Bleeding Hearts . . . and Bloody Hands
Today is the anniversary of the Sandy Hook shootings. We’ll doubtless hear great hue and cry from our liberal “brethren” about that, and about how “evil guns” killed innocents.
Yeah, they’re lying – and they know it. But that won’t stop many clueless schmucks from lapping it up. And the media will be there to broadcast the false outrage and tears.
They’re using innocents murdered by a lunatic as political props. I wish I could say that shocks me. But coming from the “Progressive” side, it doesn’t. They do crap like that all the time.
The hypocrisy, though, disgusts me. Because if anyone besides the shooter, Adam Lanza, is to blame for Sandy Hook – it’s our Bleeding-Heart Liberal “Brethren”.
In the 1950s and 1960s, our Bleeding-Heart Liberal “Brethren” began advocating for the rights of mental health patients. “Institutions are horrible, and unnecessary!” they said. “We can treat them at home, or in the community!” they said. “Putting someone in an institution is a violation of their rights, and should be only done as a last resort – after they’ve proved they’re violent!” they said.
And they convinced various state legislatures to change laws and do exactly that.
Connecticut was one of those states. Indeed, in Connecticut today it’s virtually impossible to get someone involuntarily committed – no matter how crazy they are – before they’ve committed an act of violence. The law doesn’t support it, and judges almost universally won’t order it.
So, what does this have to do with Sandy Hook? Plenty. Let’s recap what happened leading up to that incident.
- The shooter, Adam Lanza, had serious mental issues. After struggling with home care for years, his own mother was trying to get him institutionalized – presumably so that he would get the help he desperately needed.
- The legal system in Connecticut refused to institutionalize Adam Lanza. Why? Because he hadn’t committed a violent act. Yet.
- The previous year, laws had been proposed in Connecticut’s legislature that would make it easier to commit involuntarily those with mental issues. The laws did not pass. Connecticut is a liberal state; over 60% of each house of Connecticut’s legislature is Democratic.
- Adam Lanza was not simply full-blown batsh!t crazy. He was also obsessed with mass murders.
- Adam Lanza tried to purchase a firearm. Since he was less than 21 years old, he was refused – but on the grounds of age, not insanity.
- Adam Lanza’s mother owned firearms. She kept them secured. Adam Lanza murdered his own mother and stole her firearms after killing her.
- Adam Lanza used those stolen firearms to commit mass murder.
- By law, the place Adam Lanza chose to commit his crime was a “gun free zone” – AKA an undefended soft target. Adam Lanza knew this. It was one of the reasons he chose that location for his crime.
- Schools being “gun free zones” was also courtesy of our Bleeding-Heart Liberal “Brethren”. Along with deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill, they’d urged passage of laws designating schools as “gun free zones”.
- The police arrived well after Adam Lanza had already killed all his victims. During his reign of terror, he was unopposed. Why? Because he alone was armed in a “gun free zone”. It was against the law for anyone there to have a firearm. The law-abiding people there thus couldn’t defend themselves against an armed lunatic who didn’t give a damn what the law said.
- When finally confronted by armed opposition, Adam Lanza committed suicide.
So here’s the deal: what Adam Lanza did was unlawful – multiple times over. He tried to buy a weapon legally, and was refused. So he murdered his own mother, stole her weapons, took those stolen weapons to a “gun free zone”, and then committed 24 more murders. Each of those acts is a heinous crime. The minute he was confronted by armed opposition – he killed himself.
Our Bleeding-Heart Liberal “Brethren” deinstitutionalized the mentally ill in the 1960s, and made it virtually impossible in Connecticut for anyone to be involuntarily committed before they committed a violent act. Without that, ALL of the innocents killed at Sandy Hook would be alive today. So probably would Adam Lanza.
Our Bleeding-Heart Liberal “Brethren” forced schools to be declared legal “gun free zones”, AKA undefended soft targets. Without that, Adam Lanza might have encountered armed opposition early in his lunatic spree. (We’re talking Connecticut, though, so perhaps not.) It wouldn’t have saved his mother, and probably wouldn’t have saved his next victim. But those two might well have been the only lives lost. In any case, I’m guessing we’d be talking far fewer than 25 innocent lives lost.
One well-placed shot from an armed defender was all that was needed to save lives. But no armed defenders were there – because laws passed at the urging of our Bleeding-Heart Liberal “Brethren” forbade it.
Our Bleeding-Heart Liberal “Brethren” say that to prevent this from happening again, we need more laws. They say that guns are to blame, not the lunatic who murdered his own mother and then killed over 20 others using stolen weapons.
Yeah, right. Adam Lanza was batsh!t-crazy insane. He was willing to commit multiple felonies – including murdering his own mother. Do you really think another law would have made one damn bit of difference to him? If so, let’s talk business. I can make you a helluva deal on a bridge.
If you want to see who’s responsible for Sandy Hook, my Bleeding-Heart Liberal “Brethren“, look at a picture of Adam Lanza. Then go look in the freaking mirror. Why? Because other than Adam Lanza, you are the ones responsible for Sandy Hook. The blood of the innocents killed at Sandy Hook is on your hands.
You valued the rights of madmen more than society – and thus made it impossible to take a madman off the street before he killed. And you were scared out of your wits by the very thought of violence – and demanded the laws that made it impossible for the adults at Sandy Hook that day to defend either themselves or the innocent children in their care.
Their blood. It’s on your hands, my Bleeding-Heart Liberal “Brethren”.
I hope each of you remembers that every time you look in the mirror.
Category: Crime, Guns, Legal, Liberals suck
That’s right. We need to call those bleeding heart fucksticks out as soon as they open their mouths. To follow the Prez’s advice, we need to get in their faces and yell just as loud as they do. If necessary get down in that gutter where they live and take the fight to them. No more of this taking the high road crap. We are in the right; that will keep us clean from their filth no matter how dirty it gets.
@1: Yeah that.
This is a masterpiece.
You left out the part about the media vultures who enable the shooters by dwelling on their deeds, not just for a few weeks, but for as long as they can get away with it.
They feed on violence, like people who gawk at bad traffic accidents. They visit and revisit it ad nauseum. They fall on those who escape the violence like hyenas after a kill, on the pretext of ‘getting the story’. They should be barred from going near anyone who avoided the violence but they aren’t, and they get the same adrenaline jolt out of it that the shooters get.
Hondo-
My cousin was mentally ill. She was three years older than me. My aunt was told by a judge that it would never happen, she could never get the cousin committed, even though she pretended to be an FBI agent with a firearm and broke windows during one of her mental episodes. No one got hurt, luckily.
Yes, I hail from CT. My young cousins were at Sandy Hook that day, and are okay. My cousin finally managed to kill herself last March. A blessing and a curse to be sure. My SIL has the same affliction and lives with us. The laws in NC protect the patient and not the potential victims. It. sucks. balls.
Your column is priceless and unless you find a true thinking liberal, they will call you a liar, and tell you that you don’t understand.
VERY well said, Hondo! Alas, the liberals won’t even think about acknowledging facts, all they care about is media attention and hype!!
Spot on as usual, Hondo. Of course liberals will say that they’re all about helping and protecting the victims. The problem is that somewhere along the way, they got it in their heads that the “victims” are the bastards who commit unspeakably evil acts. Not, you know, like, THE ACTUAL VICTIMS Of THE VIOLENT ACT, but rather THE ASSHOLE WHO DID IT. I don’t want to sound close-minded here, but it offers a fair amount of credence to the notion that liberalism is a mental disorder.
Thank you Hondo. A well written article of the truth of the matter. How long is our nation going to continue to leave innocents in harms way? How many more will die because of the blinders that liberals wear to the the truth? I am glad some states are now allowing teachers and admins to arm themselves. In our school district there is a police officer on school property for the purpose of drug awareness and education. But they are not armed. They should be!
This should be re-posted to American Thinker, it’s that good. Thank you Hondo.
And as Mike VanderBaugh (spelling?) of Sipsey Street Irregulars likes to say about our Libtard Brethren, they are “blood-dancing”.
Every point is true. The viewpoint is thoroughly supported by fact. It’s a homerun. Send it out far and wide. Nice work, Hondo.
It’s been pathetically horrible up here in Maine these past few days. The state’s largest news group, which owns and publishes the Portland Press herald and Maine Sunday Telegram, is owned by the husband of Democrat Congresswoman Chellie Pingree. As such, they are just shills for her and the DNC’s positions. I can’t read them anymore without risking damage to my heart as the articles are so damned slanted that it automatically raises my blood pressure.
The Sandy Hook articles have been egregious in their anti-gun platitudes and shading of the truth and supporting facts. The narrative has been so far left that it risks turning all of it into fiction, which, it many ways, it already is.
Thank you for a fine article. I’m reposting this to my facebook wall for further dissemination.
V/R
It seems yesterday’s shooter was a bleeding heart liberal too. Perhaps we need some sensible gun “safety” laws regarding left wingers?
Same thing here with yesterday’s Arapahoe HS shooter. As soon as he saw the sheriff was coming, he committed suicide. If only someone IN the school had been armed, perhaps a girl wouldn’t be fighting for her life.
@12: I just read up on that. Considering that he really wanted to enter the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, we might have dodged another bullet when it comes to toxic leadership.
This is a great book on the subject of how the American mental health system came to this: http://goo.gl/q1lqJA
Same old bullshit pussy stuff that VWP spews that I get tired of reading – Jonn
Thank you, Jonn.
@16 – Ha! Yeah, if VWP wants to save keystrokes, all he has to type is “what I said last time” and leave it at that.
@16 We appreciate the moderation, Jonn. We can only handle so much of VWPissant’s special brand of stupid.
vwpissypants — good argument for birth control. And I missed what he said by – what, a half hour?
So while you guys are all arguing about forced commitment, try to remember that the abuses in mental hospitals, especially those run by the various states they were in, were rampant and horrifying. Those same abuses frequently occur now in nursing/rehab places that don’t properly screen their workers. If you will, remember the quadriplegic vet who was molested by a male nurse at the Chicago Rehab Institute.
Ex-PH2: no argument that many mental hospitals in the first half of the 20th Century had serious problems. Unfortunately, rather than correct those problems, the deinstitutionalization movement pretty much closed most mental hospitals (asylums) outright. The inmates were in many cases simply sent back to their families (or dumped on the streets) with little or no effective care.
Further, the accompanying legal changes that made it more difficult to commit someone against their will were in many cases extreme. As I noted in the article above: in some states (Connecticut among them) it is virtually impossible to get someone with mental issues involuntarily committed to a mental hospital, no matter how obviously batsh!t crazy they might be, until they have committed a violent act. Lanza’s first violent act was to murder his mother and steal her firearms. His next batch of violent acts were to attempt to murder a slew of people, succeeding 24 times, then commit suicide.
Yes, the early-20th Century abuses needed correcting. But our “fine liberal brethren” tried to effect Utopia while making that correction.
There’s only one problem: this side of the grave Utopia is only a dream. And we all know what paves the road to Hell.
Hondo, some time back, ABC ran an investigation on 20/20 about a Florida law that allowed the state to commit people to non-state, for-profit facilities, simply based on a complaint that someone felt threatened by someone else. I don’t remember exactly when that was, but the abuse of that law was rampant. Apparently, all you had to do was say ‘I’m gonna kill that so-and-so’, or something like that, and you got put away with no recourse. According to the story, the elderly and people who lived alone were the targets. I still had a black & white TV, so it was probably the 1980s. It was abuse, nothing else, and it was done for profit.
I don’t know if it’s still in place or not; my guess is that whatever that statute was has been repealed, but that’s one form abuse, motivated by profit, that I’m referring to, not just the physical abuse of patients.
Unless I miss my guess, the CT statute has more to do with something like that than anything else, i.e., you can’t just take someone’s word for it that so-and-so threatened you.
But the real problem is that Lanza and the most recent shooter (Arapahoe) were both legally adults and hadn’t actually done anything ahead of their rampages. So where do you draw the line between being aware that someone is out of control, and waiting until he shows it?
It’s easy enough to say ‘lock them up’, but if everyone who has a bad day and says ‘I’m gonna kill that jerk’ or even uses the word ‘kill’ in an offhand way is viewed as a threat, that makes up about 95% of the population this country.
Where do you draw the line?
Hondo–hammer. Nail. Head.
Hmmm. Managed somehow not to get the appropriate accolades posted earlier, Hondo! Well done. Keep up the good work, brother.
Jonn, thank you for editing that VNWP, whoever the heck, in @16, because you allowed me breathing room so I didn’t express how I really feel. So putting it nicely, every time I see a post from him all I hope is that he falls wrong side out through his a*****e and breaks his f*****g neck.
Ex-PH2: no, involuntary commitment on a whim or without due cause isn’t the right answer. As I’ve said at length here and elsewhere, before someone is deprived of a fundamental right under the Constitution IMO they deserve full due process. That is true whether that’s the right to bear arms, to vote, their property, their freedom – ANY fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution.
However, the law should not set the bar so high that it’s impossible for society to protect itself, either. A murderer or rapist should not get probation, and serial violent criminals should be put away for life. And someone who’s as obviously crazy as Adam Lanza was shouldn’t have to literally attempt murder before a judge can order them involuntarily committed for psychiatric evaluation. Some states effectively require that (or another violent act) before they’ll commit someone involuntarily. Connecticut is one such state.
There has to be a middle ground – and in some locales, and in Connecticut in particular, we’re simply not there. Involuntary commitment on scanty or no evidence, or on the word of a single party with an agenda, obviously isn’t the right answer. But effectively saying we must allow an obviously seriously disturbed individual to attempt murder before they can be committed isn’t the right answer, either.
I agree, Hondo. However, there are too many people who have no one near them who are just as likely to do what Lanza and James Holmes (Aurora) and the Arapahoe shooter did.
I can come up with three right off the bat:
Mark Chapman – killed John Lennon, Lennon was ‘in his way’
David Hinkley – tried to assasinate Reagan to impress Jodie Foster
David Berkowitz – Son of Sam, went after couples in parked cars
I would not say they came out of nowhere, but they kept to themselves most of the time. Chapman and Hinckley both tried to blame their behavior of JD Salinger’s ‘Catcher in the Rye’, which is ludicrous. They’d have done what they did, anyway. Hinkley also tried to blame the movie “Taxi Driver”, a vigilante film,for what he did.
My point is that they kept what they were planning to do to themselves, for the most part, just as Whitman kept his intention to shoot people from the U of Texas clock tower to himself. Sirhan Sirhan also came out of nowhere, and Squeaky Fromme, primed by Manson, stepped out of a crowd with no warning and tried to shoot poor old Gerald Ford.
If everyone on this board who says ‘so=and=so needs to be whatever’ were taken seriously and arrested or locked up for speaking freely, when you and I both know that they’re just venting frustration and nothing else, this would be the stupidest reponse possible.
There is no way to tell whether or not someone means it, or is just venting. And frankly, I’m laying the blame for this more and more on idiot parenting by people who were raised by ‘feel good’ byblows of the flower power generation.
Yechk. I just nauseated myself and I haven’t had breakfast yet. 😛
Ex-PH2: for a single isolated incident, there is indeed no practical way to tell if that is a sign of “teh krazee” or not. A pattern of behavior exhibited in front of multiple witnesses that persists over time and worsens is a different story.
I’d have real problems with a judge involuntarily committing someone on the word of one individual regarding a single incident. A pattern persisting over years, like Lanza’s? Different story. Some people desperately need help beyond that which is available at home or in the community.
You are correct that imbecilic, overindulgent parenting has contributed greatly to the problem. But remember: many of those indulgent parents are also the same ones arguing for gun control. Further, many of those indulgent parents are themselves children of those 50s/60s bleeding hearts that argued for deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill on the grounds that “their rights are being violated” and “we can treat them at home or in the community”.
Yeah, right. For some, home/community treatment works. For others, try it and you get incidents like Tucson, Aurora, and Sandy Hook.
The options are many, and do not necessarily apply to every community and every family. But, the bottom line (for me, anyway) is that because we know that we will not diagnose and treat every individual who needs it is not a good excuse to not diagnose and treat as many as we can.
Part of the price of freedom is that we inevitably will have screwballs and nutcases walking among us. I am willing to take the risk of a few of them being dangerous to remain a free people. But, it became obvious a couple of decades ago that we had collectively gone beyond our comfort level when ordinary people put bars on their windows and felt it necessary to routinely arm themselves.