Might this be your limit, Trumpsters? (Rhetorical Question)
Over the weekend in America, two insignificant nobodies imagined they could make their lives meaningful by shooting dozens of strangers and claiming, to aggrandize their emptiness, that their aimless spiritual suicide was some sort of quasi-political statement. In carrying out their self-damnation, the two insignificant nobodies used guns, much like the ones owned by millions of law-abiding citizens who, in accordance with the now-antiquated though still officially recognized constitutional protections of a formerly free nation, have every right, moral and legal, to own such items.
In response to these two ugly crimes, the President of the United States — the man most symbolically invested with the responsibility of upholding the rights entrenched in the nation’s founding documents — acting in direct response to the calls of the totalitarian-leaning mass media and the tyranny-obsessed progressive elite in Washington, has decided to reinforce his useful idiot status in the most superfluous, dangerous way.
Following a weekend with two mass shootings, President Donald Trump directed the Department of Justice to team up with local, state and federal agencies to work harder to find potential attackers. He also called on social media companies to “develop tools to detect mass shooters before they strike.”
And this:
Trump also asked the FBI to identify what resources the agency needs to investigate and disrupt “hate crimes and domestic terrorism,” and said mental health laws must be reformed. Trump said he will direct the Department of Justice to propose legislation to treat hate crimes and mass shootings as capital crimes that can result in the death penalty.
Donald Trump, the alleged leader of the supposedly free world, is calling on social media companies to prevent mass killings by monitoring and identifying potential criminals, and to do so in accordance with categories of “mental health” determined by the federal government.
In other words, first of all, he is further entangling the dominant corporate behemoths among private internet businesses into the workings of the federal government, at exactly the moment when people who actually care a whit about liberty should be clamoring to disentangle these private companies from the regulatory protections and partnership of the State.
Secondly, he is entrenching the principle that the federal government ought to have the authority to limit gun ownership (and therefore in principle, anything ownership), on the basis of perceived issues of “mental illness,” as this concept is defined by government officials.
If you cannot see the dangerous precedent this proclamation and any ensuing policies would set — the federal government deciding which points of view or attitudes ought to disqualify a person from the protection of his constitutional rights, independent of any crime having been committed — then you are either a progressive Democrat or a Trump supporter, i.e., a progressive Democrat in a red cap.
