In the last week alone, the nation has been rocked by two extremely violent, horrific, and disgusting acts of mass murder. In total, between the shooting in Buffalo, NY and Uvalde, TX, more than 30 innocent people have been slaughtered. It is also true that according to the FBI, the number of active shooter incidents in the United States has risen significantly since 2020.
Universal Healthcare and Easy Access Mental Health Services
59% of gun deaths are suicides. Getting healthcare in the United States is nigh impossible for many people whether it be the cost of services, lack of insurance, or the stigmatization that comes from seeking medically necessary mental health services. We need to make concerted efforts to ensure that anyone who needs healthcare can walk into a facility and get the help they need with no questions asked nor strings attached. Whether it is nationalizing healthcare or instituting dual power healthcare structures we need to get this done and we need to do it now. Getting people the healthcare they need drastically reduces rates of mental illness while also reducing the rates of economically motivated crime which is sometimes violent in nature.
In May 2002, The Secret Service published a report that examined school shootings. Among much else, they found that the majority of school shooters had difficulty coping with loss and personal failures, attempted suicide, felt persecuted, and exhibited alarming behaviors toward those around them. All of these are signs to immediately provide accessible healthcare, particularly mental healthcare. We need to be proactive about getting people the help they need. Simply scapegoating mental health issues as the conservative gun lobby does is about as helpful as thoughts and prayers. We need to directly address mental healthcare and build the systems that prevent violence.
Stable Food and Housing
Violence is quite often a symptom of economic distress. Ensuring the stable material conditions of a community not only reduces the incentive to commit economically motivated violent crime, but it also reduces interpersonal violent crime. We need to build communities that have affordable housing and accessible food. The fastest and easiest way to work towards both is to ban R1 zoning because this form of zoning creates food deserts, makes communities car dependent, and skyrockets the cost of housing. This is not to say that we should not be working on dual power structures in housing. We also need free lunch and breakfast programs run by local radicals and community-powered housing programs.
In the efforts of pro gun activists to defend the 2nd Amendment from those who would take weapons out of the hands of the people, they get over zealous and fabricate certain facts to defend their position. One of those so-called facts is the often repeated claim, “commies are coming to take our guns away”. This is one of, if not, the most repeated statement. The automatic linking to gun control to communism. Therefore anyone who supports gun control with a rational (albeit incorrect) arguments is portrayed as being a communist. This kind of automatic association between those who support gun control and communism is just dishonest, and exposes the ignorance of the pro gun movement.
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There is literally no law during the revolutionary period that prohibited anyone form having any guns. There is absolutely no source for claiming that the Party took people’s guns away. The claim that Mao or communism took guns away from people is completely made up. JEWS FOR THE PRESERVATION OF FIREARMS OWNERSHIP are liars, Huan Zhu is a liar. There is no trace of gun control in the revolutionary period, there is however very strict control under capitalism. This shows the pathetic lengths these defenders of gun control sink to. They have to lie about others in order to defend gun ownership. You don’t have to lie, there are perfectly good reasons for defending guns. Almost all of which I personally support.
So what are the facts surrounding Revolutionary China and gun ownership? Well this is what we do know for a fact. The Communist Party after the Long March resettled in the countryside where they began work with the peasants arming them against the government. Mao and the Communist Party armed the people against the country. As the Japanese were attacking China, the Nationalist (and I stress capitalist) Party was only interested in suppressing the peasants, not the Japanese invaders. Mao organized the defence against the invading foreign army while the capitalists were only interested in killing the people of the nation. Eventually the Nationalist party leader Chang Kai-shek realized the Japanese were destroying the country. The communists gave people guns in order to defend themselves and attack those doing harm to them.
In the revolutionary era the people were armed, people carried their guns into work. Some carried them out into the fields as they did agricultural work. Communist China didn’t ban people from having guns they were the ones that gave it out, capitalist China did ban them. Oh, and unlike certain YouTube video making Pastors and pro gun websites, I have sources in the description.
Discussions centered around offering grants to states that impose “red flag” firearm seizure laws are slowly progressing, according to Republican Lindsay Graham and Democrat Richard Blumenthal, who first teamed up to push the federal gun control legislation in 2019. CBS News reported on Wednesday that the pair have had multiple discussions around potential changes to their previous legislation with an eye towards attracting at least 10 Republicans, which would allow the bill to overcome a potential filibuster.
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Another issue with red flag laws is the lack of mental health resources for those deemed by a judge to be a danger to themselves or others. None of the 19 red flag laws on the books in various states require the state to help that supposedly dangerous individual find treatment or counseling, and only Maine’s version of a red flag law requires a mental health evaluation from a medical professional in addition to a judge’s determination.
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Red flag laws are ultimately a gun control solution to a mental health problem, which is one of the reasons I continue to oppose them. They do nothing to stop truly dangerous individuals from harming themselves or others, but they do allow lawmakers to avoid addressing our crumbling mental health systems by claiming they’re “doing something” to block dangerous people from doing bad things. Maybe Graham and Blumenthal’s final proposal will find a way to address each and every one of these fundamental flaws, but I’m not holding my breath.
While politicians in Washington D.C. are looking to find some sort of gun control “compromise” in the wake of the horrific murders in Uvalde, Texas, gun owners and Second Amendment advocates involved in the grassroots effort known as Walk The Talk America are taking on the challenge of improving access to and removing the stigma around mental health and gun ownership. I’m so glad that WTTA founder Michael Sodini could join me on today’s Bearing Arms’ Cam & Co to talk about the program and how it’s helping to save lives, and I hope you’ll check out the entire conversation in the video window above.
Innumerate media types will look at the NSSF’s graph of adjusted background check data and thrill to the fact that May, 2022’s total was down significantly from the 2020 spike and the 2021 total.
But if you look at the May, 2022 bar on the graph in relation to The Time Before years, you’ll see that last month’s adjusted NICS total was about 20% higher than it’s been in any previous May. Let that sink in for a minute. Americans are still buying guns a relatively blistering pace and with the current push in Washington to take advantage of the Buffalo and Uvalde shootings, that isn’t likely to change any time soon.
Republicans will blame gun violence on mental health, psychiatric medications, or violent video games, yet they aren’t willing to support solutions, such as affordable healthcare, affordable prescriptions, or defund the military industrial complex! As for Democrats, all they will offer is banning guns!
Speaking of mental health, and psychiatric medications, Peace Labor May made some good points in her most recent YouTube video (you may have to turn your volume up).
In light of the mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, and because I’m a glutton for punishment, I’m re-posting a link to my left argument for gun rights from 2017. (One among many. See links at end of article)
Some points covered in the article:
The class concept of the state. It’s not a neutral arbiter to be trusted with a monopoly of armed power. “The concentration of wealth and the concentration of armed power in the hands of a few, are both bad ideas—and the one has everything to do with the other.”
The net effect of eliminating the right of citizens to possess firearms will be to increase the power of the armed capitalist state. Whatever strict gun-control regime is instituted, ruling-class families and institutions will still have all the guns they want.
But what about horrible mass shootings? Recognize that *gun homicides have declined even as gun ownership has increased,*. that mass shootings are a small portion of gun deaths in the US & a lousy index of the social problem of gun violence. But they do grab one’s attention.
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | May 17, 2022
In the wake of a mass shooting in Buffalo, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went on ABC to advocate for “balance between free speech and safety.” She did not specify how this balance might be achieved, or who would have the last word in defining it.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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