[Ed: Dr. Faria originally published this at Hacienda Publishing June 6. It is more partisan than most of what we publish, but well-founded. Minimally edited for DRGO.]

We could say that all mass shootings are inspired by hatred. But many are carried out by deranged individuals, susceptible to violence and possessing no clear and distinct political or religious motives. These disturbed, mentally unstable people are unhinged by the strain of the postmodern age and what they see and experience, receptive to the influences of the perverse degeneration of the popular culture, media sensationalism, and the pursuit of celebrity status, even if they pay with their own lives to achieve the dubious notoriety they seek. These types of rampages may be the most common type of mass shootings, at least in the United States.

But there are other types of rampage shootings, which are clearly of different varieties, especially those triggered by fanaticism or intense racial, ethnic, or political hatred.

Some shootings are motivated by Jihad and “home grown” Islamic radicalism.  Others, perhaps the most odious, are the result of perverted political ideology and the increasing hatred boiling over from the atmosphere of racial and ethnic divisiveness and polarization of politics, largely created by the incitement of violence, directly or indirectly, by the political left and the propagandist media.

On May 14, 2022, Payton Gendron, an alleged “white supremacist,” shot and killed 10 people and injured three others at Tops Market in Buffalo, New York. The media has sensationalized this shooting not only to push for gun control but also because of the alleged “white supremacist” doing the shooting and the racial motivation behind it. Now we are learning that a former FBI agent may have known of the gunman’s plan to commit mass murder, according to two law enforcement officials investigating the case.

According to the Buffalo News, the two law enforcement sources stated that at least six individuals had been communicating with the accused shooter in an online chat room and were invited by Gendron to read about his mass shooting plans and the target location about 30 minutes before the shooting. None of these individuals tipped the FBI to warn the agency prior to the shooting. No other information has been made available to the public from the two officials familiar with the investigation, the FBI, or the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Suffice to say, the FBI and the media propagandists have been heavily discussing racial hatred, the white supremacist shooter, and the fact the gunman used an AR-15. Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrat activist Beto O’ Rourke have already begun pushing for banning “assault weapons,” especially the AR-15, and in the case of O’Rourke, calling for outright confiscation of those who already possess them legally!

Nothing has been said about much bigger problems, such as the increased polarization of America since the time of the Obama administration and the incitement of violence by the Democrats and the media — for example, calling rioters “peaceful protestors” and justifying their criminal behavior, violence, looting and plundering, as reasonable social justice. In fact, these rioters advance the leftist agenda of promoting chaos that then the Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media can exploit as pretext to pass more laws that affect not the criminal elements in society but the law-abiding gun owners and business people; at the same time, the orchestrated riots provide plunder for the looters, while the public and businesses are not even protected!

Nor has the media explored and investigated their own politicization or that of the intelligence agencies, especially when it came to undermining the presidency of Donald Trump.

No president in American history has had to suffer the sustained and vociferous media attacks that the American print and electronic media launched against President Donald Trump, the legally elected president of the United States. Some media personalities and Democrat legislators even called openly for his assassination. Moreover, we now know that an attempt to remove Trump was behind the intensive demonizing of the former president.

We also know that all resources available to the press were utilized for sustaining the constant barrage of negative propaganda, and that this could take place in our United States, a nation with a purportedly free and independent press, is unconscionable. And that a fifth column within the intelligence community, which had become corrupted and sympathized with President Barack Obama and detested President Trump, was also deeply involved is abominable.

These agencies, both the CIA under John Brennan and the FBI under James Comey that collaborated with Democrats sympathetically with foreign powers to overthrow Trump’s presidency, have lost a lot of credibility with the American people, and that none of these intelligence players is serving time is another abomination.

Where are the objective and indomitable investigative journalists of the mainstream media that should have been investigating these momentous omissions, these gaps in our knowledge, in the study of criminal mass shooters? And when is the media finally going to admit that armed citizens in place could have stopped some of these mass murderers, and, at the very least, diminish the number of casualties?

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—  Miguel A. Faria, Jr, MD is a retired professor of Neurosurgery and  Medical History at Mercer University School of Medicine. He founded Hacienda Publishing and is Associate Editor in Chief in Neuropsychiatry and World Affairs of Surgical Neurology International. He served on the CDC’s Injury Research Grant Review Committee. His latest book is America, Guns, and Freedom: A Journey Into Politics and the Public Health & Gun Control Movements (2019).

The bipartisan efforts to curb and limit gun violence, especially the extremist mass shooting events, is starting to take form and details are emerging. This will determine what efforts that we as gun owners and second amendment supports have to voice to change in our favor so that the time, efforts, and funding go to places where we can make a positive difference.

Given the political makeup in Washington though, it will be an uphill battle.

What’s in it?

• Extreme Risk Protection Order – “Red Flag” Funding
• Expanded NICS Criteria
• School Security Funding
• Mental Health Funding

What isn’t in it?

• Change the age requirement to 21

The ERPO expansion.

Especially in the format of federal funds for state programs, this is an easy avenue that can be made to achieve broad support. By making funding available, but leaving the format to the states PPO and ERPO programs, the federal government keeps its efforts very hands off and lowers the chances of offending voters. If all Congress does is fund the states, they pass the buck while doing something at the same time.

The problem remains what it has always been, ERPOs only work sometimes, when conditions are right, and are an extreme risk for generating false positives and abusing rights. I’m seeing the headline today that California’s was used 58 times to prevent mass shootings. I would be very curious to see the case data on those 58 incidents and compare them to similar verbal or written events where ERPO was not invoked. Any ERPO abuse will be costly for the state and harm the people the laws are in place to help. Liken it to a false rape accusation, it is false accusation of violent actions or intentions. It significantly negatively impacts those it is leveled against, and “We’re doing it to protect people or to save kids.” doesn’t do much to offset the loss of a job, thousands of dollars in litigation and time recovery, or the reputation you previously had before being ERPO’d. The existence of overreach or perceived overreach will itself be a major friction point. ERPO “Red Flag” laws are the one of the lowest measures though, and to be fair to them there are avenues and methods where they can increase positive outcomes.

On that can generate a positive outcome thought track, most of these proceedings must have some evidentiary basis for initiating from law enforcement, a prosecutor, or a medical professional. The counter-point is, if the ERPO is needed why are they still free to act and not being placed into some status of state custody to monitor their actions? This evidence is in front of the law and behavior professionals so why isn’t a greater custody status warranted but disarming them is?

These positive outcomes come with negative outcomes, there will be negative consequences with ERPOs and lives will be negatively impacted. That is a consequence we are accepting with ERPO expansion. Without careful monitoring and course corrections these have the potential to vastly outweigh the theoretically prevented incidents of violence, and even trigger tangential events. We cannot utopia ourselves into believing that these well intentioned ERPO programs, like every government program, will not be the target of abusers looking to leverage it in their favor.

We equally must not delude ourselves that, no matter how many flags we hand to the monitors, even to the point of flagrant rights violations, we will stop all incidents of extreme violence. We won’t stop any incident that doesn’t have enough precursors, doesn’t stay engaged and followed up upon by officials, doesn’t get properly entered into denial systems like NICS, doesn’t hit any one of a number of failure points that could allow a violent actor the freedom to act.

We’ve seen these failures, repeatedly. We’ve seen the laws passed and fail to prevent the next incident, and the next, and the next. We’ve seen the stress and anger in the nation rise, and our response seems to be ‘make being angry against the law’, but only in certain specific and quasi-unenforceable manners.

Refresh NICS

Honestly, this has merit. Refreshing what we consider a prohibited person deserves looking at from a number of angles, to include petty situations like use of marijuana. Prohibited persons needs a modernization.

But, I know that isn’t what they are talking about. My guess is this will focus on having state and local agency reporting mandates updated. The system will still be only as good as its oldest and least accurate data. Remember that 77% of mass killers who used firearms passed their checks, this includes the worst offenders like Vegas, Pulse, and Virginia Tech.

I have yet to see a criteria update and a method of database verification that looks like it is going to catch these problematic persons and deny them at least the dealer avenue of buying a firearm. That denial is unlikely to mean much either, as denial follow ups are a small percentage of denials, most initial denials are false positives, and the number of cases brought to court of accurately caught prohibited persons being tried and convicted for attempting to acquire a firearm are a miniscule percentage of the total denials.

Why?

Law enforcement does not consider them a significant threat or high priority in the vast majority of cases. They aren’t worth the time. So when the new criteria again fails to stop someone, or when someone gets denied and not followed up on, we’re just going to see another headline proclaiming “Known to authorities.” next to the picture of a shooter.

School Security

Here is where we can make headway, significant headway. But here we also have a hard limit on efficacy with diminishing returns.

We have to handle school types differently, for elementary and middle schools the threats tend to be exterior and in high schools the threat is more often interior. For both types the most safety can come from controlling where people can go and how they can get there. Elementary and Middle schools are attacked by someone outside, High schools are often attacked by an enrolled student. Faculty can also, sometimes, become a threat and faculty tends to have increased access. There are a many school districts who do not trust their faculty. They will not openly admit this, but find a district where classroom doors do not lock and you have found one where they do not trust their faculty.

Bath, MI. and Fort Hood are relevant examples of faculty or staff attacking their own.

The best thing we can do for schools is control access and maintain that control. What was originally reported as a propped open exterior door in Uvalde seems now to have been a maintenance failure. Doors only keep people out if they can stay closed. Controlling access with entrance management, making sure students don’t open the doors for strangers if asked to, man trap access during hours of operation. Making sure parents know to use the main entrance and check in and out, making sure there are no exceptions to this and that gate jumping won’t be tolerated, getting staff, students, and parents on the same sheet of music. A challenge but not impossible.

And if you, like me, are thinking that people could still get through, you’re right. This isn’t a perfect solution. There is no perfect solution, especially if we don’t want to ‘imprison’ our kids inside a school building.

School security gets ‘benignly’ violated every day. It is done by parents, students, and teachers who can’t be bothered to wait, or who prop open a door for convenience, or who politely hold a door open for someone coming in behind them, or who are really super extra in a hurry. In most cases there is no negative intent, people are simply impatient. But someone with negative intent can exploit these same avenues that an impatient parent or careless student can.

Mental Health Funding

Especially in the pandemic era, mental health resources for teens and young adults need as much support as we can possibly leverage. Teens and young adults are not the medically vulnerable population to things like COVID, but they are the most susceptible to the depressions involved with massive debt and inflation leveraged against their low income brackets.

Young people are convinced, not without reason, that the world is going to slowly collapse around them and it is the older folks who set this dumpster fire up for them. They aren’t necessarily wrong either. Millennial and Zoomer humor is dark for many reasons.

But it isn’t all doom and gloom either, we have problems but they are decidedly first world problems. We just grew up in an era in which we were told, in the shortest of terms, that we wouldn’t have problems. That we wouldn’t have serious problems. That as long as we went to college we’d get a good job and that managing finances would be easy. The amount of ‘lied to’ resentment from the younger two generations towards the elder two is high.

All this leads back to mental health funding, having the medical staff and facilities to take care of the stressed generations that, after being called lazy good for nothings for the past couple decades, are about to shoulder the burden of carrying the world. I am well aware that each generation has its clashes with the previous and the follow on, but the resentment between Millenial/Zoomer and X/Boomer is deep. This is prior to splitting that into the political factions and the varieties of chaos that all brings as everyone seeks validation for their existence.

Federal Firearms Age Limit

This is honestly the item I expected in the bill that appears to not be within it, but may become its own bill. It has some developmental merits to stand on that both pro-gun and anti-gun people can acknowledge. The devil is in the details, as usual, and I wouldn’t expect them to write it in, especially initially, in a way that I would support but raising the age of ‘Adulthood’ in the nation to 21 is not off the table as a discussion item.

But that’s the real sticking point. We aren’t talking a restructure of adult privileges and responsibilities in this nation, to include voting age, age to serve in the military, age to start paying taxes, age where parental benefits and protections run out, and so forth. We are only discussing firearms and that is a fundamental problem. We keep telling these kids they are only partial adults. Quasi-adults. That they can be trusted with X but not Y, and not really with Y until Z. It’s a mess.

So could changing the age to 21 for semi-auto firearms in general, and not simply handguns, produce a positive change?

Yes. It could.

Could being the operative term. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum and it won’t by any stretch of the imagination eliminate, or significantly hinder, extreme events. But it will put regulated firearm sales further down the mental maturation arc as we understand it, and from that sole standpoint (combined with other benefits that young adults should have, like tax exemption prior to voting age), it should be on the table for discussion.

Would 18 year old me be sad I couldn’t get my rifle? Yes. I would, especially since I was a Marine and had a work rifle. But I didn’t end up buying my own rifle until 21. Why? I was terrible at financing. That whole ‘budget’ thing took a minute to figure out. I’m far from unique in that circumstance so while I very much appreciated my right to arms, what I lacked was ability.

The question gets more complicated than that though, we aren’t just talking about a barely out of highschool teenager doing something stupid with a gun, we are talking about radically curbing the right of everyone in the 18-21 bracket to protect themselves if they are living outside a typical home structure where an adult figure can be.

We aren’t just telling a wild-with-new-freedoms 18 year old boy they can’t have an AR yet with their fast food job earnings. We’re also telling the boy who lives on their own they can’t have one. The young woman who lives on her own, is in a new space, a new city, a new situation, that she cannot have this means of protection. Maybe they don’t need it because they are still home, or in a safer and more monitored space like a campus. But what if they aren’t? We’re also telling the soldier, sailor, airmen, or Marine that they’re adult enough to go to war with these things but not adult enough to protect their home with it.

There are problems, lots of problems, with adjusting an age marker of adulthood. If we choose to change this age, we must do so while addressing all the problems in some mitigatory manner.

In short. The best case scenario for the law is that it funds school security and is otherwise fairly status quo on firearm regulation. Worst case, it makes a mess of firearm regulation for no gains whatsoever.

[Ed: This was first published by James Fite on Liberty Nation News May 21. Used with permission. I’d probably have said “progressives” rather than “Democrats” because some Democrats still think rationally about guns. ]

The political left loves to paint gun violence as a public health crisis – an epidemic, according to the Biden administration – but is that justified? A look at the numbers as they relate to the rest of America’s problems shows the “epidemic” label might be just a tad dramatic.

Firearm Deaths By The Numbers

According to the CDC, there were 45,222 “firearm-related deaths” in the US in 2020. On the CDC’s FastStats pages, a more revealing breakdown is available, however. There were 24,576 homicides in 2020, of which 19,384 involved guns. So why the first, much higher, number? Well, that includes accidents, justified defensive shootings, homicides, and the biggest chunk of all, suicides. In 2020, 45,979 people took their own lives – and 24,292 of them used firearms. Approximately 3,358,814 deaths occurred in the US in 2020, according to the CDC’s Provisional Mortality Data published in 2021. The 19,384 firearm homicides account for just 0.58% of the nation’s deaths that year. If we define “gun violence deaths” as murders, suicides, defensive-shootings, and accidents, as the CDC and the rest of the Biden administration clearly does, then firearms still only accounted for about 1.3% of the deaths that year.

Kidneys More Likely To Kill Than Guns

Even being generous enough to the left’s narrative to pretend that 100% of those who used a gun to kill either themselves or someone else in 2020 would have chosen life rather than death if only firearms weren’t available – as if there weren’t thousands of other homicides and suicides already – guns don’t even come close to ranking in the top causes of mortality. The top ten for that year include, in order: heart disease, cancer, COVID-19, unintentional injury, stroke, chronic lower respiratory disease Alzheimer disease, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, and kidney disease. The last accounted for 52,547, or 1.56% of the year’s deaths. That’s three times the share of lives claimed by actual firearm violence – but if gun violence were only mentioned as often as kidney disease, never mind a third as often, it wouldn’t even be a part of the national discussion.

As for deadly potential, the 2020 population of the US was an estimated 329.5 million. That means 329.5 million pairs of kidneys, of which 52,547, or 0.016%, killed their owners. Pretending for a moment that there are no multiple murders, and again, that 100% of the suicides and homicides wouldn’t have happened without firearms, then just 45,222 firearms, or 0.011% of the estimated 413 million in America, would have taken lives in 2020.

Who’s Fired Up Over Fentanyl?

Another actual epidemic that the left-wing media refuses to pay much attention, if any at all, is the skyrocketing number of fentanyl overdose deaths – and that’s something the government could actually do something about. As Liberty Nation’s Sarah Cowgill reported, there were 107,000 fentanyl overdose deaths in 2021. In 2020, there were an estimated 70,029.

Just 150 micrograms of fentanyl is considered a “significant risk” of overdose, according to the anesthesiologist and two Ph.D. chemists working with Harm Reduction Ohio, a non-profit dedicated to reducing the harm associated with drug use and drug policy. “High risk” is 250, “extreme risk” is 400, “death likely” is 700, and “death near certain” is 1,000 micrograms. The 250-1,000 range can kill most non-tolerant users, including veteran heroin users who have been abstinent for a while – but 2,000 micrograms will kill anyone. There are 1,000,000 micrograms in a single gram, meaning that each gram of fentanyl that makes its way over the border is enough to potentially mean certain death for 500 of the most tolerant heroin users – and that doesn’t account for the vast majority of people, who are at significant risk of overdose with less than one tenth of that 2,000 microgram dose.

A single pound – 453.592 grams – of fentanyl is 229,796 “certain death” doses, and a whopping 4,776 pounds of the drug were seized by authorities at the border in 2020. That’s enough to deliver 2,000 microgram doses to 1,097,505,696 people – more than three times the entire US population that year. Now imagine how much made it across … and realize that 2021’s numbers blew 2020 out of the water.

As we can calculate simply enough by subtracting firearm suicides from the total firearm deaths number above, the CDC’s number of non-suicide firearm-related deaths for 2020 was 20,930 – meaning guns became slightly less deadly as time went on. One must wonder how much that has to do with the growing number of states climbing aboard the constitutional carry bandwagon.

So, in 2020, fentanyl killed 3.35 times more people than firearms, when excluding suicide, and 5.16 times as many in 2021. And firearms became slightly less deadly as time went on while fentanyl became a much more severe problem – one which seems likely to continue to worsen over time. Despite this, while the folks in the Biden administration seem to be laser focused on “curing the gun violence epidemic,” even to the point of circumventing Congress whenever they think they can get away with it, they seem to almost ignore this far deadlier crisis. Why? Well, it’s likely a matter of narrative.

An Epidemic Of Gun Violence – Or Political Posturing?

“Guns kill, and therefore we should outlaw them – or, at the very least, restrict them heavily.” That line sells votes for the Democratic Party. “Enough Fentanyl is crossing our porous southern border because of lax security and immigration policies to wipe out the entire population, so maybe we should tighten up a bit down there and stop saying things that inspire massive caravans out of South and Central America to head north” isn’t something any Democrat would want to tell the voting base. Therefore, it isn’t something the complicit left-biased media acting as the party’s public relations arm would willingly cover – at least not until it can’t be avoided anymore.

As LN’s Graham J. Noble explained back in 2019, Democrats have always pushed firearm restrictions under the guise of “common sense gun control.” Despite the inevitable claims that they respect the Second Amendment and gaslighting of opponents as paranoid conspiracy theorists, Democrats have dedicated at least some effort to restricting the right to keep and bear arms even in the best of times. In times of crisis, however, they leap from to the forefront of the national news with some new anti-gun measure at the ready. And don’t be fooled by the calming efforts; Democrats do want an unarmed populace, and they always have. They don’t always get their way, but when they do, the damage tends to be permanent. The successes of this method stretches back to the National Firearms Act of 1934, a reaction to the crisis of crime created by Prohibition, and it continues through today and will continue on into the future. As Mr. Noble put it: “Democrats have never come across a gun restriction they didn’t like.”

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— DRGO Editor Robert B. Young, MD is a psychiatrist practicing in Pittsford, NY, an associate clinical professor at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, and a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.

All DRGO articles by Robert B. Young, MD