities and nation. It was understood that firearms in the hands of good men were a necessity in the fight against evil. A relentless propaganda campaign waged by the left has changed all of that. The general public has been brainwashed to fear guns and the people that own them. If this keeps up and there isn't a massive re-education effort in defense of the second amendment we will soon be like Britain where people are reported to the police for buying hammers. This is the inevitable result of encouraging an atmosphere of fear and mistrust and banning guns. People still murder and no one can defend themselves and eventually something as innocent as buying a hammer becomes suspicious behavior.

Update: Reuters is now reporting that the shooter was able to purchase his firearm and obtain a permit legally despite being a convicted felon. According to Reuters, police are claiming that a criminal conviction in Mississippi would not necessarily prevent him from obtaining a gun permit in Illinois. This is a lie. Obviously, this is a developing narrative to justify the passing of universal background checks and eventually, a registration system.

Has there been an intentional effort to brainwash people into thinking differently about guns? Eric Holder can answer that.

Understanding and Rejecting Darwinian Evolution

With every new sunrise we witness the world plunging deeper and deeper into chaos. Mankind seems to be taking the final steps off the edge and further away from sanity. The Democrat party, having once removed the word God from their party platform has exposed itself for what they really are, pure evil. The party that claims to be looking out for the oppressed and vulnerable has revealed it's true agenda, death. They have shown the world that they have no concern for the most vulnerable amongst us and that life, in their minds, has no value beyond their own definition.They are arguing that a pregnant mother should have the right to kill her baby right up to the point of birth and in some cases, even afterwards. How did we get to this point?

For years, our higher education system has been in the grips of those who do not believe in God. Our universities used to exist for the single purpose of teaching students how to find and pursue truth. Since the advent of Darwinian evolution and Pavlovian conditioning however, education has moved into the realm of the scientific, disregarding Gods word in this search and leaning on man's understanding instead. Once man discovered that behavior can be trained, shaped and manipulated to serve his own ends, life lost value as it was no longer believed that men had wills of their own. 

B.F. Skinner once described the study of human behavior as being either pre-scientific or scientific. Pre-scientific meaning from the perspective that man was in some way able to control his behavior and scientific, after the acceptance of Darwin's theories of evolution. 

"In what we may call the pre-scientific view (and the word is not necessarily pejorative) a person's behavior is at least to some extent his own achievement. He is free to deliberate, decide, and act, possibly in original ways, and he is to be given credit for his successes and blamed for his failures. In the scientific view (and the word is not necessarily honorific) a person’s behavior is determined by a genetic endowment traceable to the evolutionary history of the species and by the environmental circumstances to which as an individual he has been exposed. Neither view can be proved, but it is in the nature of scientific inquiry that the evidence should shift in favor of the second. As we learn more about the effects of the environment, we have less reason to attribute any part of human behavior to an autonomous controlling agent. And the second view shows a marked advantage when we begin to do something about behavior. Autonomous man is not easily changed: in fact, to the extent that he is autonomous, he is by definition not changeable at all. But the environment can be changed, and we are learning how to change it. The measures we use are those of physical and biological technology, but we use them in special ways to affect behavior." (Skinner, 1971)

In the above statement Skinner says that the study of human behavior should be conducted from the "scientific view" as opposed to the pre-scientific view. Looking at man through this lens has lessoned the value of human life. We have become, in the minds of scientists and behaviorists, no different than the animals Darwin claimed we are. We are not in control of our thoughts, actions and behaviors, they are controlled by the "evolutionary history of our species and the environmental circumstances to which an individual has been exposed." (Skinner, 1971)

 Darwinian evolution is a central theme in Marxist Communism. Marx needed a scientific view which justified his war against God and Darwin's theory of evolution, which claimed that humans had no divine connection or will of their own was used as that justification. 

Marx was at one time a devout Christian. He later became angry and turned against God. Many argue he was an atheist however, the book Marx and Satan by Richard Wurmbrand suggests that Marx developed Communism as a means of destroying God's creation. It is difficult to deny that Communism attacks the very nature of man and turns him into nothing more than a product of our behavior. Marx argued that class struggle was a natural part of evolution or dialectical materialism. The bourgeoise, the oppressor or "thesis" would naturally be overthrown by the proletariat or the anti-thesis, resulting in evolutionary progress of the species. Marx, according to Wurmbrand, reduced man's behavior to being motivated by economics alone. Love, along with other human emotions, was reduced to nothing more than a necessity to achieve economic success.  

It can be argued that the Theory of Evolution, combined with Marx's ideas, are responsible for the atrocities the world witnessed in the twentieth century. When the value of human life is reduced to nothing more than an accident or process or evolution, eliminating undesirables that stand in the way of other's grandiose ideas is easy. Communists killed an estimated 80-100 million people, according to The Black Book of Communism, because they were viewed as being in the way of progress, or creating a better world. 

All of this has brought us to the point where human beings are now viewed as a scourge to the planet and the young have been indoctrinated into this thinking. It is now considered moral to kill a baby right up to birth.

If things are to change in this nation Darwinian evolution must be rejected as the main basis for scientific inquiry. It appears we may be on that path. According to an article at WND.com, one thousand scientists from around the world are rejecting the main premise behind Darwin's theory claiming that there is no way it accounts for all the complexities of life. How could a Godless theory explain the complexities in a world created by God? Hopefully, more scientists will follow and our nation can return to a state of sanity.