Articles by Herschel Smith

The deep state is putting its players in place and defenestrating the threats.  Regular readers know what we’re talking about when we say the “deep state.”  We don’t mean whatever idiot Bill Kristol thinks it means.  Nor does it mean what this Breitbart author thinks it means.

Those “deep state” officials include the intelligence, law-enforcement and national security officials who worked in President Barack Obama’s administration but who are still working in permanent or temporary positions in the White House and in surrounding agencies. Many of those officials are believed to be leaking information from within the White House to allies in the anti-Trump media, including Kristol.

That’s a children’s bedtime book version of the deep state.  Regular readers know that the deep state means DynCorp, the CIA, portions of the FBI and DHS, much of the State Department, some local LEOs who have previously worked for DynCorp, former generals, The Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative, and some others, involved in money laundering, nation toppling, child and organ trafficking, oil trafficking, weapons trafficking, assassinations, and other wicked things to enrich the already wealthy and bring them more power.

Donald Trump was clearly in a war with the deep state and their mouthpiece, the MSM, during most or all of his presidential campaign.  He has lost the war.

Donald Trump has asked a New York billionaire to conduct a review of U.S. intelligence agencies and other aspects of the federal government, current and former officials told NBC News.

Trump’s expected appointment of Steve Feinberg, co-founder and chief executive of Cerberus Capital Management, is causing consternation inside the intelligence agencies, former senior intelligence officials say.

A senior administration official says Feinberg still needs to be cleared by the Office of Government Ethics, which is complicated because Cerberus owns many different companies, some of which have financial relationships with the U.S. government.

But there were indications Thursday that Trump’s plans could be changing.

Current and former intelligence officials told NBC News that Trump’s pick to be director of national intelligence, Sen. Dan Coats of Indiana, was annoyed that the news of Feinberg’s role was breaking before Coats’s Senate confirmation, expected next week.

Asked at a White House news conference if Feinberg would conduct an intelligence review, Trump said, “I think that we are going to be able to straighten it out very easily on its own.”

Trump called Feinberg “a very talented man, very successful man,” and said, “he’s offered his services and you know, it’s something we may take advantage of.”

One former official, who speaks regularly to current senior officials, called Feinberg’s expected role an “extra-constitutional process,” and said Trump believes the intelligence community “needs to be threshed and cleaned and bent to the will of the executive.”

It does, and I’ll bet Feinberg “offered his services.”  But this won’t bend the intelligence community to the will of anyone but the deep state.

Folks, Feinberg is DynCorp, DynCorp is the CIA, the State Department is the political wing of the CIA, and through the JTTF and Fusion Centers, the CIA has infiltrated the DHS, FBI and local law enforcement.  DynCorp has been the hinge pin neck deep in nation toppling in North Africa and grabbing of the resources that became available after the nations of Libya and Syria degenerated into chaos.

Trump will be coopted or molded, or intelligence will be completely hidden from him.  Either way, he will be neutered.  The deep state has won.  We always knew that Trump only gave us more time, not a real change.  Make use of that time.  Regular readers know what to do with that time.

As for Cerberus Capital – which Feinberg owns, my previous articles on Cerberus pointed to a bit of puzzlement on why this conglomerate wanted to buy up firearms manufacturers.  At the time I thought it was a bad idea for small firearms companies to sell to conglomerates like Cerberus, and I said so.  But I hadn’t mentally connected the dots between Feinberg and firearms manufacturers.  Well, I have now.

As best as I can tell, Cerberus still owns Remington, Bushmaster, DPMS, Marlin, Para USA and other companies.  At one time, since Para is located near me, I offered to drive to their offices and interview workers, management, or whomever, take some pictures of guns, discuss their gunsmithing and write a post to promote their work.  I was considering buying a Para USA 1911.

The reaction from Para USA was nothing short of creepy and weird.  “No.  We don’t do that.  Please see our web site.”  It was like no communication I’ve ever had with a firearms manufacturer, and I’ve had more than I can count.  Now that I understand Feinberg and his secrecy, it makes better sense.

Readers can make up their own minds about Cerberus, but I won’t be buying any firearms from them (Freedom Group).  It’s my little way of starving the beast since I will be accountable for all of my actions before a sovereign God, but it won’t be enough.  What?  You didn’t think that those hundreds of millions of dollars that supposedly went to train “freedom fighters” in Syria actually went to train “freedom fighters in Syria,” did you?  And you didn’t really think that any of this war against Michael Flynn was accidental, did you?

Keeping up with George Webb is difficult, but a couple of his latest are embedded below.  They touch on some of these things.

We’ve discussed the ridiculous ban on social security beneficiaries that Obama unilaterally declared before leaving office.  We’ve discussed how the ban applied to those who were deemed, according to various MSM reports, “mentally ill, not only that, severely mentally ill, and moreover, disabled and disordered.”

The reality of the matter is much more pedestrian.  These are folks who no longer work and either choose to or have to have someone do their finances for them.  Absent the issue about no longer working, this includes about half of America.

Furthermore, we’ve seen that the issue doesn’t really pertain to mental illness or severe mental illness or disabilities or disorderly anything.  Mental health professionals have weighed in telling us that they cannot bear the burden America wants to place on them (they have no predictive capabilities for propensity to violence), that mental illness has no correspondence to violence, and that even when mentally ill people commit suicide, they don’t usually use a gun.  Read the reports.  I wouldn’t send you to the links if they weren’t so convincing and absolute.  They are uncompromising.  Mental health professionals absolutely do not want this burden and have no capabilities to fulfill that obligation.  Like pagan tribes worshipping witch doctors, we continue to want to know the future, but alas, doctors cannot do that.  Science doesn’t do that.

I thought I had seen just about everything from Daily Kos.  It has been degrading over the past several years, with run-on sentences, misspellings, poor grammar, poor editing and stale ideas.  But this is a new low, even for them.  The House and Senate have rolled back this Obama ban on social security recipients purchasing guns, and how does Kos spin it?

As part of their ongoing efforts to make America less safe, the Republican Party is doing away with one of the few reforms to America’s lunatic gun policies that followed the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Because it’s important, says the Republican Party, that Americans with mental disorders be able to purchase enough guns and ammunition to murder a few classrooms full of our children if they feel like doing that.

The Republican-led Senate voted Wednesday to block an Obama-era regulation that would prevent an estimated 75,000 people with mental disorders from being able to purchase a firearm. The measure now goes to President Donald Trump, who is expected to sign it.

Social security beneficiaries are going to buy guns and go all rogue on us, shooting up people and places and things.  The fact that they haven’t so far is no excuse for lack of regulation, dammit.

Only later do they state the real sweep of the regulation, which was “to collect a list of the 75,000ish people in America who both have a mental disorder and whose Social Security benefits are managed by someone other than themselves because of that impairment, and forwards that list on to the federal background check system. The goal was to screen out those whose condition is so severe that it renders them unable to make their own financial decisions, under the presumption that those people probably should be among those also least capable of making decisions about when or when not to murder people.”

“Condition so severe that it renders them unable to make their own financial decisions.”  “Murder.”  Tough language for the elderly who want means of self defense and yet need a child to assist them with online finances.  I observed at the time that

I seriously doubt the authors of any of these commentaries know anything about the computer they use as a dumb terminal anyway.

Most of them couldn’t code their way through a hand held calculator and are likely only barely able to operate the calculator on their iPhones to multiply two numbers together.  I’d like to see them solve a differential equation, and upon failure perhaps I could cast doubt on their mental readiness to operate a vehicle.

Say, that’s not a bad idea.  How about the author of this article, who conveniently gives us only one name (only cowards do that), meet up and let me give him a math test to see just how mentally competent he is?  I welcome the opportunity, and I’ll even wager a little on the idea that I can give him simple mathematical problems that stump him.

How about it, Hunter?  Care to take the test?  Or perhaps Hunter knows that the real issue has nothing to do with social security beneficiaries, but rather, a trial balloon to see just how far gun grabbing regulations can go with the American people and just what it will take to roll them back.

I love it when people self-identify as statists.  It keeps me from having to do the hard work.

David Codrea:

No matter – when “progressives” are on a roll, what they want is all that matters. Why should the unconstitutional tyranny of imposing prior restraint punishments without due process on male gun owners (especially the evil white ones who belong to NRA and own “assault weapons” with “30 magazine clips” and “shoulder things that go up”) trump feelings?

No matter that “boyfriend” is hardly a fixed legal term, nor is “date.” There’s also the “Hell hath no fury” factor, along with just finding out you’ve let a confused and hostile bipolar head case vampire cross your threshold, and now you just want them out.

Oh, I think she makes good company for Jennifer Mascia.  Two peas in a pod, or birds of a feather.

Matt Bracken sends this along.  Gates of Vienna:

Whence, then, comes the hatred? Left-wing ideology — specifically gender-driven left-wing ideology — is certainly behind a lot of it. The protesters and the media are not so much worried about loss of welfare benefits or any other economic issue as they are about abortion and LGBT ‘rights’ — which they fear will be eroded under Trump. A recent article by Gavin McInnis, entitled “Normalizing Degeneracy” has pointed out that several of the organizers of anti-Trump demonstrations have convictions for pedophile offences. In McInnis’ opinion, these and many others of Trump’s opponents wish to continue the cultural revolution ongoing under the Obama administration, tear down the last vestiges of Christian morality, and legalize all forms of deviance, including pedophilia.

I believe that McInnis is right; that most of the opposition to Trump has nothing whatsoever to do with traditional left-wing concerns, such as working-class poverty, and is almost entirely driven by sexual and sex-related issues. His opponents fear losing the culture-war gains they made under Obama. However, I would suggest that many members of the establishment have, in addition, something very personal to fear from the Trump administration: For it would appear that some of America’s most powerful people have been involved in activities which if brought into the public forum would utterly destroy them, not only professionally, but also personally.

Regular readers know exactly what the deep state is worried about.

Prior: The Strange Case Of Donald Trump And Michael Flynn

NMPolitics.net:

Everytown For Gun Safety — the lobbyist for HB 50 and SB 48 — says private party sales allow felons to buy guns online. The ATF rules are clear here too: Online sellers must ship their guns to a FFL willing to receive them and run a background check on the buyer. That Everytown For Gun Safety found felons trying to buy a gun from one of their fake online ads only means that criminals are criminals. It so happens that those banned from buying a firearm also come into FFL retail outlets fully knowing they will not pass a background check just to see if that FFL would be willing to sell it to them anyway.

The author, Elisabeth Miller, has an impressive CV at the end of the article, and her husband owns Miller Guns & Ammo.  Listen to me my New Mexico friends.  This is part of Bloomberg’s state-to-state strategy to infringe on God-given liberties.

You cannot deal gently with Everytown.  You will get buried.  You must deal with them harshly.  When Everytown folks invaded my back yard, they tried to run with the big dogs and got chewed up by my readers.

That’s what you have to do to these people.  Chew them up.  Make them regret ever targeting New Mexico.  Make them sorry to have ever known you.

I’m not kidding.  They will use Alinsky techniques.  If you’re not prepared for battle, you need to get prepared.  You must savage these people.  Do not talk with them, do not banter with them, do not try to persuade them, do not compromise with them.  Savage them.

Donald Trump stepped on his dick with tungsten cleats today.  It was an unforced error of huge proportions, and it doesn’t bode well for his battle against the deep state in the future.

Oh to be sure, there is no question that Obama and his loyalists have waged a campaign to get rid of Michael Flynn.  His ouster was a political hit job, due in part to the fact that Obama knew that Flynn would bury Obama’s foreign policy legacy, for what it’s worth.  But they could only be as successful as Trump allowed them to be, and only Donald Trump could have fired him, and there is speculation, even early reports, that Reince Priebus was responsible for whispering in Trump’s ear to “fire the bastard.”  The mole inside the Trump administration may in fact be him, or it may be VP Mike Pence.  Who knows at this point?

What we do know is that in order to excise the cancer of the deep state, leadership will be required.  Trump didn’t display that today.  For this failure, he now faces the prospect of ugly Senate investigations of whatever they want, with hysterical calls for someone’s head because shut up and do what we say.  How’s that attention to Obamacare repeal working out, Donald?

In fact, remember the deep state?  You know, the NSA/CIA/FBI campaign, along with DynCorps and the Clinton Global Initiative and the Council on Foreign relations to topple seven countries in North Africa and the Middle East for the purpose of trafficking oil, humans, money and weapons.  Yes, that deep state, the one who ousted Michael Flynn.  How much attention have you and Jeff Sessions paid to that deep state?  You have folks actively working against you and for a shadow government, Donald, and the price for your lack of vision and failure to lead is that all of this attention just got buried in an unnecessary and hysterical witch hunt for a boogeyman.

The charge is that Flynn talked with the Russian ambassador (my God, I hope he did, someone needs to be talking to someone else in representative authority in Russia), and that there was some sort of miscommunication back to the administration about these conversations.  Frankly, I don’t give a shit about the details.  But the deep state does, and here’s why.

The deep state wants war with Russia for a host of reasons, including the fact that war is business model, war buries past sins and keeps them on the back burner so that they’re not investigated, and war opens up vast new frontiers for oil, mineral, precious gems, human trafficking and money trafficking.  The deep state is into all of that, as are most of the Senators.

Furthermore, the U.S. government has a death wish, and apparently wants to flood the country with illegal aliens South of the border to access cheap labor for the corporatists (while the middle class provides their medical care), as well as flood the country with Mohammedans because of whatever reason.  Each ruler has his own religious or monetary reason, moral perfidity or pathological condition for bowing to whose who would abuse them.  For whatever reason, there is also a Muslim invasion in the U.S.

Here is the problem for the progressives and the deep state.  Michael Flynn knows all about the deep state, and he also knows all about Islam and the danger it represents to America.  Just listen for a moment to comments at The Small Wars Journal on an article about Michael Flynn.  The article is irrelevant, but the comments aren’t.  For the record, the SWJ is where the lefty progs hang out who are attached to the military or foreign policy think tanks.  CNAS was good friends with the SWJ, and CNAS is where Obama got one of his loyalists, Michele Flournoy, former undersecretary of defense for policy.  Listen now to someone who calls himself Outlaw, who is anything but an outlaw.

Flynn to a reporter: “Islam, Mike, is a political ideology based on a religion” , at 1:55:
https://au.news.yahoo.com/video/watch/32086541/lt-gen-flynn-islam-is-a-political-ideology-based-on-a-religion/#page1

This article fails to actually indicate that the SecDef ruffled privately the Flynn feathers for actually leaking his document to CNAS……

Notice that the article also does not explain the firing from DIA “for cause” ie poor performance as DDIA……basically an attempt to create an image of a great mover and shaker for change…and to bridge his failures at DIA…..

When’s the last time you saw a Klan leader getting excited by an Attorney General…a DCIA and a NSA appointments?

David Duke must know something we all do not know about the three?????

Wonder if Flynn will reject the joy expressed in his appointment by the KKK?????

here is my beef….

1. Flynn’s anti Islam rhetoric while it pulls with many…does not play well in the entire Sunni and especially Shia ME……
2. Flynn got caught tweeting an anti Semitic tweet out and then when caught at it apologized so is anti Semitism really his core believe…
3. Flynn has fully failed to explain his trips to Moscow and how much he has received from Russian Today and 400% owned Russian propaganda machine
OR how he came to be invited to speak at the FSB/SVR Moscow Headquarters and just who invited him OR his personal ties to Manafort and Page Carter
4. Flynn led the RP Convention chants of “jail her”…to me personally a direct threat to the US Constitution….that supposedly he is now protecting from enemies near and far

Notice the charges.  Not seeing Russia as the “enemy.”  Flynn uses anti-Islam rhetoric.  Flynn led the chants of “jail her.”

If this is the best Outlaw can do, my estimation of Flynn just went sky high.  Flynn knows what’s going on, and he knows the threat posed by the real enemies of America.  Thus he had to go.  Flynn was a wall around Trump that couldn’t be breached, someone who had Trump’s ear, someone who had a history with this stuff.  Someone who had authority.

The other objections are just fabricated problems and intramural squabbles found throughout the military.  Flynn was axed for the same reason Stephen Coughlin was axed.  No one wanted to hear what he had to say.  Coughlin was a scholar and in many ways like “the weeping prophet.”  Flynn was a militarized prophet, and he posed a danger to the deep state.

In the end this can be recovered, and in the end Trump can show the leadership he needs to rid America of its shadow government.  This is not a good beginning.  The press conference he should have given would have gone like this.  Trump walks to the podium and says, “Flynn is my man.  The rest of you can go to hell.”

And that would have been the end of it, focusing all attention back on him and his agenda.  But if Trump continues to listen to mole Reince Priebus or VP Pence or any of this other “advisors,” he might just hear what the deep state has to say rather than what the people have to say.  And in the end, that probably means civil war.

This is an open letter to all North Carolina State Senators and members of the House of Representatives.  I am speaking out in favor of H.B. 69, the “Constitutional Carry Act.”  I have spoken out with open letters of this sort before.  At one time, I had to relinquish all health records to the county sheriff (CLEO) in order to receive a concealed handgun permit.  Now, based on recent changes to N.C. law, this is necessary even for handgun purchases for those who don’t hold a CHP.

As we have covered even recently, mental health professionals have told us in no uncertain terms that mental maladies have no correspondence to propensity to violence, and when people choose to commit suicide, they don’t usually use guns.  They have also told us that the mental health profession cannot bear the burden you are trying to place on them, as they don’t have the wherewithal to predict violent behavior.  Science doesn’t do that.  These mental health checks are helping no one, and yet like a pagan village worshipping a witch doctor, legislators nationwide still turn to doctors to predict the future for them.  I’m almost waiting for a new N.C. law invoking participation of palm readers.  The notion that violence has to do with things completely beyond the control of legislating apparently doesn’t occur to lawmakers.

Upon renewal of my permit to carry after moving from one county to another within the last two years, I had to reapply for a new permit from my CLEO, and instead of just signing over my medical records to him and filling out the necessary countless forms, I had an even higher mountain of paperwork to complete.  But these forms do nothing to effect change in anything, as you certainly have to know by now.  Only the peaceable and law abiding follow such laws and processes.

I and my readers have asked, even demanded, that you rid North Carolina of these bigoted, prejudiced and ridiculous Jim Crow era laws like CLEO permitting of handgun purchases and concealed carry.  We still demand this, but there is another bill that needs our attention as well.  It is H.B. 69, Constitutional Carry Act.  We are speaking out in support of it.  Oh, you’re going to see the usual hysterical naysayers and end-of- the-world doomsday prophecies, and are even seeing them now, the most recent being from the Raleigh News and Observer.

A proposed bill from 10 Republicans in the General Assembly to remove North Carolina’s concealed-carry permit requirement for handguns has the odor of a gun-lobby sponsored maneuver. There’s no other way to say it: the idea is absurd, and dangerous. One hopes GOP leaders will stop this idea before it goes any further.

Goofy measures like this one usually get put away by party leaders, but in this environment, who knows?

Basically, the proposal would remove the requirement, with some exceptions and footnotes. The very complexity of those things shows how ludicrous the bill is. For example, concealed carry permits wouldn’t be required anymore, except it would still be illegal to carry a concealed handgun at a parade or funeral, in a place where alcohol is sold and consumed, while drinking alcohol, on picket lines and at certain demonstrations — and this is interesting — on the grounds of the State Capitol, Governor’s Mansion or the governor’s western residence in the mountains.

Anything that loosens already minimal gun laws should not be enacted. North Caroilna gun owners, and there are tens of thousands of them, can indulge their fancy for guns at a multitude of ranges, with hunting, collecting and other gun-connected pastimes. Asking those who want to carry concealed weapons to get a permit to do so is hardly a great burden, especially considering the risk of a gun in the wrong hands.

I suggest that you replace the idea of a concealed handgun permit with a permit to preach, say, a sermon on the deity of Christ.  So in the future, it shouldn’t be too much of a burden to obtain state approval for your sermon topics.  And if you did what I suggested, you see how awful this sounds.  You see, the editorial board at the Raleigh News and Observer don’t actually believe that personal defense is a right.  They think it’s a privilege.  They think what they do is a right, but defending one’s personal safety or the safety of a family warrants approval by the state.

But my regular readers have seen that self defense is not only a right, it is a duty ordered by God Himself because man is made in God’s image.  It’s loss is not to be taken lightly, and that image of God is to be cherished and protected.  As for the more practical and pedestrian considerations, the Raleigh News and Observer editorial board underscores just how out of touch they are with North Carolinians when they say that there are “tens of thousands” of gun owners, and that we can “indulge our fancies at ranges.”  There are hundreds of thousands of us, and ranges have nothing whatsoever to do with the conversation.

Moreover, it should be noted that while I have followed virtually every change to state laws in the U.S. concerning constitutional carry and open carry in the past four or five years, and written about most of them, in every instance of changes like this, the hysterical doomsday prophets always tell awful stories of blood running in the streets, wild west shootouts and rampant crime.  And it never happens.  I have quotes from CLEOs I can share if you would like where they all said that it ended up “much ado about nothing.”

Except it is about something, isn’t it?  Yes, we all know what this is really about.  Revenue.  That’s right.  Some LEOs have even shared this concern.

But opponents said it would have serious financial consequences for the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, which administers firearms licenses issued under the Oklahoma Self Defense Act.

A fiscal analysis performed for the House indicates the measure would reduce OSBI’s revenue by at least $6 million and would lead to the loss of jobs and reduced operating expenses at the agency.

The reduction in revenue would be because firearms owners would no longer seek concealed carry licenses – which cost $100 for initial 5-year license and $200 for 10 years – if they could carry a gun openly without a license. There are now more than 238,300 Oklahomans with active licenses to carry handguns, according to state figures.

I suspect that a little truth-telling by North Carolina CLEOs would yield similar results.  What a miserable excuse for a law.  Filling out paperwork, relinquishing medical records, causing lost days at work because of appointments at the Sheriff’s department, and clerks sitting in offices pushing paperwork – all for revenue and a jobs program for people who should be working in business or industry.  This is just absolutely wretched.

But you can begin to end all of this onerous, nanny-state, control freak collectivism by passing H.B. 69.  And then you can rid yourselves of the embarrassing Jim Crow era laws currently on the books as we speak.  Even if this doesn’t pass with enough votes to override a veto by this progressive governor, let it move out of committee and get a vote on the floor.  That way, we’ll see who we need to target for replacement in the next election.  We will ultimately win this fight, now or later, and the only question is this.  Will you be on the winning side with us?

Prior:

An Open Letter To North Carolina State Senators On The New Mental Health Screening For Handgun Purchases

North Carolina Constitutional Carry Bill

I haven’t been posting much on Pizzagate lately, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t developments.  Make sure to check out Voat to stay abreast of developments.  Here are a few of the ones that caught my eye.  As always, I point you to the researchers who are doing the work.  I only relay the things that float to the top.

This voat thread lists and links most of the suspicious emails leaked that relate to Pizzagate.  This is useful.

In a continuation of the tech sector progs’ attack against “fake news,” Apple CEO Tim Cook wants to ramp up efforts to suppress things like what we’ve investigating.  The author, April Glaser, says this.

Remember Pizzagate? It was a completely false story that went viral on Facebook late last year that linked Hillary Clinton to a child sex ring run out of pizzeria in Washington D.C.

Prove it, April.  I dare you.  You’ve said a mouthful, to wit, “completely false.”  Prove that our claims are completely false. Go ahead.  I can be reached at my contact page.  Give me your proof.

Human trafficking is funding ISIS in North Africa.  I have no doubt, and this runs consistent with what we’ve learning from George Webb.  But this is a difficult discussion thread without any executive summary for novice readers.  I think most of my readers aren’t novice readers.

This analysis, using metadata, analyzes whether The Washington Post was “in on” the deletion of the Pizzagate subreddit.  Folks, I have to say that the evidence is not just convincing, it’s overwhelming.  Queue up another one for the MSM.

This discussion thread documents how an individual found CP on the Comet Pizza web site, turned it over to the DC police, and is now being followed by and harassed by a band of stalkers.  Now let me make it clear.  I understand those who remain anonymous, but I choose not to.  Why is it that these thugs always go after people who cannot defend themselves (viz. DC gun laws) and try to ban those who work in the shadows to discover the truth?  Oh, perhaps it’s that thing of Herschel’s Dictum.  You know.  A .45 ACP 230-grain fat boy and how useful it is.  Note to the band of thugs following this researcher.  You don’t scare me in the least.

Ryan Zimmerman has done a very good job of giving a rundown of not only the background but also the updates to Pizzagate.  It’s worth your time.

Finally, take note again how frantic their efforts are at trying to bury this.  As if you needed any other evidence as to the moral perfidity of the MSM, their burying the investigation on Pizzagate is the pinnacle of their achievements, the capstone of their careers in subterfuge and lies.  May they spend sleepless nights hearing the screams of the little ones and haunted days looking over their shoulder for the day of judgment.

Death to the pedophiles.  Eternal death.

Prior:

Connection Between Bill Clinton And Child Trafficker Laura Sislby

Pizzagate Censorship

Pizzagate XVI

Pizzagate XV

Planeload of FBI Agents Sent To Iceland To Frame Julian Assange

Pizzagate XIII: Who Really Leaked The DNC And Podesta EMails To Wikileaks?

Pizzagate XII

Pizzagate XI

Pizzagate X

Pizzagate IX

Pizzagate VIII

Pizzagate VII

Pizzagate VI

Pizzagate V: Pizzagate In Theological Perspective

Pizzagate IV

Pizzagate III

Pizzagate II

Pizzagate

Professor Jeffrey Swanson:

The gun restriction rule is a well-meaning policy that gets some things right, notably its support of federal efforts to improve detection of risky people who should not have legal access to guns. But despite its good intentions, what the policy actually does is take away the gun rights of a large category of individuals without any evidence that they pose a risk of harm to self or others, and without legal due process protections commensurate with abridging a constitutional right.

All we really know about many people in the affected category is that they have been found unable to work full time due to a mental health problem and an examiner for Social Security has decided, with some input from a licensed medical or psychological consultant, that they need help managing money. The mental health conditions in question might range from moderate intellectual disabilities to depression, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Based on one person’s judgment call, arrangements are made to have the government’s check sent to a representative payee. But this isn’t an index for whether or not someone should be allowed to own a gun.

Research on the relationship between gun violence and mental illness shows that the vast majority of mentally ill individuals are not violent or suicidal. Our group at Duke recently published a study of approximately 82,000 people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses in Florida between 2002 and 2011. We found that those with serious mental health disorders with records in the public behavioral health system were no more likely than the general adult population in Florida to use a gun to harm others (about 213 vs. 217 gun crimes per 100,000 people per year), and they were only slightly more likely to die in a gun-related suicide (about 13 vs. 9 gun suicides per 100,000 people per year). Thus, people with mental illnesses are no more dangerous to others when they have equal access to guns.

Our study, like many others, found that mental illness substantially increases the risk of suicide in general. Many, if not most, people who die from suicide have suffered from a mental illness. But our data also show that they are less like to use a gun when they do end their own lives, and are more likely to use other means.  While 48 percent of suicides in the general Florida adult population involved guns, only 20 percent of suicides in our study population of people with serious mental illnesses involved guns. The annual rate — 13 gun suicides per 100,000 people with mental illness — shows that gun suicide is a rare event in this population. Moreover, only a tiny fraction of all people with mental illness who are at risk of suicide are Social Security disability beneficiaries with representative payees. Thus there just isn’t evidence that reporting these particular individuals to the National Instant Criminal Background Check system will prevent suicides.

No doubt, the ban on Social Security recipients buying guns wasn’t a well meaning policy.  We’ve discussed this at length before.  But ignoring the professor’s leftist leanings for the moment, he’s actually given some very good information from the perspective of a mental health professional.

His view comports with that of other mental health professionals as I’ve noted.

In a paper published in the American Journal of Public Health, Jonathan M. Metzl and Kenneth T. MacLeish investigate a number of common beliefs about mental illness and gun violence, including the idea that “psychiatric diagnosis can predict gun crime before it happens.” They write that “legislation in a number of states now mandates that psychiatrists assess their patients for the potential to commit violent gun crime.” New York, for instance, “requires mental health professionals to report anyone who ‘is likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to self or others’ to the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services, which then alerts the local authorities to revoke the person’s firearms license and confiscate his or her weapons.”

However, they argue, asking psychiatrists to judge who’s likely to become violent may be the wrong approach. They cite research showing that most gun violence isn’t committed by people who are determined to have mental illness — and that most people with mental illness don’t commit violence. According to one study, “the risk is exponentially greater that individuals diagnosed with serious mental illness will be assaulted by others, rather than the other way around.”

Random gun violence is a terrifying fact of American life, because of both the violence and the randomness. Terror bred by violence does not really require comment; they are twinned. But terror bred by randomness does, especially when it leads people to accept as true a reasonable story that is false, when a myth functions as an explanation. And that is what is happening with the way we talk about mental illness and random gun violence. Thankfully, a just published report in the Annals of Epidemiology pulls together the facts we need to consider if we really want to adopt evidence-based policies to reduce random gun violence.

The article, “Mental illness and reduction of gun violence and suicide: bringing epidemiologic research to policy,” is a comprehensive, critical survey of the available data (and it is surprisingly accessible and  well-written for an academic treatise). It concludes that “most violent behavior is due to factors other than mental illness.”

[ … ]

Jeffrey W. Swanson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine and lead author of the article in Annals of Epidemiology was quoted in the UCLA Newsroom saying ”but even if schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression were cured, our society’s problem of violence would diminish by only about 4 percent.”

That is not very much. When people with mental illness do act violently it is typically for the same reasons that people without mental illness act violently.

“We’re not likely to catch very many potentially violent people” with laws like the one in New York, says Barry Rosenfeld, a professor of psychology at Fordham University in The Bronx….

A study of experienced psychiatrists at a major urban psychiatric facility found that they were wrong about which patients would become violent about 30 percent of the time.

That’s a much higher error rate than with most medical tests, says Alan Teo, a psychiatrist at the University of Michigan and an author of the study.

One reason even experienced psychiatrists are often wrong is that there are only a few clear signs that a person with a mental illness is likely to act violently, says Steven Hoge, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. These include a history of violence and a current threat to commit violence ….

And we’ve discussed Dr. Swanson’s views before.  Furthermore, I deny with prejudice that social security recipients who want someone else to handle their finances constitutes mental illness.  Most married couples have one individual who handles the finances, not two.  The entire edifice of regulation was ridiculous in the supperlative anyway.

It was never intended for the protection of anyone.  It was always intended as a trial balloon for gun regulations, first social security recipients, next those who are deemed by the courts as worthy of bans of some sort or another, perhaps because the individual believes in the second amendment, or better, that God gives us our rights and therefore they are as immutable as His nature.

Dr. Swanson has done us yet another service.  He has explained that if the ban for social security recipients is based on the notion of prevention of suicide, then that was always a pretext.  The elderly don’t use guns if they intend on committing suicide.