"Reporter" Steve Kroft starts out with misinformation and goes downhill from there: He tells us about the "1,000 homicides...committed by people with mental illness" each year, but fails to note how many of those involve firearms. He claims "the very first gun control law ever passed in the U.S. [was] way back in 1968..."
He then proceeds to mug for the camera with facial expressions as manipulative as his questions, only gives Larry Pratt enough exposure to make an out-of-context statement the viewers are being maneuvered into dismissing, and then gives us the "reasonable" alternative courtesy of Carolyn McCarthy and Wayne LaPierre.
I do have one question, something I haven't understood since these discussions have been resurrected: If someone is adjudicated mentally ill, why would it be necessary to make their medical records available to police, as everything I've read or seen in the media implies? Why wouldn't just a record of the judgment suffice? Court records are generally public records. I don't know enough about the system--is sealing such judgments common practice, and does it vary by state? Anybody have insight on this?
[Via 45superman]
Wow! Just...wow!
ReplyDeleteThat's some of the worst bias I've ever seen!
Hey, Steve Kroft is part of the clique, I guess. Even the Wikipedia page about gun politics claims it (concept of armed subjects) dates from the American Revolutionary period, when it had a long history in the mother country. (And personal firearms in general have a 500 year history.)
ReplyDeleteBack to the point, though. Here's a no-so-nice experiment you can perform with the essentially broad term "mental illness" and the disarmament debate: Find someone who is a member of Pink Pistols, and supports health record data mining as part of the background check. Then ask him to name something that what was classified as mental illness up until 1973.
The specifics matter.