How would you like to be rounded up and, uhm, registered, because you have a mental illness? Well, that’s what the NRA (National Rifle Association) proposes: a registry of all mentally ill citizens in the U.S. …
How do you feel about being assumed a very likely candidate for becoming a mass murderer simply because you have a mental illness?
Where does the hateful, misinformed madness of those who would persecute, stigmatize, and register us because of our mental health status end?!?!
Reblogged this on Living a Very Different Life and commented:
This is a view that to me keeps it very real. Thank you Beautifulwreck1
YES I have been watching this unfold in horror. And surprising thing – a lot of people go along with these ideas, they just nod their heads and say: – Yes, autism kills, or something like that. That article about mother with violent child was shared by millions, without a question about the mother’s parenting skills and decision making process. I am horrified.
Yes indeed, most people are uncritical about most things, in particular things they either 1) know nothing about and/or 2) anything that they fear. Even so-called progressive commentators, writers and humorists are missing the point and jumping on the all mentally ill people are potential killers/are a danger to society bandwagon. Bandagoneerism of any kind is itself dangerous, collective ignorance/hatred is even more dangerous and us folks with mental illness– which does not define us– had better watch our backs and each others’ backs as well. And, FIGHT BACK!
Mutant registration act has been done in the fiction of “X-Men”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registration_acts_(comics)
There is so much that is fundamentally wrong, illegal, and ignorant about that concept that I can’t begin to put words to it.
I’ll register for a “crazy people” database after they create a “gun people” database so I know who to avoid – since the mentally ill are far more to be victims than aggressors in violent crimes.
One has to see this in the larger political context. This is the NRA’s pushback against the outcry for gun control.They are strategists and will fight with every dirty trick they can think of. Dragging the mentally ill into the fight and suggesting an infringement on their rights to privacy is a distraction. You could make the same argument that every male should be registered because the massacres have been committed by men. You know how far that would fly.
This isn’t just a Second Amendment advocacy group. The NRA is the front and lobbyist for a billion dollar industry in the domestic arms market. Any control on sale or imports would be considered “restraint of trade.”
Over the years I have hidden my mental illness from family, friends….. everyone including myself sometimes. It is just recently that I have accepted my own mental illness as one of the unique traits that makes me, me. I’ve just gotten out from under my own thumb and now I may be tagged and labeled as sub-human in the governments’ eye. Then why do I hold down a job, pay bills and taxes, vote, etc… just like a “real” person. And damn it, I do it very well. If people with mental illness need to be registered, then so do people with halitosis, dandruff and athletes foot. This is so ignorant and scary.
They can’t do this!
An entire SWAT team came to my apartment last month because of an anonymous call. I was taken to a hospital and I still don’t know why, except that I’m mentally ill. I’m trying to file a complaint with the Civilian Review Board because apparently what the police did was legal!