FROM

December 4 2018 by Bob Livingston

[Editor's Note: Emphasis Added below]

In Re: Forced Weapons Disarmament by Criminal Government.

Authoritarianism, or criminal government, can never feel free from fear as long as millions of people own guns, hence the long-term effort to disarm us.

Almost all national politicians want Americans completely disarmed, even if few admit it, though they have done all possible to impress upon the public mind that private arms possession for any reason is un-American and not in the "public interest" because guns are "dangerous." Their debate is twisted nonsense, but people believe it.

The politicians realize that mass forced confiscation will not work. It would result in the deaths of thousands of federal agents, if they could find enough of them to attempt such a thing. Nor have efforts at soft confiscation — requiring self-reporting and voluntary surrender of arms and accessories suddenly deemed illegal — been anything more than marginally successful in recent years.

The truth is, the local sheriffs, rank-and-file police and military members are by-and-large pro-gun, and their families and friends are as well. For the most part, they would be loath to join federal agents in a forced confiscation program, though as we saw in the Katrina aftermath there are mindless drones who will follow confiscation orders without question. But most would likely join citizens in resisting such efforts. The result would be a bloody mess.

So the elites have employed their propaganda machine, to great effect. Vast swaths of ignorant people have swallowed the notion that certain weapons — based only on appearance, form and function — are inherently more dangerous than others. Other anti-gun propaganda is used in pushing for the fix-NCIS bill (which is a bill ostensibly designed to make it a law that government agencies must abide by the law, but which will encourage governments to place people into the system over silly things like unpaid traffic tickets) and for banning people on the "terror watch list" from possessing guns. Both of these laws abuse the notion of due process and would work to unlawfully disarm people based on government error, innuendo and false charges.

The topic of mental illness has jumped front and center in the gun debate in recent days in wake of the Valentine's Day massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas school in Parkland, Florida. Even many well-meaning conservatives have fallen prey to this trap and are advocating for laws to remove guns from people without due process under so-called "red flag" laws. A bill has been introduced to provide federal incentives — i.e., federal dollars — to encourage states to confiscate guns for the most sophistic of reasons. So-called "conservative" lawmakers have signed on.

The NRA — which has fooled millions of people into believing it looks out for their 2nd Amendment rights — has signaled a willingness to support them.

Mental illness is as nebulous and malleable a term as "assault weapon." Even psychiatrists admit that the classification of mental illness often relies on subjective criteria and that diagnoses for mental health conditions never rely on brain scans and blood tests. Conclusions of mental illness stem from observed behaviors and any behavior that seems outside what is accepted as normal at the moment can later be labeled abnormal — and therefore a mental illness — on a whim.

For several years a push has been underway to label religious adherents as mentally ill. In 2006, biologist Richard Dawkins published his book The God Delusion, in which he characterizes belief in God as delusional. Dawkins cites the definition of a delusion as "a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence, especially as a symptom of a psychiatric disorder."

In 2013, Kathleen Taylor, a neurologist at Oxford University, said in interviews that recent developments suggest that we will soon be able to treat religious fundamentalism and other forms of ideological beliefs potentially harmful to society as a form of mental illness. She maintains that religious fundamentalism may one day be treatable and that religious people will one day be able to be "cured."

Taylor admits that the scope of what could end up being labelled "fundamentalist" is expansive. She continued: "I am not just talking about the obvious candidates like radical Islam or some of the more extreme cults. I am talking about things like the belief that it is OK to beat your children. These beliefs are very harmful but are not normally categorized as mental illness. In many ways that could be a very positive thing because there are no doubt beliefs in our society that do a heck of a lot of damage, that really do a lot of harm."

Last year, the journal Neuropsychologia released a study that purported to show that religious fundamentalists are brain damaged. It claimed its research determined that religious fundamentalism is, in part, the result of a functional impairment in a brain region known as the prefrontal cortex.

[Editor's Note: "Mental illness" is best defined by behavior that is deemed socially unacceptable. Most sovereign nations have various laws against most types of violence. These include murder in different degrees and physical assault. While the superstitious, religious behavior of a "convinced" person may be very irrational, citizens of the USA live in a free country (supposedly), and as long as such persons are NOT violent, one can ignore them and leave their presence or demand they leave yours. These behaviors sometimes are so weird that government types want to intervene and "help" (making the problem worse).

Most religious behaviors are the result of life-long environmental influences — parents, relatives, friends, and religious officails such as priests, preachers, evangelists, and others who either believe the dogma or have a vested financial or other psychological interest in proselytizing and even forcefully converting people to their beliefs. If the only behaviors a person observes from early childhood to adulthood are the role models of these religiously convinced persons, and if one is never exposed to rational, objective persons who can instruct persons exhibiting aberrant, irrational, and illusory behavior to think logically, independently, and scientifically and empirically learn about their world, then they are doomed. Of course, if the person exhibiting irrational, religious behavior lacks the raw intelligence to begin reasoning when faced with obvious contradictions, then the person will never recover. This is one reason why education at all levels is important to free the religiously, extremely oppressed minds of ignorant, superstitious, illusory beliefs.

Religious persons, while irrational and ignorantly narrow, are not necessarily violent massacre murderers. Most of these people, bombarded by religious people, have been operantly and classically conditioned to behave religiously and violently. The conditioning has destroyed whatever raw, open-minded intelligence with which they may have been born. Because of this conditioning, these persons can be considered to be below average intelligence, incapable of relearning.

The development of bogus "theories" of gun violence from purported experts who work in conjunction with the feds to weaken the meaning of the 2nd Amendment (much like all other Amendments in the Bill of Rights have weakened) and confiscate guns either voluntarily or involuntarily from citizens is a new low even for government. While no peaceful, productive, educated citizen (who is supposed to be protected from government by the Bill of Rights) likes the mass murder perpetrated by some crazed psycho with one or more guns, each of the massacres in the USA have had MANY warning signs and failures to act which could have prevented the disasters.

I suggest that behavior and psychiatric "experts" develop a theory that both describes the warning signs with 95-97% probability and provides an efficacious plan for the prevention of violent gun massacres. Begin by developing a voluminous database of behavior observations (millions of obs) containing every facet of violent behaviors, family behaviors, violent school behaviors, and religious behaviors. Then, develop a probability model that accurately predicts potential gun massacre behavior. The problem is that people who can objectively and judicially act (and be correct) to prevent a massacre are rare. The goal is to predict and intervene at the right time before a massacre and treat the deranged person.

Being an Atheist, Christian, Muslim, Jew, Shintoist, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucist, Humanist, Maoist, Wotanist, Santa Claus (w/ Rudolph not drug dealer), or Tooth Fairy is not a problem — violent behavior (except self-defense) that results in injury or death is! Can it be prevented without infringing the rights of citizens? Information in this article seems to answer NO to that question if government pursues this path. ]

There are millions of gun owners in America who consider themselves Christian. Now we have atheists in places of influence and power declaring ad hoc that Christianity is a mental disorder that can and should be cured. The day is soon coming where a person's Christianity will get him labeled as mentally defective and therefore ineligible to possess weapons.

The gun control problem is a mind control problem. The authorities know full well that they, with all their high-tech weapons, cannot subdue a determined people with private arms. Therefore, they use all manner of spurious persuasion to get you to give up your arms and to exert hostility toward others who won't. Same old divide and conquer.

Be careful what you wish for.

Yours for the truth,

Bob Livingston
Editor, The Bob Livingston Letter™