2nd Amendment

Nets MUTE Dissenting Points of View (Updated)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Andrew Pollack’s daughter was killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Kyle Kashuv was a student there. They both have a message that the media does not want you to hear. But on the eve of the March For Our Lives, it is a message that needs to be heard. (Hat-tip to DC CALLER)

NEWSBUSTERS points out the following: “Nets: Parkland Anti-Gun Activists Overwhelm Gun Rights Advocates by 11 to 1“

  • CBS handed over the most amount of time (28 minutes, 8 seconds) to anti-gun rights talking heads and guests. The pro-gun rights side was allowed a mere one minute and 30 seconds on CBS’s evening and morning shows.
  • NBC offered 21 minutes and 8 seconds of airtime to gun control activists to just one minute and 37 seconds to Second Amendment supporters. 

Updated via BREITBART: Parkland Victim’s Father on Mission to Make Schools Safer… Without Grabbing Guns | Son Blocked from Speaking at D.C. March: ‘Guess He Didn’t Have the Right Agenda’

Before his daughter was shot and killed in her high school, Andrew Pollack was living a simple life in Florida.  

He was semi-retired, worked real-estate on the side, coached lacrosse, ate right, went to the gym twice a day and spent part of the day training his dog and spent time with his kids. 

“I went from blessed to cursed,” he says about the tragic day that his daughter Meadow, a high school senior, was murdered by a psychotic former student who walked into her school with a rifle. Now his life has changed forever, and Pollack is on a mission to make schools safer, but not by marching to demand more gun control. 

Instead, Pollack went to work with Florida state legislatures, met with the Speaker of the House with simple messages, viz; Make our schools safer. Secure our children.

His efforts ended in landmark legislation passing in Florida. 

“I’m like a lion right now, I tell everyone, I’ve got the heart of a lion since my daughter was murdered, I’m been empowered to work 1,000 times harder on getting this done,” he said in an interview with Breitbart News in Washington, DC. 

Pollack traveled to Washington with his family to attend the March for Our Lives, spending the week meeting with Trump’s cabinet members, Members of Congress, and political allies with the same message.

He felt hope after his message was well received in meetings across town, but when his son Hunter was denied a chance to speak at the march, he was frustrated. 

“I guess he didn’t have the right agenda, I don’t know, I’m frustrated,” he said. “When my kid is frustrated, I get frustrated.”

[….]

He blames the media for turning every mass shooting into a  gun control issue rather than focusing on the simple task of making the schools more secure. 

“That’s all you hear now … When they start with the gun control, I take it personal, it’s not going to fix the schools,” he said. 

He chooses not to disparage the kids from Parkland, after they rallied at the March for Our Lives, but admits that he feels that the movement got hijacked. 

“This whole march was politicized, you know, but they’re kids, so you can’t really blame them, they’re scared, they think they’re doing the right thing,” he said. 

Pollack was largely apolitical until the 2016 election where he voted for Trump together with his two sons. 

“It was the first time I ever voted,” the 52-year-old says about his vote for President Trump. “Can you imagine where we’d be if Hillary became president?”  

He credits the president for standing up and running for office to fix the country, despite universal opposition from the media. 

“The guy gets bashed every hour of the day,” he said. “I don’t know, I give him credit for doing it, he’s 20 years older than me and he works like a maniac.” …..

 

Walter Williams – “Not Always Like This”

Published by Papa Giorgio

Dennis Prager reads from an excellent article penned by the indomitable Walter Williams entitled, “NOT ALWAYS LIKE THIS.” In the article is this [of many] nuggets:

  • “What about the calls for bans on the AR-15 so-called assault rifle? It turns out that according to 2016 FBI statistics, rifles accounted for 368 of the 17,250 homicides in the U.S. that year. That means restrictions on the purchase of rifles would do little or nothing for the homicide rate. Leaders of the gun control movement know this. Their calls for more restrictive gun laws are part of a larger strategy to outlaw gun ownership.”
  • Gun ownership is not our problem. Our problem is a widespread decline in moral values that has nothing to do with guns. That decline includes disrespect for those in authority, disrespect for oneself, little accountability for anti-social behavior and a scuttling of religious teachings that reinforced moral values. Let’s examine elements of this decline.

A great read! Here are OLD stats for comparison:

Glenn Beck and Crew Discuss the “March for our Lives”

Published by Papa Giorgio

A “dramatic” opener leading into serious discussion about the intentions and groups behind (“dark money”) the march. Some of the videos that Glenn Beck played the audio from can be found in full, here: Some Questions Asked At The “March For Our Lives” Rally | The organizers Tweeted that there were 850,000 people that showed up… but counts were more like 200,000 — AND — A leftist University of Maryland sociologist Dana Fisher conducted a study of the demographics of Saturday’s march in Washington, D.C., and discovered that only less than 10% of those in the crowd were under the age of 18. What this really was was a way for celebrities and others unnamed to donate in anonymity due to the 503(c)(4) status (i.e., “dark money,” I am sure people didn’t want the “Soros” name to pop up in searches) in order to fund leftist causes… and help out the broke Democrat Party (https://tinyurl.com/yadovrsz | https://tinyurl.com/ya96o9ja)

Democratic Myths and Rhetoric Help Create Violence in Teens

Published by Papa Giorgio

The question is — if given a chance to have some time with these kids — what would I do to try and counter these actions? They are based on cultural myths passed on by parents, uncles, and the like. In other words, how would you begin to counter these myths? FIRST the actions, then some thoughts.

Students at Antioch High School in Nashville, Tennessee, tore down the Stars and Stripes during a walkout over gun violence. CHANNEL 4 in Chicago has more on the violence.

Here are the Chicago students being allowed out of school for 17-minutes:

I would start a reading club and meet weekly to discuss the issues in the book we would be currently reading. My first book I would have us read is Out Of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa. At some point I would have the kids listen to the audio chapter from Thomas Sowell’s book regarding slavery. Of course during this time one would be befriending and involved in a loving support of positive outcomes based in truth. As Christians, we should gravitate towards truth in outcomes in all things. Another study and discussion of a topic is the broken home. Something Larry Elder confronts in his own discussion with his father: Dear Father, Dear Son: Two Lives… Eight Hours. There are many resources to counter bad thinking on my page regarding RACIAL MYTHS… but the problem in the inner cities will continue as long as the family is broken and the blame is laid at the feet of historical myths and lies.

But this angst above is what the Left wants. It is how most revolutions happen, and why Barack Obama Tweeted to these student activists a few weeks back: “We’ve been waiting for you. And we’ve got your backs.”

  • High School Protesters Recite Marxist Chant With Communist Fists During The Walkout Against Guns

John Lott vs Snopes

Published by Papa Giorgio

Larry Elder has John Lott on his show to discuss where Snopes dropped the ball in their attempt to “fact check” him. An excellent study in statistics. John Lott’s article is entitled, “Fact Checker Snopes .com’s big mistakes in comparing mass public shootings in the US and Europe.” John’s work still stands the test of time and political meanderings.

Here is John’s conclusion from the article:

Snopes.com ignores our comparison of either the EU or Europe to the US and their second table ignores our concern about adjusting for different country populations.  If they are going to emphasize that countries in Europe with just a fraction of the US population rarely have mass public shooting (either not adjusting for population differences and/or looking at the “median” yearly rate), the only fair comparison is to look at individual states in the US.  Looking at Snopes.com’s desired measure of yearly median deaths, comparing Europe to the US or individual European countries to individual US states produces virtually identical results.  The same is true for average annual death rates, even if one adjusts for the population.  One thing completely ignored in Snopes.com’s discussion is the very high rate of casualties in Europe compared to the US.

The only thing that is ridiculous is Snopes.com’s comparison of small individual countries to the United States.  There is no reason to expect a tiny country like Norway to have the same absolute frequency of attacks as the United States.  The types of yearly median comparisons that they want to make only make sense if you compare similarly sized populations (Europe to the US or individual European countries to individual US states).

 

Federal Law and 2nd Amendment Age Restrictions

Published by Papa Giorgio
  • It may be laid down as a primary position, and the basis of our system, that every Citizen who enjoys the protection of a free Government, owes not only a proportion of his property, but even of his personal services to the defence [sic] of it, and consequently that the Citizens of America (with a few legal and official exceptions) from 18 to 50 Years of Age should be borne on the Militia Rolls, provided with uniform Arms, and so far accustomed to the use of them, that the Total strength of the Country might be called forth at a Short Notice on any very interesting Emergency, for these purposes they ought to be duly organized into Commands of the same formation.

— George Washington, Letter to Alexander Hamilton (Mount Vernon) | Friday, May 02, 1783

Second Militia Act of 1792 (WIKI)

  • The second Act, passed May 8, 1792, provided for the organization of the state militias. It conscripted every “free able-bodied white male citizen” between the ages of 18 and 45 into a local militia company. (This was later expanded to all males, regardless of race, between the ages of 18 and 54 in 1862.)

Larry Elder interviews Law Professor (UCLA) Eugene Volokh about the proposed age limits to purchasing long-guns. In fact, in a recent article by Larry, he notes the law regarding the age one is in the militia:

……The second point, often ignored, is the very purpose of the Second Amendment. It is to prevent government tyranny through the power of a citizens’ militia. Since many on the left denounce President Donald Trump as a “tyrant” or a “dictator” or a “Hitler,” they might find that the Second Amendment could come in handy. As to why a 19-year-old can legally get a gun, the Second Amendment refers to a “well-regulated militia” as necessary for our freedom.

And yes, a 19-year-old is part of the militia.

Section 311 of the U.S. Code Title 10 (as last amended in 1958) says: “(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and … under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.”……

L.A. Times Visceral Attack On the Value of Life (Paso Robles)

Published by Papa Giorgio

(JUMP to Added Update)

While on vacation I remembered this reading by Dennis Prager of an LA TIMES article that enrages his sensibilities… why you ask? Exactly because the Left doesn’t use theirs. So a volume caution at around 8:22 to about 9:30 is required.

Here is my Facebook post as I was sitting for breakfast in the Central Coast wine country:

I am in the free breakfast area of the Best Western in Atascadero [Wine Tasting in Paso Robles] and the news item on the TV that caught my attention was the police officer not entering the school, risking his life to save the lives of children and teachers in that very recent school shooting. Instead, he took up a position outside the school… probably thinking that this position will assure his going home to his own family. (Who knows what was going through his mind, but self preservation was most probably the adrenalin enforced decision. All those calling the officer a coward would probably do the same.) And it is this natural “self-preservation” that would be in my mind the best argument for allowing teachers and staff to conceal-carry that would protect the most lives in such a situation. But, like that teacher who raised against the military being the lowest of the low, saying that bankers and scholars do not join the military, the Left seems to have a picture of an educated elite guiding them (an example of this is their belief that science is a consensus — at least in regard to global warming, not gender). They also have Utopian dreams of men in uniform laying aside self preservation in order to save them. Which is why the statement by William F. Buckley will always remain true: “I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” Which is why the gulf between the base of the GOP (conservative/libertarian roots) and the base of the Dems (socialist/progressives) will always exist. Doing many of life’s struggles oneself versus expecting others to do it for them.

Someone on Facebook wasn’t picking up what I was laying down. She responded thus:

  • While i’ll admit that self preservation is a driving force for many of us, many of us did not go to the academy and swear to an oath “to protect & serve”, which was failed completely. Now we are protecting him from violence? Who protected those children? He’s a cop, let him protect himself like he did those children. Any action he could have & should have taken may have saved even just one life, one less family paying for a funeral.

I expanded my view a bit:

  • I know two people at the elementary my boys attended that would be more than happy to conceal carry. And if their kids and they were to come under fire, their self-preservation would kick in and many children’s lives would be saved. Because of the natural instinct to live another day. That same instinct that stopped four officers from entering a school would have kicked in with armed staff and teachers. It’s Florida for God sake… There would have been more than a couple armed staff.

Now, more important than my editorial above, are cold hard facts in the face of the mantras. To wit, while in Paso Robles wine tasting, the wine tender at Rocky Creek (FACEBOOK PAGE – great wines BTW) mentioned that the United States has all the mass killings like the one in Florida. This just is not true. John Lott clears this up for us over at IBD:

…..President Obama talked about it a lot, including in June of 2015, after a gunman shot nine people in a Charleston, North Carolina church: “Let’s be clear: At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries,” Obama said. 

Days later, Sen. Harry Reid echoed his comments. “The United States is the only advanced country where this kind of mass violence occurs,” he said.

More recently, the tragic, preventable slaying of 17 students by accused gunman Nikolas Cruz elicited similar sentiments from Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, speaking in the Senate just  last Thursday: “This happens nowhere else other than the United States of America.”

Powerful remarks, and no doubt heartfelt. But a study of global mass-shooting incidents from 2009 to 2015 by the Crime Prevention Research Center, headed by economist John Lott, shows the U.S. doesn’t lead the world in mass shootings. In fact, it doesn’t even make the top 10, when measured by death rate per million population from mass public shootings.

So who’s tops? Surprisingly, Norway is, with an outlier mass shooting death rate of 1.888 per million (high no doubt because of the rifle assault by political extremist Anders Brevik that claimed 77 lives in 2011). No. 2 is Serbia, at just 0.381, followed by France at 0.347, Macedonia at 0.337, and Albania at 0.206. Slovakia, Finland, Belgium, and Czech Republic all follow. Then comes the U.S., at No. 11, with a death rate of 0.089.

That’s not all. There were also 27% more casualties from 2009 to 2015 per mass shooting incident in the European Union than in the U.S.

“There were 16 cases where at least 15 people were killed,” the study said. “Out of those cases, four were in the United States, two in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.”

“But the U.S. has a population four times greater than Germany’s and five times the U.K.’s, so on a per-capita basis the U.S. ranks low in comparison — actually, those two countries would have had a frequency of attacks 1.96 (Germany) and 2.46 (UK) times higher.”

Yes, the U.S. rate is still high, and nothing to be proud of. But it’s not the highest in the developed world. Not by a long shot…….

Another myth surrounds the AR-15 and the progression of semi-automatics from military to civilian use. The truth is just the opposite, via HOT AIR:

…..The third problem is a historical one. Semi-automatic rifles were originally created for the civilian market, but eventually made their way into the military. The Standard Catalog of Remington Firearms notes the old Model 8 “was the first successful American semi-autom sporting rifle.” It appears the M1 Garand is when semi-automatic rifles became focused on the military use first, before civilian use. One of these reasons is because developer Springfield Armory was owned by the U.S. government. It’s interesting to see how government focus on weapons development increased as the U.S. became more involved in international conflicts. It was really a role reversal with gun manufacturers making arms for the Pentagon, before selling it on the civilian market. Other semi-automatic rifles were still being developed and sold to civilians, but the M16 style was strictly for military.

Richard Mann believes one reason why the AR-15 jumped in popularity was because of the political footballing of the White House, starting after Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush who had replaced Bill Clinton. Mann suggested in GunDigest Shooter’s Guide to the AR-15 people started buying AR-15’s because they expected the Democratically held government to re-pass the Assault Weapons ban……

So much for the mantras I heard on vacation. I will share more in a review of my time in Paso.

UPDATED

Here is part of Prager’s article:

Why does the left oppose allowing a small number of highly trained teachers and other adults who work at schools to arm themselves?

When asked, their response is consistent: “It’s a crazy idea.” And “We need fewer guns, not more guns.”

A New York Times editorial offered the following argument against having any armed teachers: “Nationwide statistics on police shooting accuracy are not to be found. But if New York is typical, analyses show that its officers hit their targets only one-third of the time. And during gunfights, when the adrenaline is really pumping, that accuracy can drop to as low as 13 percent.”

But if that is an argument against armed teachers, why isn’t it an argument against armed police?

And that argument was Aristotelian compared to this one from a Los Angeles Times editorial: “If a pistol-strapping chemistry teacher had grabbed her .45 and unloaded on today’s gunman after he killed, what, one student? Three? Five? That would be good news?”

Of course, no murder is “good news.” But to most of us, one or three or five as compared with 17  murdered is good news. Only those who think it isn’t good news think permitting some teachers and other school staff to be armed is a bad idea.

Beyond such arguments, the left rarely, if ever, explains why allowing some teachers and other adults in a school to be armed is a crazy idea. They merely assert it as a self-evident truth……..

(read it all)

NRA Political Donations Myth

Published by Papa Giorgio

THINK PROGRESS, a Leftist organization, back in 2012 went on to prove the following:

In a series of posts for Think Progress beginning today, I’ll detail what the data on the NRA’s involvement in elections actually tells us, and what conclusions we can draw about the status of an issue that has been largely dormant in our politics in recent years. The results of this analysis include the following:

  • NRA contributions to candidates have virtually no impact on the outcome of Congressional races.
  • An NRA independent expenditure (IE) campaign does not improve a candidate’s chance of winning.
  • The NRA’s endorsement, so eagerly sought by so many candidates, has almost no impact on the outcome of elections; the bulk of NRA endorsements go to incumbent Republicans with almost no chance of losing.
  • Despite what the NRA has long claimed, it neither delivered Congress to the Republican party in 1994 nor delivered the White House to George W. Bush in 2000.

[…..]

In a more recent post, GUNMART notes the under-funding of gun issues:

The liberal lie of the ‘Big Money NRA’ buying congress and funding their way to controlling our laws is a myth. Here is a look at the stats…

Now look at those dollar amount from those top special interests and compare and contrast those numbers to what the NRA’s real financial power is… They come in with a ranking of only 155th place among top lobbyists and 464th place among top contributions.

 

 

Myth About Trump’s Unilateral Rescinding Obama’s Mental Health Law

Published by Papa Giorgio

Rush Limbaugh dismantles a lie from the Left expressed by Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue regarding Trump’s first few days in office and his rescinding an Obama era bill that was an Executive Order.

If the Left do not like this legal snafu of one President rescinding another’s E.O., pass laws through Congress dammit! U-n-l-e-s-s they just want to u-s-e the controversy to support their wild positions that have no reality in the real world. Here are the organizations who supported Trump’s action (via the WASHINGTON FREE BEACON):

…Officials at the American Civil Liberties Union opposed the rule and called for its repeal because the process did not include sufficient due process protections.

  • “The rule includes no meaningful due process protections prior to the SSA’s transmittal of names to the NICS database,” the group said in their letter. “The determination by SSA line staff that a beneficiary needs a representative payee to manage their money benefit is simply not an ‘adjudication’ in any ordinary meaning of the word. Nor is it a determination that the person ‘[l]acks the mental capacity to contract or manage his own affairs’ as required by the NICS. Indeed, the law and the SSA clearly state that representative payees are appointed for many individuals who are legally competent.”

The National Council on Disability, Consortium for Citizens With Disabilities, and National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery all submitted letters calling for the reversal of the rule during hearings conducted by the Ways and Means Committee….

The WASHINGTON EXAMINER also looks into the pressure from right and left organizations

….This is why America’s new favorite charity, the American Civil Liberties Union (along with many other groups that are not particularly conservative or pertinent to gun rights per se) advocated and wrote in favor of what House Republicans did yesterday. This is from the ACLU’s letter of support:

On behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), we urge members of the House of Representatives to support the resolution disapproving the final rule of the Social Security Administration which implements the National Instant Criminal Background Check System Improvement Amendment Acts of 2007….

…In December 2016, the SSA promulgated a final rule that would require the names of all Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefit recipients – who, because of a mental impairment, use a representative payee to help manage their benefits – be submitted to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), which is used during gun purchases.

We oppose this rule because it advances and reinforces the harmful stereotype that people with mental disabilities, a vast and diverse group of citizens, are violent. There is no data to support a connection between the need for a representative payee to manage one’s Social Security disability benefits and a propensity toward gun violence. The rule further demonstrates the damaging phenomenon of “spread,” or the perception that a disabled individual with one area of impairment automatically has additional, negative and unrelated attributes. Here, the rule automatically conflates one disability-related characteristic, that is, difficulty managing money, with the inability to safely possess a firearm.

The rule includes no meaningful due process protections prior to the SSA’s transmittal of names to the NICS database. The determination by SSA line staff that a beneficiary needs a representative payee to manage their money benefit is simply not an “adjudication” in any ordinary meaning of the word. Nor is it a determination that the person “[l]acks the mental capacity to contract or manage his own affairs” as required by the NICS. Indeed, the law and the SSA clearly state that representative payees are appointed for many individuals who are legally competent…

…[R]egulation of firearms and individual gun ownership or use must be consistent with civil liberties principles, such as due process, equal protection, freedom from unlawful searches, and privacy. All individuals have the right to be judged on the basis of their individual capabilities, not the characteristics and capabilities that are sometimes attributed (often mistakenly) to any group or class to which they belong. A disability should not constitute grounds for the automatic per se denial of any right or privilege, including gun ownership.

So, if you donated the ACLU after President Trump’s executive travel ban, congratulations. Yesterday’s vote was your victory, too…..

The WASHINGTON TIMES also brings some historical clarity to the issue:

In recent years, advocates for the mentally ill created more boundaries for law enforcement and healthcare workers to forcibly hospitalize Americans who are suspected of being a danger to both themselves and others. The 1966 Lanterman Petris Short Act (LPS Act) was California legislation designed to reform the antiquated state of mental institutions in the state. 

It should be noted that LPS was signed by Governor Reagan in California but only after pressure from groups like the ACLU stepped in and sued on behalf of patients who were being involuntarily hospitalized. Other states followed suit with their own similar involuntary and voluntary commitment statutes.

According to U.S. Veteran’s Affairs, “Maurice Rodgers, spokesman for the California State Psychological Association, called the plan the “Magna Carta of the Mentally Ill,” while the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), officially in support of the legislation, raised objection to the fact that the patient had to personally petition for a due process hearing at the initial point in the commitment. 

Tying this all together for us is THE CZAR OF MUSCOVY:

….Later, the Carter administration signed into law the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, which largely promoted the same idea for national facilities. In 1981, when both parties in Congress agreed to the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981, President Reagan signed that into law. One of it many provisions was to eliminate federal funding for community services and thereby transfer funding back to individual funding or state-funded efforts. Had Reagan even been aware of that part of the Act, he would have immediately realized the Act was negating the disastrous effects of the LPS he experienced as governor of California.

In other words, the State needs more funding control over mental health facilities, whether local, community, or state. Serious cases could still be funded through Medicaid, creating a virtual federal funding pool of money. This was formalized in the Mental Health Planning Act of 1986.

In effect, bipartisan policies recommended that the Federal government transfer government funding of community mental health facilities back to the states. State-funded facilities as well as privately-funded facilities were not affected by that policy. Reagan signed the bill into law as part of an overall spending cut package. As he would have known, complete state funding of facilities resulted in terrible mental healthcare, but state governments had an obligation to provide for this. However, in 1986, he also signed into a law another bipartisan solution to have Medicaid assist with funding. The laws closed not a single facility.

Ergo, to the liberals, REAGAN CLOSED THE MENTAL HEALTH FACILITIES. The fact that states closed some facilities and let staff go at others due to their own budget issues is unimportant because, of course, liberals hated Reagan. And still do.

[…..]

So when you hear the argument that Reagan closed the mental health facilities, ask the name of one health facility that Reagan actually closed. And when it closed. And how he closed it. And if you hear that Reagan closed it by extenuation of a funding cut, ask which particular bill he signed into law specified that particular facility be closed.

Or is it a case that bipartisan governments at the state and federal levels attempted to improve healthcare treatment and that bipartisan governments within the states screwed things up so badly that individual departments of health closed down less effective facilities? You will have lost the typical liberal at the word bipartisan….

A lifelong Democrat at the DAILY JOURNAL LETTERS ties this all in a neat bow for us:

…As a lifelong Democrat (of the Irish-Catholic-Labor variety), I think Reagan did some good things and other things I didn’t support. But one thing Reagan didn’t do was single-handedly “close down” mental hospitals thus triggering 40 years of mental health hell.

Two other forces actually determined the fate of mental health care in this state. You might call them acts with unintended consequences. Here’s the history.

In 1967, the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act (LPS Act) a so-called “bill of rights” for those with mental health problems passed the Democratic-controlled Assembly: 77-1. The Senate approved it by similar margins. Then-Gov. Reagan signed it into law.

It was co-authored by California State Assemblyman Frank Lanterman, a Republican, and California State Senators Nicholas C. Petris and Alan Short, both Democrats. LPS went into full effect on July 1, 1972.

The bipartisan law came about because of concerns about the involuntary civil commitment to mental health institutions in California. At the time, the act was thought by many to be a progressive blueprint for modern mental health commitment procedures, not only in California, but in the United States.

Its main purposes were:

  • To end the inappropriate, indefinite, and involuntary commitment of mentally disordered persons, people with developmental disabilities, and persons impaired by chronic alcoholism, and to eliminate legal disabilities;
  • To provide prompt evaluation and treatment of persons with serious mental disorders or impaired by chronic alcoholism;
  • To guarantee and protect public safety;
  • To safeguard individual rights through judicial review;
  • To provide individualized treatment, supervision, and placement services by a conservatorship program for gravely disabled persons;
  • To encourage the full use of all existing agencies, professional personnel and public funds to accomplish these objectives and to prevent duplication of services and unnecessary expenditures;
  • To protect mentally disordered persons and developmentally disabled persons from criminal acts.

Initially, mental health advocates pushed for community-based mental health facilities that would replace the closed mental hospitals.

But that never happened because even though post-Reagan the legislature was still controlled by Democrats, no major funding for new community-based mental health facilities ever occurred. And that situation basically is still the case today.

The second force at work in the mental health care issue were the courts and what is known as “deinstitutionalization.”

During the 1960s, many people began accusing state mental hospitals of violating the civil rights of patients. Some families did, of course, commit incorrigible teenagers or eccentric relatives to years of involuntary confinement and unspeakable treatment. Nurse Ratched, the sadistic nurse famously portrayed in the book and film “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest,” became a symbol of institutional indifference to the mentally ill.

By the late 1960s, the idea that the mentally ill were not so different from the rest of us, or perhaps were even a little bit more sane, became trendy. Reformers dreamed of taking the mentally ill out of the large institutions and housing them in smaller, community-based residences where they could live more productive and fulfilling lives.

A mental patient could be held for 72 hours only if he or she engaged in an act of serious violence or demonstrated a likelihood of suicide or an inability to provide their own food, shelter or clothing due to mental illness. But 72 hours was rarely enough time to stabilize someone be held another two weeks for evaluation and treatment.

As a practical matter, involuntary commitment was no longer a plausible option…..

Ex-NPR CEO Changed Mind On Gun-Control

Published by Papa Giorgio

I touch on this story here on my PREVIOUS POST regarding the media and what this CEO of NPR did in his trying to understand “flyover country.” He changed his mind on a lot of issues, but here is on that is awesome – the 2nd Amendment. Here is the lead up to the below video by WASHINGTON FREE BEACON:

The former CEO of National Public Radio came back from a reporting trip on conservative America having changed his mind about the efficacy of gun control measures, he said on Tuesday.

Ken Stern appeared on “Morning Joe” to discuss his new book, Republican Like Me: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right. Stern, a Democrat, wrote he realized he was cordoned off in a liberal bubble and set off into conservative enclaves of America to expose himself to new ideas.

Co-host Willie Geist asked him if he altered his views on any key issues as a result of the book. Stern said he had changed them on guns, and it began with a notion he hadn’t thought of before: that gun homicides have declined significantly over the past 25 years.

  • “The most extraordinary trend in modern American criminal history,” Stern said. “At the same time, the number of guns have gone up. Those two things aren’t correlated, but it’s clear we know how to drive down gun murders without gun control, and the question is why are we talking about gun control when there’s other things that we’ve been doing for 25 years that actually have reduced murders in this country by an extraordinary amount.”…..

Here is an interesting conversation about the 2nd Amendment — CHANGE MY MIND: