Dear Congress: I Don’t Need An Effing Gun, I Need Health Care
The hypocrisy of our mental health-ignoring, gun-loving Congress has reached new heights.
O n Wednesday, the Republican Party pretended to care about the rights of the mentally ill by repealing an Obama-era regulation that prevented people with diagnosed disorders from purchasing firearms.
To be clear, the regulation was absolutely stigmatizing; I’m happy to see it go. It was drafted after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, because the shooter had Asperger’s syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder — neither of which increases a person’s likelihood to be violent.
There are plenty of actually useful regulations and laws that could have been introduced during the long-overdue conversation about gun control that followed the Sandy Hook tragedy. For example: getting rid of guns designed for anything besides hunting, limiting clip size, or, yanno, not letting the federal assault weapons ban expire in 2004. But this grandstanding the GOP is doing right now, pretending that the regulation repeal has anything to do with them caring about…
