This is an article talking about Donald Trump's recent response to the recent shooting on the community college campus in Oregon. The article quotes Trump from a recent MSNBC interview that didn't get much publicity (probably because Trump's PR people paid for it to be silenced) yet it was reported on by NewMax. The general gist is that Trump cited mental illness as the cause for the shootings. He also insinuated that people with mental illness choose isolation, instead isolation being forced upon them by the stigmas attached to mental illness by our society and individuals. The author goes as far to insinuate that Trump would like come up with a way to visually profile people with mental illness, much like what happens with black people. The author overall argument is that Trump is an idiot, talking about mental illness like he's an expert on the topic, and makes a fool out of himself by doing so. I agree with the author on this. Maybe not to the extreme the author did, yet that's probably because I'm a moderate and the author is quite liberal.
The author's second, and bigger argument, is that Trump's argument is invalid, that mental illness had nothing, or little, to do with the shooting, and that the real culprit is our country's lack of gun control and our over inflated gun culture. "the plain fact is that the Chris Harper-Mercer, the Oregon shooter, didn’t shoot 9 people because he was mentally ill, he shot them because of the ready availability of guns and the general habit of using violence to solve your problems as modeled for the nation and the world by the US government." This is where I can not agree. First off, nobody of sound mind goes into a school, a movie theater, or anywhere else, and shoots people at random. So yes, mental illness is to blame. Yes, our country has an over inflated gun culture that might give some mentally ill people add "fuel to their fire". Second, strict gun control isn't going to solve anything, as much as uber liberals like this guy believes it will. Point in case, Switzerland and Australia. In Switzerland, all citizens of a certain age must own a gun and be trained on it's use, however, historically, Switzerland i one of the most peacefully nations with one of the lowest violent crime rates worldwide. Australia on the other had has much stricter gun laws than the US and in the 90's confiscated guns of certain varieties, and yet still suffers from violent gun related crime at a rate about equal to the US. I don't have an answer to all this. Yet, I am a pacifist, and a buddhist, and have a concealed weapons permit, and own a hand gun. Guns and peace can coexist.
The author is Ben Debney, a Ph.D candidate in International Relations at Deakin University, Burwood, Melbourne. He is studying moral panics and the political economy of scapegoating. I feel this makes his opinion on Trump's scapegoating valid and well presented. However, I feel his opinions on gun control and the amount that mental illness being a cause of tragedies like this is based off of his super liberal political leanings, and therefore are nothing more than unsupported opinion.
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