World News Korner

Wayne LaPierre on Navy Shipyard shooting. "There were not enough good guys with guns."

Courtesy of Press Pass:

In his first television interview since the mass shooting last Monday in which gunman Aaron Alexis killed 12 people, LaPierre, the executive vice president of the NRA, described the Navy Yard as a military facility that was “largely left unprotected.”

LaPierre said more personnel who work at military facilities, including retired military personnel, should be armed so they are able to stop attacks such as the one at the Navy Yard.

“We need to look at letting the men and women that know firearms and are trained in them, do what they do best, which is protect and survive,” he said.

LaPierre also vehemently criticized the flaws in the nation’s treatment of the mentally ill, especially of those mentally ill people who try to buy guns. “They need to be committed is what they need to be, and if they’re committed, they’re not at the Navy Yard,” he said.

“I’ve been into this whole (background) check business for 20-some years; I’ve said the system is broken for 20 years and nobody listens,” he said. “It’s broken in terms of our military bases…. On the gun check, the NRA supported the gun check because we thought the mental records would be in the (national instant check) system, we thought criminals would be in the system. And we thought they would be prosecuted.”

He said that the records of those adjudicated to be dangerous are not entered into the national instant check system for gun buyers. “So the Aurora shooter in Colorado gets checked and is cleared, the Tucson shooter gets checked and gets cleared, Aaron Alexis go through the federal and state check and gets cleared,” LaPierre said because the nation’s mental health system doesn’t detect a dangerous person such as Alexis.

So the fault for this incident falls to the mental health community for not notifying the Federal government so that Alexis could not pass a background check? Are these the same universal background checks that LaPierre was vehemently arguing against earlier this year?

La Pierre referred to the mental health system as "completely broken" as if its entire function was to identify potentially dangerous individuals and keep them off of the streets. That is not the function of the mental health community. It is to provide services for "mental health."

In other words it is designed to help people function with their mental disabilities in a way that provides them with the most normalized life possible and allows them to live in the least restrictive environment possible for them.

Getting somebody committed against their will is no easy task nor should it be. To do that you have to have quite a lot of documentation to substantiate the need. In this case there did not seem to be enough.

I agree that the mental health system needs work, but what it needs mostly is more funding. Funding by the way that Obamacare, you know the law that Republicans keep trying to defund, would help to put in place:

And the Republicans will have the stomach and stones to vote very soon here to defund the Affordable Care Act, which, says University of Chicago health-care expert Harold Pollack, “is the most important change to mental-health and substance-abuse policy in decades,” for two reasons. First, the expansion of Medicaid to all citizens with incomes up to 138 percent of the poverty line will mean that millions of people will be able to afford mental-health care who simply couldn’t before. And second, the ACA requires that coverage of mental illness and substance abuse be offered by insurers “at parity” to more traditional medical treatments. Up to now, these treatments have been more expensive, less likely to be covered, and so on.

Gee, perhaps LaPierre needs to take his need for more mental health services case to the Republicans and tell them to leave Obamacare the fuck alone!

However even if there were more money for mental health, that does NOT mean it would have stopped this shooter, as Aaron Alexis did not fall into the appropriate category to deny him access to firearms as the law stands right now:

Federal law prohibits felons and domestic violence misdemeanants from purchasing or possessing a firearm. None of Alexis' criminal behavior fell under this category.

Though Alexis was being treated by the government for mental illness, he was never adjudicated as a mental defective or committed to a mental institution. The national policy tools that we have just don't cut it.

Despite the numerous, glaring red flags in Aaron Alexis' background, he was a "law-abiding gun owner" as far as our National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) was concerned. And too few states have gone beyond the weak federal standard to prevent people like him from getting guns.

So no Mr. LaPierre the mental health community are not the ones who deserve the blame here, nor are the creators of video games, the fault lies with the impotent restrictions that determine who can and who cannot have a gun in this country.

You know the restrictions that the NRA has made it their mission to keep as easy to get around as possible.

The fault for the shooting lies with them, and more specifically, as the face of the NRA, it lies with Wayne LaPierre.

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