Numb Is Dumb

"Just can't take it no more feelin' numb
Woke up face on the floor I was dumb"
From "Last Tattoo" by Rehab

1966: Austin, Texas --- almost 50 years ago

“Charles Whitman takes a stockpile of guns and ammunition to the observatory platform atop a 300-foot tower at the University of Texas and proceeds to shoot 46 people, killing 14 people and wounding 31. A fifteenth died in 2001 because of his injuries. Whitman, who had killed both his wife and mother the night before, was eventually shot to death after courageous Austin police officers, including Ramiro Martinez, charged up the stairs of the tower to subdue the attacker. Whitman, a former Eagle Scout and Marine, began to suffer serious mental problems after his mother left his father in March 1966. On March 29, he told a psychiatrist that he was having uncontrollable fits of anger. He purportedly even told this doctor that he was thinking about going up to the tower with a rifle and shooting people. Unfortunately, the doctor didn’t follow up on this red flag.” (emphasis mine, see: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/an-ex-marine-goes-on-a-killing-spree-at-the-university-of-texas )

When I graduated from high school in 1960 there were very few gun laws, lots of guns, and no mass shootings until 1966 in my memory. There was also no such thing as permissive cultural relativism and subjective truth to make us dumb and numb.

Like some collective Pontius Pilot, Americans are again washing their hands of the blood from another school shooting massacre, this time in Oregon. But the blood won’t go away. President Obama is correct to say we are ‘numb’ to these repeated atrocities. But he is as ‘dumb’ as the rest of us in dealing with them let alone preventing them. The only thing that’s certain is the uncertainty about the causes of these mass murders. We know what the causes are not. The gun is not the cause. Lack of ‘gun control’ laws is not the cause. Unfettered gun access by mentally unstable people is not the cause. The Second Amendment is not the cause. The NRA congressional lobby is not the causes. By process of elimination, if you want to know the ultimate cause for the problem, then go into the bathroom and look in the mirror. There’s the cause. Take a selfie of the cause. Make it your new Facebook profile picture. Photoshop it with a blood filter. Get your FB friends to do the same in a meaningless act of numb and dumb.

Our national hand-wringing has started again. Last Thursday morning, British-born Christopher Harper-Mercer, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after exchanging fire with police officers who responded to the shooting at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College. Chris murdered nine people in cold blood. Chris was 26. His father and mother separated when Chris was born. His absentee father, Ian Mercer, had not seen his son since abandoning the family. Chris regularly went target shooting with his mother, Laurel Harper. She was aware that Chris had guns, lots of guns. She knew her son was unstable. He routinely wore army camo clothing even though he was booted from the Army after serving just one month for ‘instability’ issues. Laurel could not be ignorant of these facts. She worked as a nurse. What is not known is what she did about these facts if anything at all. Question: What’s the likelihood that both parents were negligent parents of a disturbed mind? This element of the Oregon massacre maps with other similar shooters most especially the UCSB shooter, Elliot Roger three years ago. Again, we find dysfunctional, absentee, and remote parents indulging their son’s mental deformity with material objects including guns. Ian Mercer registered incredulity about how his son could amass an arsenal of 14 guns. Then, he admitted he had not spoken to his son since separating from Chris’s mother, Laurel. Turns out Ian Mercer and Laurel Harper were not even married. But, as any fool can plainly see, all that must be the fault of guns, their manufacturers, lack of gun-control laws and the NRA lobby in Congress. Both Chris and Elliot left manifesto’s blaming their mental anguish over their inability to have sex.

Over this weekend, as our national gun debate exploded with acrimony. I had a few serious and productive ‘gun’ conversations with my friend, former student and now a fellow philosophy professor. Not since I had dinner with NRA Executive Director, Wayne LaPierre and then-NRA president, Charlton Heston in 1998, has anyone actually proposed real, rational and doable legislation that made sense to me. My and I do not see eye-to-eye on many matters political, but we came to an agreement on some specific pieces of legislation that would help reduce the likelihood of these mass shootings.

First, when reviewing the Elliot Roger rampage killing in nearby Isla Vista, California (UCSB’s student ghetto), these facts emerged that proved existing gun access laws are not being enforced by local authorities.

1. Existing gun laws in California require psychologist, psychiatrists and mental health providers to alert local law enforcement when they have knowledge their patient poses a serious threat with or without possession of a firearm: “ Licensed psychotherapists are required to immediately report to a local law enforcement agency the identity of a person who has communicated a serious threat of violence against a reasonably identifiable victim or victims (see Cal. Welfare and Inst. Code §§ 8100 - 8108).

2. 1. Local law enforcement is required, under California law, to investigate any such report by psychotherapists. In the Elliot Roger case, that local law enforcement agency is the Santa Barbara County Sheriff-Coroner, Bill Brown. Killing six and wounding fourteen more, the Elliot Roger rampage occurred on May 13, 2014, just at the end of the UCSB term. On February 18, 2015, Sheriff-Coroner Brown issued his report. The report narrated the particulars of the incident and exonerated Elliot’s parents, psychotherapists and the sheriff’s deputies dispatched to ‘check the welfare’ of Elliot after his step-mother viewed several alarming YouTube videos where Elliot threatened violence because he couldn’t get laid. If the sheriff ever investigated what Elliot’s parents, and doctor’s know about Elliot’s gun collection, the report never tells the public despite this footnote in the report itself;

“California Welfare & Institutions code §5150(a) When a person, as a result of a mental health disorder, is a danger to others, or to himself or herself, or gravely disabled, a peace officer, professional person in charge of a facility designated by the county for evaluation and treatment, member of the attending staff, as defined by regulation, of a facility designated by the county for evaluation and treatment, designated members of a mobile crisis team, or professional person designated by the county may, upon probable cause, take, or cause to be taken, the person into custody for a period of up to 72 hours for assessment, evaluation, and crisis intervention, or placement for evaluation and treatment in a facility designated by the county for evaluation and treatment and approved by the State Department of Health Care Services. At a minimum, assessment, as defined in Section 5150.4, and evaluation, as defined in subdivision (a) of Section 5008, shall be conducted and provided on an ongoing basis. Crisis intervention, as defined in subdivision (e) of Section 5008, may be provided concurrently with assessment, evaluation, or any other service. (see http://www.keyt.com/blob/view/-/31362906/data/1/-/vkbudz/-/Summary-Report-of-Isla-Vista-Shooting-Investigation.pdf page 147.)

Notice the yellow highlighted section. Suppose that word ‘may’ was legislatively changed to ‘must’. It is highly likely that such a change would have resulted in a ‘probable cause’ search of Elliot’s dorm room and immediate discovery of his gun arsenal. It is highly likely that competent interviews over the 72-hour detention would have unlocked Elliot’s torrent of torment and then to his correctional incarceration beyond the 72-hour initial evaluation. Sheriff Brown dispatched four deputies to ‘evaluate’ Elliot after his mother alerted authorities to the threat. Not one of these dispatched law officers was qualified to ascertain Elliot’s mental stability. The guns were in his room at the time sheriff’s deputies ‘interviewed’ him. Sheriff Brown is an elected law enforcement official. Suppose legislation were passed the ‘required the removal from office any elected law enforcement officer who neglects to enforce existing gun control laws.

That legislation is not likely to pass in Sheriff Brown’s case. His bosses, the Santa Barbara Board of Supervisors, are dominated by liberal progressive democrats who accepted Brown’s ‘investigative’ report without question. These are the same county supervisors that campaign for more legal restrictions on gun ownership. These are the same career politicians that have no concern for enforcing existing gun possession laws of the kind referred to above. The dead and wounded in Isla Vista need not have been murdered by a sex-starved lunatic if existing laws had been enforced.

Until now, the Elliot Roger case has been corruptly buried by politicians and politically motivated law officers, district attorney’s and prosecutors. Yet, in just this one area strengthening existing gun possession laws would very probably saved six lives and fourteen wounded. How many other local gun laws could be enforced that will decrease the chance of these acts of mayhem? How many incompetent and corrupt elected law enforcement personnel can be removed who refuse to enforce the law aggressively?

How many gun-control laws are there in the United States to be enforced aggressively? The left-leaning Brookings Institution study offers this answer:

“The most informative answer to the question of “how many gun-control laws?” is then “about 300 major state and federal laws, and an unknown but shrinking number of local laws.” Rather than trying to base arguments for more or fewer laws on counting up the current total, we would do better to study the impact of the laws we do have. (see http://www.brookings.edu/es/urban/publications/gunbook4.pdf )

President Obama leads the chorus of politicians who have long eyed the repeal of the Second Amendment. Their latest excuse is the false supposition that these mass shootings only occur in America. And since only America has a Second Amendment, then get rid of the Second Amendment, guns can be confiscated, and there will be no more shootings, or at least they will be very few. For a detailed and balanced refutation of this unsound argument take a peek at this analysis from politifact.com: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jun/22/barack-obama/barack-obama-correct-mass-killings-dont-happen-oth/

So, go look in the mirror America. You won’t see a gun, or a gun manufacturer, and you won’t see a new ‘gun-control’ law. You won’t even see a politician exploiting the massacre victims for votes. What you will probably see is someone who’s become quite numb and dumb through cultural relativism, and the age of the selfie. You'll probably see someone too clueless to demand enforcement of gun laws already on the books, and stiff punishments for those who refuse to enforce them. What you see in that mirror is the reason the next mass shooting is almost a certainty in a dysfunctional society where psychosis is the new normal.

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