Vin Suprynowicz

I see where retired astronaut Mark Kelly and his wife, brain-damaged former Arizona Congresscritter Gabrielle Giffords, are criss-crossing the country, traveling with an extended staff “resembling that of a political campaign” in private planes and helicopters, trying to stir up state-by-state support for more laws designed to make it harder for law-abiding Americans to buy and keep guns — part of a planned $20 million fund-raising effort by their “Americans for Responsible Solutions.”

Yes, I know those crying for ever more rigorous “background checks” and other permits and fees say making things harder for law-abiding gun owners is not their goal.

And if you believe that, be sure to also write your name on your luggage when you leave it behind to board the cattle cars at the train station, so they can forward it to you in the “resettlement” camp.

To a wealthy white person, it sounds like no big deal to be required to take a $100 “safety” course offered at your local suburban gun store, then drive to some police facility during business hours to get fingerprinted and pay another hundred bucks apiece for “permits,” “background checks,” etc.

But imagine you’re a young black or Hispanic man living in the inner city, 20 miles from the gun stores that offer such classes — all located in suburbs you can’t reach in the evening by bus. And that “a mere couple of hundred dollars” means your younger siblings might have to go hungry for days.

And that’s before we get to the new requirements that you prove you’ve never sought psychiatric counseling. We’ll get to that.

Frankly, since it’s insane by definition to try again and again to solve a problem with methods that have never worked in the past — while these same methods HAVE consistently led to increased tyranny — it’s actually quite appropriate to have as the poster girl of today’s gun control movement a woman with brain damage.

Though I suppose the couple does deserve credit for figuring out a way to keep financing the jet-set lifestyle to which they became accustomed during their decades on the federal payroll, raising taxes and spending our hard-earned loot on worthless boondoggles like Porky the Space Bus.

Some will say this is all unkind or insensitive. But here’s the thing: When people are trying to take away our rights — aiming to turn this once-free country into a slave state — we can’t afford to let them choose the ground on which we fight, or the arguments or language we’re “allowed” to use.

America’s leading gun control advocate is brain-damaged.

WHILE WE SLEEP …

“But she’s only brain damaged because Jared Loughner had a gun!” some will insist.

How do you know? People who live in the former congresswoman’s district in Arizona tell me she was anti-gun long before this incident — that she refused to knowingly allow anyone to carry a self-defense weapon to her public appearances.

Might this Loughner character — who passed an FBI background check “immediately and without incident” to purchase his handgun in November, 2010, by the way — have gotten off fewer rounds if there’d been plenty of armed good guys at the rally that day in 2011? Heck, had there been some defensive firepower in evidence, might he even have been scared off? How do we know Gabrielle Giffords isn’t brain-damaged because there weren’t ENOUGH guns in the supermarket parking lot that day? Armed lunatics rarely shoot up police stations, after all.

In fact, no one who believes that the right of Americans to keep and bear arms of military usefulness should be infringed (such as, by voting to fund a BATF that bars the import or manufacture of machine guns for “civilian” use) would be able to take the congressional oath of office, vowing to “protect and defend” the Second and 14th Amendments — as Ms. Giffords did three times — unless they were either morally depraved or a cretin.

So if she was against gun rights before she was shot, who’s to say she wasn’t already brain-damaged?

Campaigning for their scheme in Dover, New Hampshire July 6, Ms. Giffords exited one event through a back door to avoid a small group of protesters, including one carrying an “AR-15 assault rifle,” The AP reports. (One more time, the AR-15 is a semi-automatic, not an assault rifle.) “Shortly before they left, the man appeared to be napping in the shade with his gun at his side,” The AP reported.

“Apparently, he got tired,” space bus driver Kelly said later at a dinner with parents of children killed at Newtown, Conn., by another insane shooter — another incident not prevented by background checks. “You can’t sleep when you’ve got your loaded AR-15 next to you,” Mr. Kelly said. “This is not responsible.”

Really? Leaving aside how the former astronaut could tell the rifle was loaded, I can’t think of a better time to have a loaded weapon beside me than when I’m sleeping, given how often the drug warriors happily funded by Ms. Giffords and her ilk tend to break down the doors of innocent people in the middle of the night and murder them, these days.

Does spaceman Kelly believe the 2nd Amendment now reads “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed … except when we catch them napping”?

If so, I’m glad he told us.

CREATING EVER MORE NUT CASES

Liberals believe the armed forces will always protect them — yet insist on indoctrinating American children that firearms are so inherently evil you will be expelled from school if you point a finger and shout “Bang Bang!” or bite your Pop-tart into the shape of a pistol.

Where do they think they’re going to find tomorrow’s Army and Marine marksmen?

The statist paradise-builders ignore all warnings of the unintended consequences of their actions, dismissing them as “lies invented by the greedy rich, who just want to protect their privileges.”

Thus, early warnings that ObamaCare would lead to skyrocketing costs, along with employers laying people off and/or shifting their remaining no-benefits work force to 28-hour weeks, were laughed off as alarmist lies.

Yet now, as the deadlines loom for imposing this bizarre and costly Gyro Gearloose version of rationed medical care, its very champions whine, “What? All that stuff is really happening? How come we weren’t warned?!”

But now get ready for something really big:

Simpering, Politically Correct left-liberals hate — hate — to hear us accurately identify any of our fellow citizens as crazy or retarded. They have virtually emptied our former institutions for the insane, dispersing them to wander the streets with their shopping carts. I agree it’s better than locking up everyone who acts funny. But the liberals’ magical thinking is so strong that they actually appear to believe idiocy and homicidal madness can be banished simply by preventing anyone from using the words.

Meantime, they have vastly EXPANDED the number of children they now identify as retarded under such new, politically correct euphemisms as “learning disabled,” “behaviorally disabled,” “Attention Deficit Disorder,” “Autism Spectrum Disorder,” etc. — even as they refuse to investigate the weird similarity of some of these conditions to the known symptoms of mercury poisoning, while continuing to use mercury compounds as preservatives in their vastly expanded array of compulsory childhood vaccinations.

This has required a vast expansion of the medical specialty identified by Dr. Thomas Szasz as “state psychiatry,” an industry dedicated to providing a “medical” rationale for the massive control (through force-feeding of bad psychoactive drugs) of any part of the populace not willing to quietly chew its cud.

Yet get this: Left-liberal gun controllers now threaten to destroy their very own pet industry — state psychiatry!

Read closely all the new calls for “universal background checks.” Now that the liberals have saddled us with more lunatics wandering the streets, they want to use this as an excuse to remove gun rights from lunatics — while vastly expanding the list of those who are “forbidden from gun or ammunition ownership due to mental health problems.”

I’m watching a case right here in Nevada in which a citizen who for decades was considered OK to buy and own guns — was even issued a Federal Firearms License — is now being prosecuted in federal court for “being an ineligible person in possession of a firearm.” How? The federal prosecutors just RETROACTIVELY apply their new “mental health” standards.

The assertion is that, when this gentleman’s first marriage broke up 40 years ago, he voluntarily sought psychiatric treatment and counseling.

He’s been a law-abiding gun owner and dealer for 40 years, but “Presto!” — the federals now consider him a dangerous nut who should go to jail for owning guns that he was told were legal for him to own when he bought them.

Mark my words: Anyone who wants to avoid seeing their kids or grandkids deprived of the right to keep and bear arms — and other rights to be named later — is now duty bound to instruct them: “Unless you want your rights taken away, you may never seek or accept psychiatric counseling, advice, or treatment. If anyone ever asks you whether you have violent thoughts or urges, whether you get depressed, whether you ever think of harming yourself or others, you must refuse to answer. You must politely but firmly state: ‘I know what this is. This is psychiatry. So as not to have any of my rights taken away from me in future, I refuse to have interface with any form of psychiatric examination, discussion, inquiry or treatment. If I’m not under arrest, I’m leaving. If you refuse to let me go, I wish to speak to a lawyer immediately.'”

You might even want to print that up on a handy card.

The choice is now between our Constitutional rights and the survival of the form of ersatz, self-justifying “medical” practice known as “state-funded psychiatry,” a sham designed to take away Americans’ rights under color of therapeutic medicine.

I would not have imposed this choice, myself. But now that the opponents of our freedoms have done so, I don’t find this a hard choice.

Psychiatry must be destroyed.