Thread by @abigaildisney

I said yesterday that racism was a mental illness, chronic, progressive and untreatable. I criticized Bernie for talking about mental illness, so yes I am inconsistent on this point so let me be more clear about what I meant to say (and yes, I now know I took Bernie 1/

Out of context, sorry) First of all, what did I mean when I call racism a mental illness? I have no intention of taking away a person's responsibility for himself when I say that. Racists are racists and they are choosing to actively damage their fellow man. 2/

They don't have to act on it. Even just the belief on its own without action is hurtful. And it prevents people from proactively defending and helping their fellow humans, so on its own it is hateful. But most of the time it is accompanied by action, from the low level vote 3/

Behaviors all the way up to actively physically harming people who are guilty only of rising to your notice. I call it a mental illness because the idea itself is a derangement. First the idea that blackness or brownness are in themselves bad or evil or inferior are thoughts 4/

Unsupportable by science, by empirical fact or by experience. To hold beliefs so tightly that you refuse to acknowledge that they are based on ideas that are demonstrably untrue might not be technically definable as mentally ill, but it is surely mentally-ill-adjacent. 5

But it's worse than that, right? I come from a family from the south, I know how racists speak among themselves when they know they won't be overheard. They are drawn to these beliefs BECAUSE they are hurtful, because they are hateful. They are hard wired as trolls, they 6/

ENJOY feeling these feelings, believing these beliefs. That is sick. It is a sickness that infects every nook and cranny of their character. So if I say I believe racism is a mental illness, perhaps I should simply say that racism is a sickness. And it is destructive not 7/

Only to the person with the sickness but to everyone around them. And they treasure their sickness the Golem treasures the ring. 8/

The reason I criticized Bernie when I thought he was only attributing this problem to mental illness was because the association or equation of mass shootings with mental illness does a terrible injustice to the men and women among us who suffer and who are never 9/

Ever Going to hurt anyone. YES, the mentally ill should not have access to high caliber weapons!! But mentally ill people come in every shape and size and description and as a group are far more at risk of harming themselves and of being harmed by 10/

By others than they ever will be of hurting another soul. So let's not throw the civil and human rights of the mentally ill out just because we are afraid. There are bigger and far more proximal causes. 11/

Let's fix the care system for the mentally and let's fix the courts' attitude to the mentally ill and let's treat people fairly and on the basis of what the people who know them say about them and what they tell us about themselves. And let's do all that because we are good 12/

People, not because we are so afraid we can't see straight. People are suffering. Help them!! And not because you are really only trying to help yourselves. 13/

All that having been said, there are people who simply shouldn't have weapons. And they do. And this is bad. And they don't have just any weapons; they have assault weapons. And these people have been adjudicated mentally ill 14/

And look what our idiot president did!!!
eu.usatoday.com/story/news/pol…
And yet yesterday he just said he wants to lock everyone up! Make up your mind Mr President!! 15/

So to conclude. Racists are bad, thought-disordered people who cannot be trusted not to hurt others with acts of both commission and omission. Mentally ill people, for the most part are not a threat and should be treated with humanity. But some mentally ill people 16/

Should not have guns!! And it's not that hard to figure out who!! ITS NOT THAT HARD!! And for all the gun lovers out there who tweet pictures of their rifles and say "look, it's just an instrument, I would never abuse it." Just stop it!! 17/

If 110 million people own weapons and just 1% of the population has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and that is, by the way the actual percentage of schizophrenic people in any population, then 1.1 MILLION people are out there with guns!! 18/

Let's be generous and imagine that the gun owners are a self selected group of particularly sane, law-abiding people as they like to tell us, though Ted Nugent would seem to be ample refutation of that idea, and only .5% of gun owners are schizophrenic. That still leaves us 19/

With 550,000 schizophrenic people with weapons. How is it possible that something like this is NOT happening every fucking day???? Come on everyone, this is not that hard. THERE ARE TOO MANY WEAPONS AND THEY ARE TOO POWERFUL. While much about this problem is not simple 20/

This one is. Get the assault weapons off the street. Pass Red Flag laws. Fix the registry. Put serial numbers on weapons and taggants in gun powder so the people who use weapons in crimes can be caught and the people responsible for getting those weapons to them can 21/

be held to account. Punish people who leave their weapons unsecured and get them stolen. Punish people for letting their children have unsupervised access to them. Make open carry of long guns illegal. Keep long guns out of highly populated areas. 22/

None of this is rocket science. If we have the will we can do this!!