How Long Before The DSM Invents Diagnosis Of … Gun Incompatibility Disorder?

GUNS, Law, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry

Gun-restriction advocates want nothing more than to restrain “predisposed” individuals before they transgress. The central authorities will decide who falls within this extremely plastic category. The same planners will act with the complicit assistance of the pseudo-scientific profession of psychiatry. Seriously: How long before the Psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM # infinity) invents a diagnosis of gun incompatibility disorder? Against this kind of prior-restraint argument even Ivy league statists have argued, albeit with respect to limitations on speech only.

We are witnessing today a tremendous and ominous expansion of preventive law in the area of civil liberties. More and more, our controls are being devised not as punishment for actual wrongful conduct, but with a view to preventing future evils by a series of restrictions and qualifications that seriously jeopardize freedom …

In the spirit of prior restraint is the case of a veteran who presented with symptoms of insomnia and had his guns confiscated. (With the active encouragement of the liberty loving police force. It figures. The local police monopoly certainly made snide comments of displeasure on handing me my firearm license.) Via American Thinker:

New York State Police ordered the permanent confiscation of Mr. Montgomery’s registered handguns after he sought treatment for insomnia. The confiscation was ordered under Cuomo’s “SAFE Act” gun-control law.

The allegations in the case are downright scary. The complaint contends that Montgomery, a Navy veteran and retired police officer who rose to the rank of detective sergeant during his 30-year career, voluntarily sought treatment for insomnia at a hospital on Long Island in May of 2014 after relocating to a new home several hundred miles from his previous residence.

According to the suit, the hospital diagnosed the plaintiff as “mildly depressed,” and his clinical evaluation stated, “Patient has no thoughts of hurting himself. Patient has no thoughts of hurting others. Patient is not having suicidal thoughts. Patient is not having homicidal thoughts…” and “there is no evidence of any psychotic processes, mania, or OCD symptoms. Insight, judgment, and impulse control are good.” The suit further alleges that a psychiatrist told the plaintiff, “I don’t know why you were referred here. You don’t belong here.”

Nonetheless, the suit contends that five days after being discharged from the hospital, the local sheriff’s department showed up at Montgomery’s door and seized his four registered handguns, including his former duty sidearm, after the sheriff had been subjected to “repeated pressure” by the New York State Police, who claimed that Montgomery had been declared mentally defective and had been involuntarily committed to a mental institution.

The gun confiscation aforementioned is a logical conclusion to prior restraint legal arguments.

Mentioned above is the Psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV). The Rosetta Stone of the profession has grown since its inception in the 1950s from 60 categories of abnormal behavior to over 410 diagnostic labels and counting. Many of the disorders described in it are more about trend and niche than science.

In the late 1990s, I told readers of my Calgary Herald column about one Dr. John Ratey, a Harvard associate professor and a well-respected, prominent psychiatrist, who claimed, in his 1997 book Shadow Syndromes, that quirky behaviors were actually mild mental illnesses resulting from brain dysfunction.

The lout who is appropriately obsequious with the boss because he knows where his bread is buttered, but who is less dainty with the wife, even thumping her occasionally, would be a candidate for compassion. He is after all doing battle with what Dr. Ratey terms “Intermittent Rage Disorder”. And the dad who dotes on his children while they are with him, but fails to mail them child support money as soon as they are out of sight, is simply afflicted with “Environmental Dependency Disorder”: He remembers his kids only when they are around. Is there proof for these sub-rosa disease categories? None whatsoever, although this has not prevented Ratey and many like him from coating their pronouncements with a patina of scientific respectability—and then cashing in.

Given the tenuous ties between psychiatry and science, how likely is it that “evidence” for new diagnoses will be marshaled in order to keep more people from being able to defend their lives and loved ones with guns?

Very likely.

UPDATE II: 2014: The Year Of Living Racially (FREE People Don’t Fear ‘Racial Polarization’)

Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Political Correctness, Private Property, Propaganda, Race, Racism

The current column, “2014: The Year Of Living Racially,” surveys some of the major racial milestones of the year, only to conclude … Well, read it yourself, on WND.

My man Richard Sherman said something that kicked off the 2014, year-round, banal, racial back-and-forth that parades as debate in the U.S.

Other than that the Seattle Seahawks are my team, on account that they’re from my neck of the woods; what I know about American football is dangerous. So naturally, I was rooting for, if not watching, the Hawks, when, following their victory over the San Francisco 49ers, Sherman said That Thing. And from their citadels of stupidity, U.S. mainstream media—conservatives, liberals and libertarians—went into full St. Vitus mode

“I’m the best corner in the game. When you try me with a sorry receiver like [Michael] Crabtree, that’s the result you gonna get. Don’t you ever talk about me!”

Sherman sounded good to me. Still does. The man was pumped, as men ought to be in a testosterone-infused game. The Seahawks’ cornerback was correct to point out that his “outburst,” following the “defensive play that sealed his team’s trip to the Super Bowl,” was an extension of “his game-time competitiveness.”

“Let’s not make thug the new N-word,” pleaded John McWhorter, a scholar of color, whose intellectual and moral authority in the culture stems primarily from the concentration of melanin in his skin cells, not from the force of his argument.

Come again?

As in January of last year, I still don’t get the reason for the fuss over what Sherman said. His boisterous bit of theatre set in motion some racial, national free-association, which no man or woman with a brain cell to rub between them can follow.

Speaking of mindlessness, in February, the president of black America launched his “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative. Barack Obama claimed “this initiative” as his “lifelong goal,” “even after he leaves office.”

If to go by Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” “rising inequality and declining mobility,” as well as “widespread decay in moral fiber”—these are as serious and widespread among “white, lower-status, less well-educated Americans,” as they are among the black and Hispanic communities. It was against this backdrop that Obama signaled his intention to deploy his signature initiative to keep at least $200 million belonging to “leading foundations and businesses,” for “programs aimed at minority youth of color.” …

Read the rest. “2014: The Year Of Living Racially” is now on WND.

Happy New Year.
ILANA

UPDATE I: The title of the column is from a movie, but I doubt anyone under 40 (Kerry Crowel excepted), brought up on current Hollywood fare, will remember “The Year of Living Dangerously.”

UPDATE II (1/2): FREE People Don’t Fear “Racial Polarization.” I am not sure why people, in this so-called free society of ours, “worry” so much about what they term “racial polarization.” Leave people to fire, hire, rent, employ or live with whomever they wish. So long as there is no aggression against The Other, who cares about “racial polarization”? Isn’t the right to include and exclude a feature of freedom of association and the right of private property.

Racial Cacophony Resumed (It Never Stopped)

Free Speech, Race, Racism, Republicans

Personally, I doubt very much that Republican Representative Steve Scalise has much to impart by way of political philosophy and principle. Still, if he hasn’t himself preached racial supremacy and hasn’t goosestepped around the lectern and lecture stage; why does it matter who he addressed? How is one to sway others to your perspective if you don’t speak to them?

Here we go again. It should not be news. It’s not news. The malfunctioning media has made it news: “Representative Scalise of Louisiana,” intones an Enforcer at the New York Times, “the third-ranking House Republican, had appeared before a group called the European-American Unity and Rights Organization … More than a decade ago.” Scalise and Speaker John A. Boehner are now bowing and scraping. And for what?

Some of the major racial milestones of the year are surveyed in the current column, “2014: The Year Of Living Racially.” Its conclusion—read it yourself—is apropos the Scalise event:

The noisy racial cacophony with its attendant falsehoods is a feature of the political and cultural landscape, irrespective of color, creed and political affiliation.

I’m already tired, and it’s only the first day of the new year, 2015.

South-African Zealot Helen Zille, A Disgrace To Liberalism In The Classical Tradition

Classical Liberalism, Constitution, Free Speech, IMMIGRATION, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, South-Africa

For the infinitesimally small incidents of white-on-black crimes of violence in South Africa, “Helen Zille, the left-liberal leader of [South Africa’s] ‘official opposition’ in parliament,” dares to blame courageous individuals like Dan Roodt. For he has deigned to stand up for the rights of Afrikaners, and has spoken out tirelessly on behalf of Afrikaner history, culture and self-determination. (More about Afrikaner history in Into The Cannibal’s Pot.)

For that, zealot Helen Zille has saddled Roodt with the responsibility for crimes he has never advocated nor committed. Moreover, this ignorant female dared to depict Dan, a highly educated former leftist, as an ignoramus:

Gone are the khaki-clad, gun-toting, horse-riding para-militaries of old. They have now been replaced by one pop star and one self-proclaimed intellectual, in Steve Hofmeyr and Dan Roodt. I often wonder what happened in Steve Hofmeyr’s life to turn him into the man he has become. It was not always so. And few people know that Dan Roodt went into self imposed exile rather than serve in the SA Defence Force during apartheid. What happened?
Both these men are outspokenly offensive on issues of race, Hofmeyr through his concerts and Roodt through his website and twitter. Their strategy is to be as racially provocative as possible, under the guise of language and cultural freedom. Nothing particularly unique about that approach. But they then cry foul when people respond. Social media is a tough space and they should stay off the playground if they can’t take the punches they dish out.
Cloaked in flowery prose and intellectual bluster, their racism has emboldened some of their followers. I doubt it is a coincidence that the increase in racist incidents across the country has run parallel to the increase in their public profiles.

This woman is a disgrace to liberalism in the classical tradition (libertarianism). Scrap that. Zille is a plain disgrace. And stupid to boot.

Dan distills the mindset of the likes of Zille The Zealot:

When a blacks torture or hurt whites, even a baby as was recently reported by the Beeld newspaper, whites are to blame. That is the gist of Zille’s and cultural-Marxist discourse in South Africa. And if you question that dogma, as some of us are wont to do, you are an ogre, a racist, an “apartheid denialist” in the language of Webber Wentzel’s band of legal inquisitors.

What Zille understands under “challenge” is a euphemism for vilification, censorship and persecution. If you deviate from the cultural-Marxist canon of South African history, you will be fined, imprisoned or both. That is what is being planned for us and Zille’s “liberal” DA – which has of course as little to do with classical liberalism as Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge had to do with democracy – will support these draconian measures to suppress our free speech.

No doubt, this crushingly stupid cow would describe my book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot, in the same vain, although she would be hard-pressed to offer textual proof for her demonstrable falsehoods.

Stalinist speech laws, and Kangaroo courts like the one before which Dan will be hauled, are instantiated in that obese and obscene document the South Africans call a Constitution—these Sovietized laws preclude my visiting the country of my birth. The Cannibal is used by immigration lawyers to help white refugees remain in the West—the La Raza has lobbyist like the Democratic Party and the Demopublican US presidents. Whites don’t!

If not the usual ANC cognoscenti, you just know that some South African Jewish quorum will pitch up to protest the presence of the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot in the country of her birth, South Africa.