Thursday, February 15, 2018

Donald Trump Owns the Blood in Florida

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

Seventeen individuals who showed up for school yesterday at the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, won't ever have to worry about being late for class again.  This morning they are lying dead in cooling units at a local morgue - the victims of the eighth school shooting in the United States since January 1st.

It's just another day in America.

Donald Trump took to Twitter this morning to berate the shooter, a 19-year-old former student at the school by the name of Nikolas Cruz who had posted on social media of his interest in becoming a school shooter.  Cruz's disturbing social media posts had been reported to law enforcement.  Trump has this to say:

"So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again!"

Translation:  This was a mental health problem, not a gun issue.  There is also an implication that the public bears some responsibility for not being persistent enough in their alarm regarding the instability of the man who eventually opened fire at the school.

Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General of the United States, now says he wants to "study" the mental health aspects of school shootings.

Translation:   Savagely flog that mental health horse in an attempt to keep the onus off of guns and God's NRA.

Guns don't kill people, crazy people kill people!

If that is really and truly the case, perhaps the country should be looking at limiting crazy people's access to guns.  No, wait, we did that already.  President Obama, who couldn't get Congress to act on limiting the rights of persons with mental health issues to buy guns even after the Sandy Hook massacre of 2012, enacted a regulation in 2013 that placed people who received social security disability payments for mental health issues and were deemed unfit to handle their own financial affairs on the national background check database - an imposition that should have kept them from being able to buy guns.

If they were crazy enough to qualify for disability and could not even legally manage their own money, then they probably had no business owning guns.


Guess who was opposed to that bit of commonsense?  The National Rifle Association, that's who.  In February of 2017, almost exactly one year ago, the NRA pushed a repeal of the Obama rule through Congress and it was quickly signed by Donald John Trump, a law which said, in effect, that people with serious mental illnesses have Second Amendment rights, too - thank you very much!

Trump flogs "mental health" after every mass shooting.  Today, he and his stooge attorney general are both wailing about "mental health" while promoting social welfare budgets that take the knives to programs aimed at improving mental heath outcomes for Americans.  And today, Trump's signature is on the bill that officially rolled back the Obama era rule that was designed to keep seriously mentally ill individuals from being able to purchase guns.

Donald Trump owns this bloody, bloody mess in Florida - and the NRA owns him!

1 comment:

Xobekim said...

It is Public Law 115-8. The Senate bill was H.J.Res.14. The House measure was H.J.Res. 40. Senators Blunt, Moran, & Roberts are co-sponsors in the Senate. Representatives Smith, Long, Luetkemeyer, & Hartzler are co-sponsors in the House. These are the persons responsible for making it easy for a mentally ill person to obtain a gun.