In wake of Newtown shooting, Feinstein Rabid on Guns...Toothless on Mental Health

Senator Dianne Feinstein has made herself conspicuous over the years by her single-minded (and might I say OBSESSIVE?) drive to ban, burn, bash, and bomb anything that has even the faintest aroma of an "assault weapon." Watch out flash hiders, bolt hold-backs, and now "dangerous" pistol grips! You just look way to scary...even though you have nothing to do with crime. But that doesn't bother the California senator. She will continue to discredit her position anyway--all in the name of symbolism.

Why do I call it symbolism? Because the senator seems to ignore the actual data relating to homicide in general, and especially gun-related homicide! She has such an obsessive fascination with guns that she cannot force herself to focus on issues of even greater import: namely, a mental health registry, followed by gang violence, and a cause no one discusses which takes the lives of over 200,000 Americans annually.

 I'm exaggerating, you say? Well, after hearing of her renewed vigor in pursuing an assault weapon ban, I became curious to discover if she had finally made any effort to tackle the mental health issue in some finite way. What I found was very disappointing, and a telling indictment of her real agenda.

Using a search engine to locate the phrase "Feinstein and mental health," the only thing to be found was her recent comment in her own December 17 editorial concerning the Newtown massacre:

The wickedly incomprehensible massacre of little children and their teachers in Connecticut last week is occasion for deepest sorrow. But it is also time for action in dealing with firearms and mental illness.

The best place to start is to reinstate the federal assault weapons ban that was in place between 1994 and 2004, when it was allowed to expire....

And, perhaps the most important piece is dealing with mentally ill people. Behind most of these American massacres that plague us is someone with a mental illness.

Certainly we need to mobilize to create a better system of care for disturbed people before they can harm anyone. And that includes stronger laws allowing society to isolate from the rest of us. Let's begin to engage that process as well.

Modernizing gun laws and improving mental health care are steps on the path President Obama announced at the Newtown memorial: "We can't tolerate this anymore. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change." (1)

 This is nice talk, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Unlike Feinstein, a few officials seem to be genuinely attempting to address the mental health issue. Governor Deval Patric, notwithstanding his radical anti-gun views, noted that he wanted to keep firearms from falling into the "wrong hands." He further proposed enrolling Massachusetts in a national mental health registry for firearm background checks. (2)


Supposedly on the other side, The NRA wants an ‘active’ mental illness database, as well, which they note that thirty-eight states already have.(3) California has such a registry. Please note the title of one of their forms:

California Mental Health Firearms Prohibition
California Welfare and Institutions Code, sections 8100 - 8108

There are a number of circumstances under which mental health clients may lose their right to purchase and possess firearms. You should read this entire publication before deciding which, if any, of these circumstances apply to you. (4)

The Washington Post's Sarah Kliff pointed out in her December 21, 2012 article that the Gun Control Act of 1968 already prohibits gun sales to persons committed to mental institutions or “adjudicated as a mental defective.”(5)

Lindsay Nichols, an attorney with the Center to Prevent Gun Violence adds to this that 

The federal law pretty much says that anyone who has been involuntarily committed or anyone who has been determined by a court to be a danger to themselves or others, those two categories are prohibited from possessing firearms.(6)

That prohibition stands today but is pretty difficult to enforce, partially due to the issue LaPierre mentioned: Reporting on mental health status is incomplete, with a hodgepodge of state laws that specify what information does, or does not, go into the federal background check system. Personally speaking, even as...perhaps especially... as a Second Amendment Supporter, that simply is not acceptable. Hence: this is where new pressure needs applied.

In pursuing this goal, an excellent U.S. map is available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2012/12/N3Y3y.png. It shows those states yet to develop mental health registries.

Beyond this, and concerning mental health and gun shows, I believe that instead of requiring firearm registration at gun shows, sellers could be required to use a government-supplied database to check the mental health registry for the potential buyer. This would continue to protect an individual's Second Amendment rights while, at the same time, ensuring against firearm purchases by persons deemed a risk due to previous acts of violence against others.

The challenge to such a system are those legislators who, like Senator Feinstein, are unwilling to exercise the effort of independent thought, but instead continue to offer the same trite, tired answers. To them, in their lust for symbolism, for easy object lessons, little more can be conceived beyond decreasing the size of a respective magazine, say, from 20 down to 10 rounds. However, such an answer in no way alleviates the problem. A perpetrator can simply strap on ten five-round magazines, thus providing him with fifty shots...still plenty for extreme lethality. So, magazine restrictions won't work.

By the way, in the pursuit of truth the question needs to be asked: are guns responsible for the greatest number of homicides in any given year in the U.S.? And what about the question of numbers of persons killed with "assault weapons" versus regular handguns. In answer to these questions, we turn to Bureau of Justice statistics which show that the total number of individuals killed by knives roughly mirrors that of "other guns" (everything but handguns) every year from 1976-2005. Knives actually account for more deaths nearly every year during that period. (7)

 ^{Adding further data, according to Wikipedia,}

Of the 30,470 firearm-related deaths in the United States in 2010, 19,392 (63.6%) were suicide deaths, and 11,078 (36.4%) homicide deaths. (7)

Larry Bell, contributing writer to Forbes suggests (Jan. 6, 2013) that

for a bit more perspective, consider that while the number of AR-15s of all models that Feinstein’s new bill defines as “assault weapons” rose by more than 2.5 million from 1995 through 2011, the nation’s murder rate during that same period fell 48% to a 48-year low during that period. In fact, the FBI reports that 8.5 times more people are murdered with knives, blunt objects and bare hands as with rifles of any type. (8)

So, that being true, doesn't it stand to reason that we should define a class of knives called "assault knives" and outlaw them--even before we address the "assault rifle" issue? I am not trying to be funny here, merely logical.

Continuing, the same Bureau of Justice document displays that from 1990 through 2005, 90-98% of the homicides were gang-related. (9) Yes. GANG RELATED. That is the vast majority of gun-related homicides in the U.S. So, logically, might we suggest dealing with gangs even before we deal with "assault knives"?

Since we are comparing relative causes of death in the U.S., how many are caused annually by doctor error? Dr. Mercola puts the number conservatively at 225,000 annually using data supplied by Dr. Barbara Starfield of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. (10)

A July 31, 2012 New York Times article by Sanjay Gupta posits that a reasonable estimate is that medical mistakes now kill around 200,000 Americans every year. That would make them one of the leading causes of death in the United States. In fact, Gupta says it is the third leading cause of death. (11)

NBC News contends on the other hand, that it is alcohol abuse which is the threat. Alcohol, they report, kills some 75,000 Americans annually and shortens the lives of these people by an average of 30 years, according to a U.S. government study. Excessive alcohol consumption, they say, is the third leading cause of preventable death in the United States after tobacco use and poor eating and exercise habits. Wikipedia sets the number of alcohol related deaths at 100,000. They get their data from the NIDA Report, the Scientific American and Addiction Research Foundation of Ontario. They refer also to Alcohol Consumption and Mortality, Alcohol poisoning deaths, CDC report. (12)

Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_alcohol_related_deaths_occur_each_year#ixzz2IC8qHFYo

The question then becomes: who, or what, are the real dangers to us? Guns make a very convenient, symbolic target, but should they be our primary focus? I posit the real threats as gangs, alcohol and the biggest of all...big Medicine.

Footnotes:

1. Feinstein, Dianne. December 17 editorial concerning the Newtown massacre. http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/feinstein-in-the-news?ContentRecord_id=66503f12-5d0f-4f6c-abd1-184a0b32e430
2. (Boston Globe Dec. 18, 2012). http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/12/18/patrick-calls-for-tougher-gun-laws/KSohXQ7SuUXNVMUkAH0wwI/story.html
3.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/21/the-nra-wants-an-active-mental-illness-database-thirty-eight-states-have-that-now/
4.  http://www.mabpro.com/resource/docs/cal_firearmsProhibitionForm.pdf
5.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/21/the-nra-wants-an-active-mental-illness-database-thirty-eight-states-have-that-now/
6. Bureau of Justice statistics (Homicide Trends in the U.S. 2005) 
7. 10 Leading Causes of Injury Death by Age Group Highlighting Violence-Related Injury Deaths, United States" 
8.  Bell, Larry. Forbes, Jan. 6, 2013
9.  Bureau of Justice statistics (Homicide Trends in the U.S. 2005)
10.  http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2000/07/30/doctors-death-part-one.aspx 
    
    11.  July 31, 2012 New York Times article by Sanjay Gupta.  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/opinion/more-treatment-more-mistakes.html?_r=0
    12.  NBC News, Alcohol linked to 75,000 U.S. deaths a year. NIDA Report, the Scientific American and Addiction Research Foundation of Ontario. Also, Alcohol Consumption and Mortality, Alcohol poisoning deaths, CDC report.