Saturday, May 13, 2023

Unanswered Questions

 By Judd Garrett


On Saturday, a lone gunman dressed in black tactical gear, pulled up at a mall in Allen, Texas, and started firing, killing 8 and wounding 7, the casualties ranged from 5 to 61. It has been revealed that this man had been discharged from the Army with mental health concerns in 2008, yet somehow, he was working as a security guard and able to purchase the guns legally. How did that happen? How was he allowed to do all those things in light of his documented mental health issues? Was somebody not paying attention? I don’t think even the most strident Second Amendment supporter, would want a mentally insane person to be allowed to legally purchase firearms. That is the main issue with many of these gun control laws that we have in place. They are not enforced properly to protect the public. The law-abiding gun-owners follow the law. The criminals find a way around them.


Considering the mental health issues of this man and the shooter in Nashville last month, are we ever going to do a legitimate study into the connection between using anti-depressant drugs and committing violent acts of crime like mass shootings? Are we ever going to do a study on the link between drug use, particularly marijuana use, and mental illness? Why do the authorities rarely ever release the toxicology reports on people who commit mass shootings like they do when a person dies in a car accident or from any untimely death? Why don’t we want to know if a person who committed an extreme act of violence that only a mentally deranged person would commit was on some mind-altering drug? Wouldn’t that be helpful information in our attempt to take action to prevent these tragedies from happening again? How often are violent criminals whacked on drugs when they commit their heinous crimes?


Listed in the Important Safety Information section on the website of one of the most advertised anti-depression medications on the market, it says: “Increased risk of suicidal thoughts and actions. Antidepressant medicines may increase suicidal thoughts and actions in some children, adolescents, and young adults.” I don’t know if this shooter or the shooter in Nashville was on anti-depressants, the authorities will never tell us, but as we are in the process of deciding whether to ban certain things, wouldn’t it be smart to ban the anti-depressant drugs that increase the “risk of suicidal thoughts and actions”? I thought the point of taking anti-depressants was to reduce the risk of suicidal thoughts and actions, not increase them. Maybe this mass shooting, the shooting in Nashville and many of the other such shootings, were the shooters’ way of committing suicide, and maybe the suicidal thoughts were brought on by mind-altering drugs. Why are we so willing to protect the pharmaceutical companies and put the average citizen at risk?


It has come out that the 33-year-old man who committed this atrocity was an Hispanic who praised Adolf Hitler and the transgender shooter who murdered Christians in Nashville on social media. With all of the surveillance of American citizens that the FBI conducts these days, why was this person never identified as a potential threat by our intelligence agencies? As the FBI was focused on parents who speak out at school board meetings and Catholics who prefer the Latin Mass, they were completely ignoring a person who worked as a security guard and was posting pictures of himself with Nazi tattoos and praising mass shooters. The FBI was wasting its bandwidth working with social media companies to censor the political speech of conservatives in order to influence elections, while a neo-Nazi praising Hitler on the internet went completely unnoticed.


It is interesting that we have found out more about the neo-Nazi and his motivation for his mass shooting within days of the attack then we have about the transgender shooter in Nashville who targeted a Christian school. Why aren’t the motivations of all these atrocities laid bare? Authorities still have not released the Nashville shooter’s manifesto which would have very important information if we want to better target potential threats, but it remains hidden to protect the LGBTQ political agenda. If the shooter had been a Christian who shot and killed 6 transgender people, we would know every last piece of information about that shooter within hours and anyone who wears a crucifix would now be placed on the FBI terror watch list.


Early in his presidency, Joe Biden announced that the FBI concluded that domestic terrorists were the biggest threat to our country. This shooter was a domestic terrorist. The shooter in Nashville was a domestic terrorist. If combating domestic terrorism was the number one national security priority of the Biden administration, why were these shooters not identified through their disturbing social media posts? Last year, Joe Biden’s deranged speech in front of Liberty Hall in Philadelphia made it clear who the FBI would be targeting in their surveillance of Americans for domestic terrorism - “MAGA Republicans”. So as FBI agents are listening to the benign conversations of a grandmother talking about Donald Trump, the neo-Nazi praising Hitler and the transgender who hates Christians are ignored because politicians like Joe Biden are not interested in using the FBI to stop mass shootings, they are only interested in using the FBI to target Trump supporters.


The Patriot Act was passed to give the government the power to surveille United States citizens with the sole intent on stopping another 9/11. That was the ONLY reason why we were willing to give the government that much power. And as always, the government used that power the way it was intended for about 5 seconds, and then they turned that power against the American people for political purposes. Edward Snowden, who should be lionized as a hero whistleblower, because he revealed how the NSA was abusing the Patriot Act to spy on US citizens, is now living in exile in Russia because if he returns to the United States, he will be thrown in jail for protecting our Constitutional rights from the government.


In the wake of these type of shootings, there is always a strong call for gun control legislation and even repealing the Second Amendment by the Democrat politicians. One of the reasons why so many people are so adamant against gun control measures which infringe on our Constitutional rights is legislation like the Patriot Act. There has never been legislation where the government assumes certain power that it doesn’t Constitutionally have or where the government takes from the citizens freedoms that they Constitutionally possess, where the government has not exploited that power against the people for their own political purposes. Just as we saw with the abuses of the surveillance state, we know from history that if we give up our Second Amendment rights and government assumes that much more power over us, it is will, as always, be used and abused against the citizens.