When a tragedy like the one at Annunciation Catholic School on August 27 unfolds, the knee-jerk reaction from Democrats and their allies in the corporate media is to demand more gun grabs and recruit Republicans to pass red flag laws.
There is a solution, however, that wouldn’t require any further encroachment on law-abiding Americans’ Second Amendment rights. In fact, the answer lies in the very paperwork and background checks that leftists often claim aren’t enough of an obstacle to guns.
Curbing the alarming rise of shootings committed by people pretending to be the opposite sex starts with treating transgenderism as a serious mental health issue.
Page two of the 4473 transaction record required for any gun purchase from a federally-licensed firearms dealer includes a series of yes or no questions designed to determine someone’s eligibility to purchase and own firearms. Question 21 subhead g specifically asks a potential buyer whether they have “ever been adjudicated as a mental defective OR have you ever been committed to a mental institution?”
As the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms has repeatedly clarified, this provision does not apply to “a person in a mental institution for observation or by voluntary admission.” Instead, it bars people who were “formally committed to a mental institution by court, board, commission or other lawful authority” involuntarily for “mental defectiveness or mental illness” or other reasons such as “drug use.”
For centuries, an open desire to masquerade as the opposite sex was defined and treated as a weighty mental and behavioral disorder. By 1980, transgenderism was officially classified as a psychosexual disorder in third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. More than 30 years later in 2013, however, APA’s fifth edition DSM removed gender identity disorder as a diagnosis and replaced it with gender dysphoria, which focused less on fixing gender-bending and more on doing whatever it took to relieve the “marked incongruence.”
Widely recognized American and global health and medical institutions quickly followed APA’s lead in shying away from dubbing transgenderism a mental illness. Some, such as Johns Hopkins, went as far as opening centers devoted to “affirming” those struggling with accepting their sex. By 2019, the World Health Organization removed “gender incongruence” from its list of official imbalances.
These irreversible interventions euphemistically referred to as lifesaving “gender affirming care” paired with rhetoric from Democrats who undoubtedly incite violence by insisting Republicans are “erasing trans people” have had more than a decade to take effect.
The results, as seen in both science and culture, are less than ideal. Not only are more people than ever struggling with the social contagion of the LGBT movement, but more of those people are also resorting to deadly acts of violence often linked to and motivated by their struggle.
In olden days, the genderbending and deranged musings of the alleged shooter who sprayed bullets through the stained glass during a Catholic school’s mass would get him institutionalized and easily disqualify him from lawfully obtaining a gun, as law enforcement officials claim he did. Instead, the disordered impulses and feelings of those like the deceased suspect are indulged by his parents, the people who govern him, and leftist-led brainwashing.