Monday, June 20, 2016

What Bothers Me About LGBTQIA Victim Disarmament Advocates

Well, there's the part where they're advocating victim disarmament ("gun control"), of course. That's bad enough

But then there's the particular part where victim disarmament advocates turn to the argument that  "we need to make sure the mentally ill can't buy guns." That's even worse.

Until the early 1970s, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the psychology/psychiatry industry's official guide to mental illnesses) classified the LGB (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual) part of LGBTQIA as a "mental illness."

The T part -- Transsexual -- is still reflected in the DSM as "gender dysphoria."

Part of the A part -- Asexual -- is still reflected in the DSM as "male hypoactive sexual desire disorder" and "female sexual interest/arousal disorder."

To the extent that people form groups or communities based on common characteristics and interests -- and we do -- the queer community should be the last such group to buy into the idea of handing over a general power to forcibly constrain the actions of others based on claims of "mental illness."

I suppose I could turn here to some of the Szaszian argument against the existence of "mental illness" as generally understood. Such a turn would be entirely appropriate, and I certainly encourage those of you not familiar with it to explore it, but I'm going to go in a slightly different direction:

There seems to be an extraordinarily high correlation (maybe not quite 1:1, but fairly close) between membership in the group that victim disarmament advocates propose to give these powers to (the political class) and display of the symptoms of another DSM-classified "mental illness" -- antisocial personality disorder.

If anyone should be preemptively deprived of access to guns, sociopaths fit that bill perfectly. Governments are composed, at least in large part, of such people. They've murdered hundreds of millions of innocents in the last century alone. Instead of giving them the power to take our guns, why don't we take theirs?

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