Gun Laws and the Mentally Ill

From the BBC:

Mental illness has clearly been at the centre of some of the country’s most notorious mass shootings. But could the new law have an unintended consequence: making it harder for the mentally ill to seek help?

Here’s the thing: if someone is so mentally ill they can’t be trusted, they shouldn’t be out in society.  If they need supervision because of problems, whether permanent or temporary, they need that supervision.  If they can’t live on their own, whether it be because they want to kill themselves by driving into bridge supports at 90mph, or whether they just can’t handle the stresses of life, then maybe they shouldn’t be living on their own until they have those problems conquered.  Whatever the cause, if they need treatment and it will benefit them, they should be treated until they’re well; and if treatment won’t help, then maybe they shouldn’t be out.

If a person is so mentally ill they can’t be trusted in society, then they shouldn’t be trusted in society.

“If I had that fear that it would go to the police, I would feel violated,” she says (a gal with illnesses that needed treatment – ST). “Like big brother is watching me.”

Because, sadly, he is.

Mental health professionals and advocates fear that as a result of the new law, those who need treatment will stay away from the very people who ought to be able to help them.

“It has set back stigma a trillion years,” says Sharon McCarthy, programme director for the Westchester branch of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

“In developing this law, you brought in the mentally ill people,” says Ms McCarthy, whose daughter is bipolar. “You didn’t bring in the gangs. You pinpointed that group.”

This isn’t about gangs.  This is about disarming the population at large.

Those who are mentally ill and shouldn’t be released simply shouldn’t be released.  Those who are in some supervised status should be supervised.  The objective of treating mental illness, for those who are simply unwell, but not madmen, should not be to demonize them, either.

But here we get to the bigger problem – it’s not about guns, it’s not about preventing the mentally ill or unwell from harming themselves if supervision fails, it’s about control.

…the Safe Act has plenty of supporters.

Westchester County’s Board of Legislators passed a resolution urging similar action by federal leaders.

The board’s chairman, Ken Jenkins, says the act has adequate protections and that no-one should fear that the mental health provision will be used for anything other than preventing the sale of handguns and assault-style weapons to those who have been reported.

He says it’s only reasonable that gun ownership now comes with an extra burden.

“For the privilege of having… specific types of guns, you now have the additional responsibility for opening up your privacy,” he says.

No.

The Second Amendment clearly states THE RIGHT of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.  Nowhere in there does it say “privilege”.  At the point that a right becomes a privilege, it’s no longer a right – it’s something to be permitted or denied by your rulers who run the state.

There is no “responsibility” to open up one’s privacy in order to enjoy a RIGHT (aside from counting numbers of voters – but not the votes themselves).  There is no “responsibility” to surrender your privacy to beg for a privilege that the state is out to destroy.

The mentally ill, and more importantly those who feel they would like some therapy or counseling, are sadly correct to be a bit paranoid.  The database on them may well impact their future employment prospects and their future prospects in life.  It’s already part of a bill that is out to destroy the natural right of self-defense and to destroy the self-determination of the citizen because the Ruling Class wants to subjugate the population.

The series of mentally ill murderers in the last few mass murders were not normally troubled people going through a rough patch, they were deeply troubled, and identified as such.   With the massive stigma already attached to mental illness and the difficulties in forcibly committing someone who is dangerous preventing friends and family from acting, that led to many people’s deaths.  There are madmen out there – and many of them are easily identified by anyone who looks at photos of them, and they were well-known to friends and family, who are always concerned with the well-being of the mentally ill person.  But they’re already so scared of the consequences and hamstrung by groups that worked to prevent commitment, that those who needed to be committed were not; and those who’d seek their own help don’t.  Due to the perceived aberration of asking for mental health, individuals who need help receive it much less and their families and friends are that much less likely to ruin their lives on a hunch.

The stigma does run deep.

Obamacare and Car Insurance

Didn’t expect to do another Obamacare post so fast, but I just found out my car insurance went up.  I’m with a very major insurance company, and in the many, many years I’ve been with them, they aren’t the type to raise rates arbitrarily.  I called up and asked why my rates went up about $50.

The answer I got was that in my state, the company has assessed the new costs of Obamacare and started raising rates to compensate for those increased costs that Obamacare is causing.  The increased health care costs as a result of Obamacare are now raising car insurance rates because those same car insurance companies also end up paying medical bills for those injured in car accidents.

So watch your statements, call and ask.

Somewhere in that red tape tower, your rates just went up.  Broken windows.

Obamacare: The Red Tape Tower

Obamacare started as a 2700 pages and a fat binder of rules and regulations.  It is now over 20000 pages of rules and regulations.

A couple weeks ago, Senator Mitch McConnell’s office sent a few pictures of the 7’3″ tower of red tape that that is Obamacare out onto the internet.

By contrast, the Constitution:

Obamacare’s IPAB: Death To The Constitution, Death To Everyone

By Dr. Elizabeth Vliet at the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons:

The Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB, is one of the lesser known features of “healthcare reform” tucked away in the thousands of pages of the “Stimulus Bill” from 2009 and the healthcare law passed in March 2010.

Just exactly what is IPAB and how does it affect your life and health, and your access to medical care? And how does IPAB fit with our Constitutional Republic and our guarantees to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” under the US Constitution?

IPAB is a panel of unelected, government-appointed bureaucrats set up under the guise of “efficiency” and “clinical effectiveness” to “recommend” cuts to Medicare services in order to “bend the cost curve downward.” That is government-speak for “spend less money on patient care.”

IPAB is a threat to your health, and your life, if you are the patient whose care is denied because of your age, your condition, and cost based on how many “quality” years you are expected to live.

IPAB is set up to function exactly like the rationing board of the National Health Service (NHS) in Britain, called National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE). The strong arm of NICE prevents NHS doctors from prescribing state-of-the-art drugs for breast, stomach, lung, and prostate cancer or diseases like multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and many others.

IPAB is also charged with slowing the growth of payments to doctors and hospitals, reducing the rate of medication reimbursement under Medicare, and “reducing waste” in Medicare spending. “Waste,” however, is defined solely by bureaucrats, and may include medicine you actually need.

It’s worth reading the whole thing.

The state will declare you OBSOLETE.

You never learn, do you?  History teaches you nothing!

On the contrary, history teaches us a great deal!  We had predecessors, Mr. Wordsworth, who had the beginnings of the right idea.

Hitler!

Yes, Hitler of course.

Stalin!

Stalin too.  But their error was not one of excess, it was simply not going far enough!  Too many undesirables were left around, and undesirables eventually form a core of resistance!  Old people, for example, clutching to the past, and won’t accept the new.  The sick, the maimed, and the deformed!  They fasten onto the healthy body and damage it!  So we eliminate them!  And people like yourself – they can perform no useful function for the state – so we put an end to them.

- Mr. Romney Wordsworth and The Chancellor, Twilight Zone: The Obsolete Man

Gun Control In Minnesota Stalls For Now

Powerline makes the broad statement that Gun Control DOA In Minnesota:

The Democrats now control all of the levers of power in Minnesota, so when the national Democratic Party made its gun control push after Newtown, Minnesota Democrats followed suit. Legislation to ban a random selection of semiautomatic rifles and average-capacity magazines for all firearms was introduced here, largely mirroring gun control measures at the federal level and elsewhere. Given the Democrats’ control over both the legislature and the governor’s office, many thought that heightened gun control could become a reality. However, the Democrats decided rather quickly not to walk that particular plank. Today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune reports:

The Minnesota Senate will not act to ban assault weapons or high-capacity ammunition clips [sic] this year, a DFL leader said Monday.

Sen. Ron Latz, DFL-St. Louis Park, who is chairing the Senate’s gun hearings this week, said he will focus on closing the loopholes in background checks and leave the issue of banning weapons or ammunition to Congress.

“The assault weapons ban and high-capacity magazine ban proposals are highly divisive,” said Latz, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Legions of concerned gun owners turned out for three days of hearings on gun issues last week, and Latz said such bans also do not have strong support from law enforcement.

On the other hand, he said, the idea of filling loopholes in background checks has strong public and police support, and he believes it can pass this year.

They won’t enact the ban “this year”.  They want citizens disarmed, and they’ll be back.  Note that they do want Congress to go after citizens’ rights, though.

The “loopholes” are again going to be going after you wanting to sell a gun to your shooting buddy; though they talk a good line about one thing that does need to be taken care of:

…the background check system is largely non-functional as it relates to the mentally ill. The common element in mass shooting cases is that the shooter is nuts, by any reasonable definition, and is known to be mentally ill by any number of people, especially family members. But the mental institutions have been emptied now for several decades, and even when family members try to take their concerns to law enforcement, they generally get nowhere. One practical improvement in the NICS would be to make it easy for relatives and others to ban mentally ill people from buying firearms. A friend who is a gun dealer writes:

Legislation could require the reporting to the National Instant Check System (NICS) of individuals with known behavior problems or mental health issues that make them a danger to themselves or others. This reporting would result in a denial at the time of purchase from a dealer.

It could also institute a hot line to NICS so family members can easily report to NICS.

It would then be necessary to develop an appeal process for those who may be falsely accused by people seeking to cause them trouble.

The problem is that the seriously mentally ill need to be institutionalized.  The Aurora, CO madman set up a series of bombs at his apartment.  No amount of background checks on buying guns could’ve prevented that.

If a madman who is a danger to himself and others is banned from being able to buy a gun legally, he can still buy gasoline and matches.

No amount of NICS information sharing is going to prevent madmen from being madmen.   Setting up one more criteria for anti-gun forces to deny citizens their rights by declaring the citizen insane gives the leftist-statist wannabe tyrant one more tool towards citizen disarmament.  Consider the talk of denying veterans who’ve made PTSD claims the right to bear arms as one example.  Numbers up into the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of veterans across America’s wars, who were put in bad situations by the US government – issued guns and told to kill – come home and ask for help dealing with things they experienced… and the response is to deny them the rights they fought to preserve and call them crazy?  The anti-rights forces want that tool because those who’ve fought for their freedom tend to want to exercise it.

For a solution to dealing with madmen, institutionalization of madmen works.  Someone who is a danger to themselves and others, no matter the origin of their madness, needs treatment and until such time as that treatment is complete, should be kept out of society until it’s complete.  Without getting too deep into health care, it’s been successfully done before, and with lessons learned from some failures in the past, could be done better in the future.

When dealing with madmen, as a society we used to send them to institutions until they were treated and could be released back into society.  The rest of the citizenry decided that the best way to deal with them was to put them somewhere they could hurt no one and get help, and transition them back to society as best was available with help from their families and organizations that wanted to help them.  Now we drug them up and set them loose.

The option, or in some cases necessity of institutionalization lets mental health professionals actually work to help people who need it.  Those who could benefit from it and recover need it, and those who are a danger to themselves or others also need the controlled environment.  It also allows mental health professionals to monitor and supervise patient progress, something that just prescribing powerful antipsychotics and sending someone back into the world doesn’t allow for.

Consider the late John Noveske’s last Facebook post concerning drugged-up lunatics and society (the link source is trying to turn coincidence into something – I’m only interested in Noveske’s observations on unsupervised mental illness drug treatment for this post):

Eric Harris age 17 (first on Zoloft then Luvox) and Dylan Klebold aged 18 (Columbine school shooting in Littleton, Colorado), killed 12 students and 1 teacher, and wounded 23 others, before killing themselves. Klebold’s medical records have never been made available to the public.

Jeff Weise, age 16, had been prescribed 60 mg/day of Prozac (three times the average starting dose for adults!) when he shot his grandfather, his grandfather’s girlfriend and many fellow students at Red Lake, Minnesota. He then shot himself. 10 dead, 12 wounded.

Cory Baadsgaard, age 16, Wahluke (Washington state) High School, was on Paxil (which caused him to have hallucinations) when he took a rifle to his high school and held 23 classmates hostage. He has no memory of the event.

Chris Fetters, age 13, killed his favorite aunt while taking Prozac.

Christopher Pittman, age 12, murdered both his grandparents while taking Zoloft.

Mathew Miller, age 13, hung himself in his bedroom closet after taking Zoloft for 6 days.

Kip Kinkel, age 15, (on Prozac and Ritalin) shot his parents while they slept then went to school and opened fire killing 2 classmates and injuring 22 shortly after beginning Prozac treatment.

Luke Woodham, age 16 (Prozac) killed his mother and then killed two students, wounding six others.

A boy in Pocatello, ID (Zoloft) in 1998 had a Zoloft-induced seizure that caused an armed stand off at his school.

Michael Carneal (Ritalin), age 14, opened fire on students at a high school prayer meeting in West Paducah, Kentucky. Three teenagers were killed, five others were wounded..

A young man in Huntsville, Alabama (Ritalin) went psychotic chopping up his parents with an ax and also killing one sibling and almost murdering another.

Andrew Golden, age 11, (Ritalin) and Mitchell Johnson, aged 14, (Ritalin) shot 15 people, killing four students, one teacher, and wounding 10 others.

TJ Solomon, age 15, (Ritalin) high school student in Conyers, Georgia opened fire on and wounded six of his class mates.

Rod Mathews, age 14, (Ritalin) beat a classmate to death with a bat.

James Wilson, age 19, (various psychiatric drugs) from Breenwood, South Carolina, took a .22 caliber revolver into an elementary school killing two young girls, and wounding seven other children and two teachers.

Elizabeth Bush, age 13, (Paxil) was responsible for a school shooting in Pennsylvania

Jason Hoffman (Effexor and Celexa) – school shooting in El Cajon, California

Jarred Viktor, age 15, (Paxil), after five days on Paxil he stabbed his grandmother 61 times.

Chris Shanahan, age 15 (Paxil) in Rigby, ID who out of the blue killed a woman.

Jeff Franklin (Prozac and Ritalin), Huntsville, AL, killed his parents as they came home from work using a sledge hammer, hatchet, butcher knife and mechanic’s file, then attacked his younger brothers and sister.

Neal Furrow (Prozac) in LA Jewish school shooting reported to have been court-ordered to be on Prozac along with several other medications.

Kevin Rider, age 14, was withdrawing from Prozac when he died from a gunshot wound to his head. Initially it was ruled a suicide, but two years later, the investigation into his death was opened as a possible homicide. The prime suspect, also age 14, had been taking Zoloft and other SSRI antidepressants.

Alex Kim, age 13, hung himself shortly after his Lexapro prescription had been doubled.

Diane Routhier was prescribed Welbutrin for gallstone problems. Six days later, after suffering many adverse effects of the drug, she shot herself.

Billy Willkomm, an accomplished wrestler and a University of Florida student, was prescribed Prozac at the age of 17. His family found him dead of suicide – hanging from a tall ladder at the family’s Gulf Shore Boulevard home in July 2002.

Kara Jaye Anne Fuller-Otter, age 12, was on Paxil when she hung herself from a hook in her closet. Kara’s parents said “…. the damn doctor wouldn’t take her off it and I asked him to when we went in on the second visit. I told him I thought she was having some sort of reaction to Paxil…”)

Gareth Christian, Vancouver, age 18, was on Paxil when he committed suicide in 2002,
(Gareth’s father could not accept his son’s death and killed himself.)

Julie Woodward, age 17, was on Zoloft when she hung herself in her family’s detached garage.

Matthew Miller was 13 when he saw a psychiatrist because he was having difficulty at school. The psychiatrist gave him samples of Zoloft. Seven days later his mother found him dead, hanging by a belt from a laundry hook in his closet.

Kurt Danysh, age 18, and on Prozac, killed his father with a shotgun. He is now behind prison bars, and writes letters, trying to warn the world that SSRI drugs can kill.

Woody ____, age 37, committed suicide while in his 5th week of taking Zoloft. Shortly before his death his physician suggested doubling the dose of the drug. He had seen his physician only for insomnia. He had never been depressed, nor did he have any history of any mental illness symptoms.

A boy from Houston, age 10, shot and killed his father after his Prozac dosage was increased.

Hammad Memon, age 15, shot and killed a fellow middle school student. He had been diagnosed with ADHD and depression and was taking Zoloft and “other drugs for the conditions.”

Matti Saari, a 22-year-old culinary student, shot and killed 9 students and a teacher, and wounded another student, before killing himself. Saari was taking an SSRI and a benzodiazapine.

Steven Kazmierczak, age 27, shot and killed five people and wounded 21 others before killing himself in a Northern Illinois University auditorium. According to his girlfriend, he had recently been taking Prozac, Xanax and Ambien. Toxicology results showed that he still had trace amounts of Xanax in his system.

Finnish gunman Pekka-Eric Auvinen, age 18, had been taking antidepressants before he killed eight people and wounded a dozen more at Jokela High School – then he committed suicide.
Asa Coon from Cleveland, age 14, shot and wounded four before taking his own life. Court records show Coon was on Trazodone.

Jon Romano, age 16, on medication for depression, fired a shotgun at a teacher in his New York high school.

Missing from list… 3 of 4 known to have taken these same meds….

What drugs was Jared Lee Loughner on, age 21…… killed 6 people and injuring 14 others in Tuscon, Az

What drugs was James Eagan Holmes on, age 24….. killed 12 people and injuring 59 others in Aurora Colorado

What drugs was Jacob Tyler Roberts on, age 22, killed 2 injured 1, Clackamas Or

What drugs was Adam Peter Lanza on, age 20, Killed 26 and wounded 2 in Newtown Ct

Roberts is the only one that I haven’t heard about being on drugs of some kind.

Dr. Benjamin Carson’s National Prayer Breakfast Speech

That guy sitting two seats to the left sure doesn’t like having someone much smarter than he is telling him he’s wrong.

Political Speechwriter Begs For Tyranny

From the New York Times – Please Take Away My Right to a Gun:

My depression appeared for the first time in the late ’90s, right before I began writing for politicians. It comes and goes like fog. Medicine can help. I have my tricks to manage and get through it. Sometimes it sticks around for a day or a week, and sometimes it stays away for a couple of years. But it never leads me to sleep all day, cry and wear sweat pants like the people in the commercials. You’d look at me and never know that sometimes my fight against the urge to die is so tough the only way I get through it is second by second; I live by the second hand.

…

But since most people like me are more likely to harm ourselves than to turn into mass-murdering monsters, our leaders should do more to keep us safe from ourselves.

Please take away my Second Amendment right. Do more to help us protect ourselves because what’s most likely to wake me in the early hours isn’t a man’s body slamming at my door but depression, that raven, tapping, rapping, banging for relief.

I have a better chance of surviving if I never have the option of being able to pull the trigger.

Sorry, Wendy, but your poor life choices don’t dictate that my sister has to be disarmed and fistfight your rapist.

Wendy starts off her story by saying that she lived in DC, had a break-in, and survived because the police actually responded in time.  That she didn’t end up like Carolyn Warren means she thinks that everyone should end up like Carolyn Warren:

Believing the police might be in the house, Warren and Taliaferro called down to Douglas, thereby alerting Kent to their presence. Kent and Morse then forced all three women, at knifepoint, to accompany them to Kent’s apartment. For the next fourteen hours the women were held captive, raped, robbed, beaten, forced to commit sexual acts upon each other, and made to submit to the sexual demands of Kent and Morse.

But because Wendy has depression, she thinks Warren and Taliaferro and Douglas should all be violated at knifepoint; and she thinks that the public should be disarmed because she’s incompetent.

Please take away my Second Amendment right. Do more to help us protect ourselves

The very first comment at the story nails it:

ColCrockett New York City

Well this piece fits right in with the whole cultural movement that involves eliminating all individual responsibility. “I don’t want to have to make my own decisions so the government has to.” Take responsibility for your own actions. Though you may have depression which can lead to suicidal thoughts, don’t buy the firearm. It’s as simple as that. All of our current issues arise from the fact that no one is willing to take responsibility for their own actions. It’s ideology like that expressed in this op-ed that harms our nation.

And the very second comment gives the emotional, foolish response of someone who isn’t fit to run their own affairs – so they decide that because they’re incompetent, they should run everyone elses.

From what do I need protection?

Myself.

It upsets me deeply that the NRA is fighting so hard to protect my right to be armed. They are more dangerous to me (and others) than I could possibly be to myself. More than a constitutional right to bear arms we need a constitutional right to live safely.

Then you should be locked away.  The ACLU fought to keep you out of an institution.  You should be angry at them.  The NRA is keeping your government from turning into a tyranny that does decide it’s best for you.

I am beginning to understand how intense the seething contempt Sam Adams must have been feeling about these groveling sheep when he said:

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace.  We ask not your counsels or your arms.  Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you.  May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.

As to the point of suicide, Japan has virtually no access to guns, yet Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world.  Guns aren’t the problem.

I empathize with and support anyone who says “I don’t think I personally should own one due to my depression.”  I hope you get treatment, have a strong support system, and do better for yourself.  Clinical therapists usually have to do several hundred if not thousands of hours of free services during their licensing process, so there’s always free therapy around.  There are people who want to take care of you, because your life is valuable.  Dr. Jenn lists a bunch of places to go for help right here.  If you need it, it’s there.  There’s no lack of empathy or love in the world.

Now, if you demand that the rights of 300 million other Americans be destroyed, ultimately enabling tyranny and oppression that will get progressively worse as years roll by, and all because you can’t manage your life, then I have nothing pleasant to say to you.  You are denigrating others and demanding they be trampled by the state – a state composed of people just as flawed as you or anyone else – because you can’t handle your own life.  Your own failings turn into a demand that the state take care of you, lord over you, and drive your life.  You beg for tyranny.  If you are in such a miserable condition that you want a faceless, powerful bureaucrat to rule over you… well… then pick up that can…

Doctors as Agents of the Federal Government

From The Weekly Standard:

Official photographic portrait of US President Barack Obama (born 4 August 1961; assumed office 20 January 2009) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

According to a background briefer provided by the White House, President Barack Obama is asking doctors to help deal with guns. Here’s the relevant passage:

PRESERVE THE RIGHTS OF HEALTH CARE PROVIDERS TO PROTECT THEIR PATIENTS AND COMMUNITIES FROM GUN VIOLENCE: We should never ask doctors and other health care providers to turn a blind eye to the risks posed by guns in the wrong hands.

Clarify that no federal law prevents health care providers from warning law enforcement authorities about threats of violence: Doctors and other mental health professionals play an important role in protecting the safety of their patients and the broader community by reporting direct and credible threats of violence to the authorities. But there is public confusion about whether federal law prohibits such reports about threats of violence. The Department of Health and Human Services is issuing a letter to health care providers clarifying that no federal law prohibits these reports in any way.

Protect the rights of health care providers to talk to their patients about gun safety: Doctors and other health care providers also need to be able to ask about firearms in their patients’ homes and safe storage of those firearms, especially if their patients show signs of certain mental illnesses or if they have a young child or mentally ill family member at home. Some have incorrectly claimed that language in the Affordable Care Act prohibits doctors from asking their patients about guns and gun safety. Medical groups also continue to fight against state laws attempting to ban doctors from asking these questions. The Administration will issue guidance clarifying that the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit or otherwise regulate communication between doctors and patients, including about firearms.

I love how our president is so concerned about the “rights” of doctors. He is so concerned about those rights that he is ready and willing to enable doctors to gather information on individuals, that some how will not violate patient privacy laws, that sure looks like it infringes on every citizens right to bear arms. How is a doctor going to know if a family owns weapons? Is it any of that doctor’s business? I know if my doctor ask me about guns and etc. I will walk straight out of his office and find myself another doctor. Don’t get me wrong if someone’s life is in danger, a doctor does need to get involved, what the president is suggesting though is outright spying on citizens and reporting information directly to the federal government.

 

Related articles

• Obama to doctors: you’re now responsible for gun safety
• READ: Obama’s plan to reduce gun violence
• We Wanted Gun Control, But All We Got Was a Database of Everyone Who Has Ever Seen a Shrink

Obamacare Summed Up In One Sentence

A William Faulkner sentence, but one sentence nonetheless.

Leftist Groupthink: The Liberal Legal Bubble

Via Reason Magazine, The Liberal Legal Bubble:

How could members of the Supreme Court possibly seriously consider the argument that ObamaCare’s individual mandate to purchase health insurance is unprecedented and unconstitutional? The quality of the arguments? The presence of a genuine legal debate? No, if you ask the law’s liberal cheerleaders, there can only be one answer: pure partisan politics.  …

After this week’s arguments concluded, Jeffrey Toobin, a legal analyst for CNN and The New Yorker who had predicted that the law would easily secure Supreme Court approval, declared that “the last three days were a disaster for the Obama administration.” Some were downright distraught: Lithwick warned that Supreme Court’s skepticism that Congress might not be able to compel individuals to purchase a private product constituted a “dark vision of freedom.” An even bigger surprise was that Solicitor General Donal Verrilli, who argued the case in front of the Supreme Court, seemed unprepared for the tough questioning from the justices.

What can explain liberals’ widespread failure to anticipate the Court’s wariness of the mandate? Research conducted by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggests one possible answer: Liberals just aren’t as good as conservatives and libertarians at understanding how their opponents think. Haidt helped conduct research that asked respondents to fill out questionnaires about political narratives—first responding based on their own beliefs, but then responding as if trying to mimic the beliefs of their political opponents. “The results,” he writes in the May issue of Reason, “were clear and consistent.” Moderates and conservatives were the most able to think like their liberal political opponents. “Liberals,” he reports, “were the least accurate, especially those who describe themselves as ‘very liberal.’”

Liberals, on the other hand, have a different theory. The Court is just a bunch of partisan hacks who’ve bought into the most extreme ideas of the Republican base. Lithwick has argued that despite the law’s self-evident constitutionality, the decision has “everything to do with optics, politics, and public opinion.” Harvard law professor and former Solicitor General Charles Fried, who signed an amicus brief arguing in favor of the law, huffed that “the whole thing is just a canard that’s been invented by the tea party and [anti-mandate legal architect] Randy Barnetts of the world, and I was astonished to hear it coming out of the mouths of the people on that bench.”

The liberal position on the Court seems to be that as long as it accepts their arguments, it’s an independent legal arbiter. But whenever it doesn’t, it’s a partisan political enforcer. The New Republic‘s Jonathan Cohn makes this explicit, arguing that it isn’t just the health law that’s on trial, but “the legitimacy of the Supreme Court.”

Much more interesting as I’m reading Bastiat’s The Law right now.

What, then, is law? It is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.

Each of us has a natural right — from God — to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties? If every person has the right to defend even by force — his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the right to organize and support a common force to protect these rights constantly. Thus the principle of collective right — its reason for existing, its lawfulness — is based on individual right. And the common force that protects this collective right cannot logically have any other purpose or any other mission than that for which it acts as a substitute. Thus, since an individual cannot lawfully use force against the person, liberty, or property of another individual, then the common force — for the same reason — cannot lawfully be used to destroy the person, liberty, or property of individuals or groups.

Such a perversion of force would be, in both cases, contrary to our premise. Force has been given to us to defend our own individual rights. Who will dare to say that force has been given to us to destroy the equal rights of our brothers? Since no individual acting separately can lawfully use force to destroy the rights of others, does it not logically follow that the same principle also applies to the common force that is nothing more than the organized combination of the individual forces?

If this is true, then nothing can be more evident than this: The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all.

So how does the law decide to take from one to give to another?  Oh, that’s right, about a dozen segments of Bastiat deal with “plunder” – because just law doesn’t take from one to give to another.

It’s fascinating that classical liberalism and modern liberals are virtually polar opposites.