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" Welcome back to our weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue which is, of course, what Bartok would have come up with, had he written his First Belt-Sander Quintet. Nobody Knows Anything. William Goldman once wrote this about Hollywood, and he was right, of course. But, as it turns out, the pros on The Sunday Shows \u2014 which, as Susan Rice discovered, are so damned important that saying something on them that turns out to be inaccurate can keep you out of a president&amp;#039;s cabinet, especially if you are an accomplished black woman who once wounded John McCain&amp;#039;s fee-fee \u2014 are afflicted with the same problem. Confronted with an event like last Friday&amp;#039;s massacre at an elementary school in Connecticut, none of these people who ordinarily have the solutions to all the political world&amp;#039;s knottiest problems right there at their fingertips have any idea what&amp;#039;s going on around them. Forelocks are tugged, Hands are wrung. Let&amp;#039;s talk about everything, even including guns, but let&amp;#039;s be sure we point out that nothing can be completely effective, especially whatever we do, if anything, about guns. Brows are furrowed but, ultimately, shit happens and what a mystery is man, and are you gonna eat that last doughnut? Take, for example, David Brooks of The New York Times. (Henny Youngman reference optional at extra cost.) Brooks appeared on Disco Dave&amp;#039;s Disco Dance Party on Sunday. Ordinarily, Brooks is full of advice for those people who are wandering through their lives in a fashion he finds contrary to his principles for moral living. He is very free to tell people to stop fking on their sofas without his permission, but he is ambivalent about the availability of high-capacity clips to deranged human beings. They feel they&amp;#039;re not being recognized by the world at large and they decide they&amp;#039;re going to do something to make the world recognize them. And so they go out and do these terrible things. And at the moment they&amp;#039;re doing them, this is the happiest moment of their life. They feel the world is uncontrolled and then suddenly they are in their \u2014 they are in control. And they are the hero in their own life story. And so we should acknowledge A, they are extremely determined to do these things. And that it&amp;#039;s \u2014 they are essentially \u2014 they spend the months before lost in a black hole of their own festering. Or, they spend months sharpening their mad shooting skillz. What is there to be done, anyway? Can \u2014 can I just say one thing about the \u2014 the debate we need to have? This has become \u2014 one of the problems for this debate is it&amp;#039;s become a values war. It&amp;#039;s perceived as urban versus rural...And frankly, it&amp;#039;s perceived as an attack on the lifestyle of rural people by urban people. And I admire Mayor Bloomberg enormously \u2014 there&amp;#039;s probably no politician I agree with more but it&amp;#039;s counterproductive to have him as the spokesperson for the gun law movement. There has to be more respect and more people frankly from rural and Red America who are \u2014 who are participants in this. Forgive me, but this is not a matter of &amp;quot;perception.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s a matter of concrete reality. In fact, it happens to be a matter of concrete reality right there in Newtown, Connecticut, as we learned today. There are people who simply are irreconcilable on this issue, and who spend their lives in the &amp;quot;black hole of their minds&amp;quot; created by Fox News and the relentless paranoid propaganda of the NRA. (This self-contained universe was not discussed at all.) It is time for them to stop determining national gun policy. It&amp;#039;s time to stop being afraid of &amp;quot;perception.&amp;quot; It is too easy for people to gain access to weaponry that belongs nowhere except on a battlefield. Brooks&amp;#039;s bafflement continued unabated as the program went on. Yeah. Well, I had thought video games have played a role, too, but this has been studied. There have been hundreds, unfortunately, of these shooters over the decades and very few of them had any contact with violent video games and generally tend to be older, it tends to be not part of who they were, it tends to not have driven them. So I don&amp;#039;t think this is a sociological problem primarily. I think this is a psychological problem. And there are millions of moms and dads in the country now who are dealing with mental health issues in their own families... MR. RIDGE: Right. MR. BENNETT: Right. MR. BROOKS: ...and they don&amp;#039;t know \u2014 there&amp;#039;s not \u2014 say you&amp;#039;re the mom of this kid, you don&amp;#039;t know immediately where to go. There are places you can go which are the police or an institution. But that&amp;#039;s like stepping off a very steep chasm. Where do you easily go for help? I think that&amp;#039;s the gap. Amazingly, the Dancin&amp;#039; Master stepped in to fill in the &amp;quot;gap&amp;quot; that so mystified his expert panelist. The National Alliance on Mental Illness put out a report in November of last year that said in part, &amp;quot;States have cut more than 1.6 billion dollars in general funds from their state mental health agency budgets for mental health services since fiscal year &amp;#039;09, a period during which demand for such services increased significantly.These cuts translate into loss of vital services such as housing, Assertive Community Treatment, access to psychiatric medication and crisis services. You&amp;#039;re kidding. Guns actually kill people and proper mental-health care actually costs money? Unpossible! Over on ABC, on This Week With The Clinton Guy Shocked By Blowjobs, the experts were just as far at sea. George Effing Will, so sure was he once that global warming was a big hoax, was all fluttery about whither goest the nation. Yes. And our response is always to think that there&amp;#039;s some defect in the social system or some prompting in the social atmosphere that causes this and, therefore, we assume, we can tailor a law to correct the defect. The problem is, the law can do three things. It can deter with severe punishments. Of course, we already have lots of deterrents against murder. They can impede the access to public spaces or to weapons. Or, third, the law can monitor and, in some cases, confine people who meet the profile of these people. The problem with this is, these people are determined, psychotic, and often suicidal. It&amp;#039;s very difficult to deter someone like that or impede. And then when you come to the question of monitoring or confining, you look at the profile. These are often men, young men, young, unmarried men, young men who are socially awkward, and sometimes young, unmarried, socially awkward men who have been diagnosed or even prescribed some kind of psychotropic medicine. The civil liberties and privacy issues involved in trying to monitor people in this not insignificant cohort who fit that profile are insuperable. Well, hell, then, let&amp;#039;s all get a beer. Nonetheless, you could see that the perfectly legitimate mental-health aspect of this case is going nonetheless be used merely as the main dodge \u2014 even more than video games and the evil inherent in the heart of sinful man \u2014 for the people who don&amp;#039;t want to discuss this country&amp;#039;s idiotic fetish for deadly firearms. Here, for one, came Congressman Jason Chaffetz from Utah, responding to his colleague, Donna Edwards, who suggested that maybe we all ought to consider whether we went to live in the country where the woman next door may be arming herself like an infantry platoon. (Edwards, it should be noted, doggedly kept coming back to talk about guns. Not that it helped at all.) Well, look, I&amp;#039;m a conceal carry permit-holder. I own a Glock 23. I&amp;#039;ve got a shotgun. I&amp;#039;m not the person you need to worry about. And there are millions of Americans who deal with this properly. It&amp;#039;s our Second Amendment right to do so. But we have to look at the mental health access that these people have...No, there are prohibitions on lots of \u2014 gun rules are \u2014 are very stringent. There&amp;#039;s a lot of conjecture out there that \u2014 that I don&amp;#039;t think necessarily would solve this particular problem. And I want to look at anything that we think will solve all the problems, but we have to, I think, look at the mental health aspect. Chaffetz, of course, has all the public-health cred of the average botulism bacillus, but, if he can talk about improving access to mental-health care, the federal funding for which he never would vote for in a million years, then he won&amp;#039;t have to talk about gun laws that he wouldn&amp;#039;t vote for, either. Scoreboard! Meanwhile, Joe Klein, who is still waiting for Do The Right Thing to touch off nationwide race riots, was willing to chip in the video game distraction. We can \u2014 we can think \u2014 the mental health piece is obviously important. I think there&amp;#039;s a bright line on gun control, as well. But there&amp;#039;s a third piece, and that is the celebration of violence. We not only have a Second Amendment in the country. We also have a First Amendment that protects, you know, Sylvester Stallone&amp;#039;s right to fire thousands of bullets in any given movie. But I think that the \u2014 you know, that what we need to do in this society is treat people who create violent movies and violent video games with the same degree of respect that we accord pornographers. They need to be shunned. Pornographers are shunned? Really? Where? Joe&amp;#039;s house? He can be forgiven, however, because he simply was not himself yesterday. STEPHANOPOULOS: And on that point, Joe Klein, people should be reminded, parents should be reminded that the overwhelming majority of schools in this country are safe. KLEIN: That&amp;#039;s right, although, you know, I had this creepy feeling walking into this school this morning that I wasn&amp;#039;t in a place of safety in this town. STEPHANOPOULOS: Even though you know rationally that&amp;#039;s not true. KLEIN: Even -- it was a completely irrational thought, but I&amp;#039;m sure \u2014 and when I \u2014 and when I say that, I think about all the children who are going to be walking into schools tomorrow. Hang in there, Joe, you brave soul, you. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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