Don's Tuesday Column

         THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson   Red Bluff Daily News   8/13/2019

Political violence and gun facts

Last week’s column ended by acknowledging the horrific mass murders in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio. “Re: late news of mass shootings: It’s sad and evil but every word from Democrats and news people linking President Trump to the shootings and white supremacy, is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”

Misrepresentations, half-truths and malicious falsehoods have become a threat to America’s ability to govern itself. They come not just from Democrat politicians and leftist activists, propagandists for their cause, but also from supposedly objective news reporters and outlets that hypocritically obsess over Trump’s “lies.”

Honest policy differences—meant to be debated and argued on newspaper opinion pages, radio and television panels, and state and national legislatures—have turned into endless accusations of racism, white supremacy, Hitlerian motives and dark, soulless evil. You don’t have an honest dispute with people and groups that you consider evil; you simply resort to any available means to eradicate them and their ideas.

Democrats exposing citizens’ personal data, or “documents,” or “doxxing,” is a despicable violation of their right to act and contribute based on their beliefs. It is violent and abhorrent because it invites harm to them.

Violence is evil; political violence even more so because the perpetrators seek to purge people and their freely-held ideas from the public sphere. That’s not how self-governance works, which requires a peaceful exercise of power as well as acceptance of political decisions that one side doesn’t agree with. Those decisions must, however, not violate rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” guaranteed to all people and groups under our Constitution.

This can go both ways and apply to the right or the left if allowed to spread without being checked by reason and good-faith interaction. The actual annihilation of disfavored groups has, over the last hundred years, been primarily the result of the abomination of leftist, socialist and communist totalitarianism: the USSR (Union of Soviet “Socialist” Republics), Communist China, Communist Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba and Nazi Germany.

Hitler headed the National Socialist German Workers Party; the title, “Nazi,” was the German phonetic, shorthand combination of national (Na) and socialist (zi). Hitler purged “communists” because they believed in “international” socialism; Hitler would not subjugate his state-run “national” socialism to Russian-dominated communism. All told, about 100 million souls were slaughtered, starved or worked to death to serve “socialism” in all of its ugly, bloodthirsty permutations.

Proponents of progressivism, or Democratic Socialism, or Marxist/Leninist “dictatorship of the proletariat” (with their “ownership” of the “means of production”) require conformity to whatever “politically correct” nostrums of collective activity the socialist leaders mandate. “Group-think” is what you see on the left today and drives the formulation of such pipe dreams as the “Green New Deal” and “Medicare-for-All.” Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini summed it up: “All in the state; nothing outside the state.”

Fascism is, ultimately, socialism under a different banner. The violent, destructive misnamed “Antifa (antifascist)” group is the equivalent of Hitler’s “Brown shirt” street thugs that were sent out to knock heads, burn storefronts and intimidate the opponents of Hitler’s National Socialist (Nazi) party. They are the fascists they claim to be against. Witness the mob on Mitch McConnell’s lawn calling for his death.

I don’t see potential effectiveness for proposed gun-related laws unless—and this is a big unless—mandates are incorporated that would have prevented some shootings: 1) High schools nationwide must give up foolish notions that treating misbehaving students leniently due to race does anything but decrease the education of other students and encourage further misbehavior. Students that commit crimes must be turned over to law enforcement, prosecuted and jailed, which will deny them legal access to firearms. Nicholas Cruz, who killed the Parkland students, benefited by not being jailed and bought his gun legally.

2) Mental health professionals must be required to enter the names of patients deemed violent threats to others in the NCIC background check system, denying them access to legal gun purchases. 3) Military branches must report to NCIC (and may already be doing so) those dishonorably discharged due to crimes that would disallow them from buying firearms.

Before adding laws with potential for abuse by ex-spouses, or others with a grudge, who want someone disarmed—by falsely claiming violent behavior—all current laws must be enforced; someone’s 2^nd and 4^th Amendment rights against wrongful deprivation of guns without due process must be complied with. New background check laws won’t change anything if current ones, preventing the wrong people from buying guns, aren’t being used.

It’s curiously ironic that the same people that insisted wrongly that Donald Trump colluded with Russians to win the election—never happened—now insist, again without any proof, that Trump is a racist and a white nationalist/supremacist.

“Mass Shootings Aren’t Becoming More Common—and Evidence Contradicts Stereotypes about the Shooters,” by psychology researcher Christopher J. Ferguson, concludes: 1) Games and media do not create criminal violence or mass killers; 2) Mass shooters are not primarily male white supremacists. The racial proportion of shooters from 1982 to 2019 is roughly similar to the racial makeup of the U.S. population—Whites slightly less, Blacks slightly more and Hispanics much less.

3) Psychosis and suicidal depression is very common among mass murderers, according to a U.S. Secret Service report; these mental conditions should require reporting to the background check system. 4) Mass homicides are not becoming more frequent—from 2006 to 2019, the number has remained 18 to 25 per year with no trend.

Lastly, in spite of those misstating the fact, America is actually 56^th out of nearly 90 countries for mass shootings per capita. We do not lead the world in mass killings. Criminologist Adam Lankford’s flawed omission of foreign shootings was corrected by the Crime Prevention Research Center to move America’s ranking from first to 56^th.