Brunswick Beacon, 06.30.22
What should we think when Congressmen Ted Budd and David Rouzer blame mass shootings on “mental health issues” after voting to give guns back to “a person who has been adjudicated as a mental defective?”
In March 2021, a shooter in an armored vest used a semi-automatic AR-15 with a 30-round magazine to kill 10 people in a Colorado supermarket. One of them was the proverbial “good guy with a gun”, 11-year police veteran Eric Talley, who engaged the shooter with his service revolver but was outgunned by the assault weapon the perpetrator bought just six days before. The killer was adjudicated “mentally incompetent to stand trial.”
Budd and Rouzer have stubbornly voted against expanded background checks, including H.R.8, the Bipartisan Background Check Act, in 2019 and again in 2021. Rouzer claimed it would be “more productive to address the root causes” of gun violence, noting that the Colorado perpetrator was “mentally disturbed.”
Last month, after two 18-year-olds with AR-15’s shot 50 people in Buffalo, NY and Uvalde, Texas, killing 31, Rouzer once again blamed “troubled” individuals “filled with evil.”
Budd, a gun-shop owner and senate candidate, agrees, blaming mass gun murders on the “mentally disturbed.”
So, why on Earth did Budd and Rouzer make it “easier” for them to get guns? After the Sandy Hook Elementary school massacre of 20 children and 6 adults, President Obama enacted a regulation that blocked people with severe mental health problems from buying firearms. Ten days after Trump became president, Rouzer co-sponsored H.J.Res.40, nullifying the regulation, thus allowing “mentally incapable” people to freely purchase guns. Budd voted for it, too. It was one of the first bills signed by Trump.
So, the next time Budd or Rouzer blame mass killings on the “mentally disturbed” ask yourself this: “Who’s more disturbed, the mentally ill or the politicians who gave them back their guns?”
Mahlon “Lon” Anderson Leland