Everyone knows what happened in Newton, CT and that it has led to a debate on guns with all ends of the spectrum weighing in. There was the NRA answering every question with "more guns", to President Obama announcing common sense reforms.
Amongst the debate, mostly by the NRA apologists(but to be fair, this is an important part of the discussion), while trying to turn the attention away from guns, have tried to turn it strictly to people with mental illness!
“We have a mental health issue in this country,” Stingl said. “You’re blaming an inanimate object for what happened,” he added.
Winona Sportsmen’s Club board member Kevin Kotlarz, who was at Mainstream on Wednesday, said he doesn’t think the proposed reforms will prevent mass shootings, and that such violence results from untreated mental illnesses
Mental Illness is definitely fair position to take and an important part of this issue to discuss and work on. Obviously, anyone who is going to walk in an elementary school with a gun is not sane, so we need to figure out how to stop it on that end also.
The problem however, comes in the fact that to do this we need to work with our friends on the right. Unfortunately, they have proven, time and time again, that they care about gaining power not fixing the problems in our country.
Recent actions in Madison have given us a perfect example to show how disingenuous our friends on the right have been and continue to be.
A 20 year old part time protestor at the Capitol was arrested for telling people he had a "Molotov cocktail" in his backpack and may or may not have made a specific threat! This is a prime example obviously someone who is not well, threatens (instead of acting) to do harm and what do the people that want mental health reform do?
Why jump on the blame all democrats bandwagon of course. This story is political porn for the hate bloggers/squakers on the right who would have only been happier if someone had actually gotten hurt!
The usual cast of characters piped in - James Wigderson, Media Trackkkers, and Kevin Binversie among many others (who needed some time alone after reading this story) jumped right in and tried their hardest to paint everyone on the left with the Kvon Smith paint brush.
In reality, Kvon Smith is NOT a democrat, not affiliated with the party and a sick kid who needs mental health help!
A Madison Fire Department official said the contents of the bottles Smith brought to the Capitol were largely harmless, but District Attorney Ismael Ozanne said Smith will face felony charges.
Don Neviaser, who was Smith's Big Brother, said that until last month, Smith was a smart and promising marketing student at UW-Milwaukee, where he was already a leader among peers though he was only in his first semester of college.
A Middleton High School graduate, Smith, 20, had been using medication to treat schizophrenia that was diagnosed a few years ago while he was in Air Force basic training. But for some reason, he stopped taking it.
"He's literally out of touch with reality," said Neviaser, a life coach whose family is known in the Madison area for its commercial real estate business. "His roommate said that within a couple of days he totally changed."
"In reality, Kvon Smith is NOT a democrat, not affiliated with the party and a sick kid who needs mental health help!"
ReplyDeleteHe voted in the Nov 2010 election and in the Nov 2012 election. He voted in no other elections; no primaries, and no recall elections.
And as best I can tell, he didn't sign any of the recall petitions.
So, if showing up at the Capitol Tuesday night was supposed to be an 'anti-Walker' thing, then his 'anti-Walker'ism is a new thing. He didn't sign the Walker recall, and didn't vote against him in the recall election.
I find the whole thing odd that they chose that morning to also release all the supposed threats that Walker received.
ReplyDeleteI think they did that, and then used Smith to support their "concern" in order to limit access to the Capitol so that Walker wouldn't get audibly booed during his speech again.