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By Lee Duigon
February 7, 2013
NewsWithViews.com

Crazy people shouldn’t have guns. Everybody agrees with that. But what if someone isn’t crazy when he buys the gun? Or maybe he is crazy, but you can’t tell because he hasn’t done anything crazy yet.

No problem—just make a law that says everyone who wants to buy a gun has to pass a sanity test first. Congress seems receptive to that idea. Why not? They could set up an enormous bureaucracy to administer the tests, keep records, do follow-up, etc. So many new government employees! So many public employee pensions! So many Democrat votes.

But why should you have to be demonstrably sane to buy a hand gun, when any slobbering psycho or cement-headed oaf can be elected president and have a whole nuclear arsenal to play with? Not to mention soldiers, fighter jets, warships, and tanks.

Why do we allow lunatics, dolts, whoremasters and other perverts to serve in Congress, where they can do almost as much harm as a batty president? You don’t think sane people saddled America with a $16 trillion debt, do you? Sane people don’t hire left-wing think tanks to write 2,500-page laws and then enact them without even reading them. Surely you don’t think normal people have uncontrollable urges to dictate to millions of other people what kind of light bulbs they can use. And who but a loon would ever say the primary mission of the United States armed forces is to fight Global Warming? I’ve never attended a session of Congress, but if I did, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see the members overturning bowls of spaghetti on their heads while making barnyard noises. I’d leave my wallet home, too.

How about requiring a psychiatrist’s OK for anyone who wants to teach or be an administrator at a college? Our universities are chock-full of nutty professors and dizzy deans. They’re also full of daffy degree programs—women’s studies, queer studies, black studies, chicano studies, hole-in-the-head studies: all guaranteed 100 percent useless. Young people who earn degrees in these subjects are also useless.

Of course, the whole idea of virtually everyone going to college was pretty loopy in the first place. Not that many people have a bent for scholarship. But how else are you going to provide jobs for hundreds of thousands of prats disguised as intellectuals? And how many of these would actually pass a psychiatric examination?

Before you argue that a passel of pinheads spouting pseudointellectual hogwash does no real harm to anyone, consider this. The students whose heads have been stuffed full of that hogwash are the voters who elect other kooks to high public office. You haven’t already forgotten “Occupy Wall Street,” have you? How much of that do you think America can stand?

As long as we’re on the subject of doing real harm without actually shooting a gun or enacting bird-brained laws that wind up costing the country untold billions of dollars, we might also do well to insist on psychological fitness tests for persons who practice what we still call “journalism.” Is there any doubt that the ranks of this profession are densely packed with fruitcakes? What sane individual, after turning himself inside-out all day to conceal the sheer ineptitude and malice of our leaders, can grin at his reflection in the mirror and say, “There stands an honest man”? Walter Durante of The New York Times—some things never change—won a Pulitzer Prize for covering up the crimes of Josef Stalin. Could he have passed a rigorous sanity test? Are we sane for basing our votes on information provided by such persons? And what about “Newsweek,” recently, proclaiming the current dunderhead in the White House as “the Second Coming”—presumably of Jesus Christ: I can’t think of anyone else who has a Second Coming. Is that dozy enough for you?

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According to the National Institute of Mental Health, about one in four Americans, 57.7 million people, suffers from some form of mental illness during any given year. That’s a lot of mental illness. Happily, we have more than 550,000 mental health professionals on hand to treat it. We can’t help wondering how effective they are, or what good it would do to hire another half a million of them to make sure prospective mental patients don’t buy guns.

With or without treatment, one way or another, most people recover from their mental illness. The rest go into teaching, journalism, or politics—and write gun laws.