Mental health and gun control cannot be separated. As I keep pointing out (and have been for many years), conservative analysts and commentators continue to produce an amazing amount of fantastic material that fails to be heard or read by enough Americans. Here is yet another example — this time from Daniel John Sobieski writing at American Thinker:
Never mind that the FBI failed to heed and follow up on repeated and explicit warnings about Nikolas Cruz before his shooting rampage in Parkland, Florida. Never mind the FBI was too busy chasing phantom Russian collusion to locate a future killer that any nerd living in his parents’ basement could have located with ease. According to mental health professional Jimmy Kimmel, Trump made Parkland happen by rescinding Obama administration regulations barring the mentally ill from getting guns:
Kimmel kept addressing Trump by adding that politicians and the president like to say that mass shootings are a mental health issue. He then said that one of the first acts of Trump’s presidency was to roll back a regulation designed to keep firearms out of the hands of the mentally ill.
“Your party voted to repeal the mandates on coverage for mental health,” Kimmel said. “So I agree, this is a mental illness issue because if you don’t think we need to do something about it, you are obviously mentally ill.”
What in fact happened is that President Trump and the Republican Congress removed regulations not designed to protect the public, but intended to disarm innocent and law-abiding senior citizens based on the assumption that if they need help handling their finances, they must be dangerous and must be disarmed. When was the last time Grandpa shot up his nursing home?
The reality is somewhat different from Kimmel’s slanderous falsehood. As Snopes reports:
In the wake of a horrific school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 dead in February 2018, media renewed focus on an Obama-era regulation repealed in the early months of the Trump administration. That rule would have given the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which is used for gun sales, access to Social Security Administration data including the names of individuals receiving certain federal mental health benefits.
Read more: American Thinker
