(Dis)Arming the madman: sane supremacy and the Second Amendment

Abstract

The protection of American mental health consumers’ Second Amendment rights is the ‘mad’ liberation issue of the twenty-first century. Federal laws currently dispossess the differently minded of their Second Amendment access and rights to bear firearms. In response to a spate of school shootings, ‘Red flag laws’ are used in an effort to circumvent mad citizens’ rights to self-preservation and defence. In this article I am proposing neither a political-left nor right side of the aisle position, but rather a bipartisan, anti-sanist stance, where I call for an end to America’s contemporary era of sane supremacy that strips the mad citizenry of their rights to own firearms.

Keywords:

• Gun violence
• Mad Studies
• sane supremacy
• Second Amendment
• Donald Trump

Introduction

The notion of ‘saneness’, or one’s lack thereof, is rarely, if ever at all, figured into Mad Studies scripts. Sanity in this sense is being of sound mind, and saneness then implies the politicization of one’s sanity. Since Donald J. Trump assumed the presidential mantle, I have borne witness to America’s sane supremacy problem, and have discussed this elsewhere in Disability & Society (Procknow 2017). America’s regressive far-left has sown the seeds of sane supremacy through its weaponization of psychiatry in an attempt to tarnish President Trump, and to remove him from office for not meeting their ‘proto-presidential’ sane standard (Procknow 2017). Sane supremacy exists thanks to political, academic, social, and mainstream media colluding to shore up saneness as normative, leaving mentally ‘Othered’ citizens who are situated outside the State’s prescribed ‘sane’ norms as non-normative. In this way, sane supremacy mirrors structural violence. Structural violence bestows mad citizens lowly access to legal standing, resources, and political power (Farmer et al. 2006). This article opines that when the mad body populace is denied their Second Amendment right under federal firearms laws, due to some diagnosable mental disorder, then this is evidence that America’s civil society is deeply invested in sane supremacy and arrays against the differently minded.

To state my subject positionality outright, I am a psychiatric consumer: twice diagnosed ‘schizophrenic’; and (re)inscribed a third time as ‘schizoaffective’. I once occupied the interstices between carcerality and madness, having served a sentence in Penetanguishene, Ontario’s medium-maximum (‘superjail’) Central North Correctional Centre, for crimes committed during a very public mental health crisis. At the time of my incarceration, it was Canada’s only privately managed correctional facility. However, the fact that a US-based company (Management and Training Corporation) from Centerville, Utah operated the facility cemented my carceral experience with the American one. Despite being Canadian, I feel I am apt to comment since I dream of becoming a dual citizen of the United States and Canada, and migrating my ‘Madvocacy’ southbound.

United States Code Title 18 Section 922(g) and Second Amendment right

The salience of the Second Amendment is in how it safeguards Americans’ inalienable right to self-defence. This constitutional right to bear arms is uniquely an American one and is not something which is universally acknowledged or supported for any citizen. Yet sane supremacist bureaucrats divest Americans who have been adjudicated as ‘mental defective’, or who have been ‘committed to a mental institution’, of their constitutional right to bear arms through United States Code (USC) Title 18 Section 922(g)(3–4). Americans who are deemed through a court of law, or other lawful authority, as lacking mens rea, who are a danger to themselves or others, or who lack the mental wherewithal to manage their own affairs are barred from gun ownership. Any citizen who is voluntarily admitted, or has a history of help-seeking, or is interned merely for observational purposes remains unaffected. Still, Presidents Obama and Trump have classified all persons with diverging neurotypes as ‘deviant’ and dangerous. We have seen this in the matter-of-fact sane supremacist statements by President Obama that ‘We got to make sure [the mentally disturbed] don’t get weapons’ (Wilson, 2016, 670) and President Trump: ‘we don’t want … people that are mentally ill to be having any form of weaponry’(Coaston, 2018, para. 5). Neither president nor the sanestream media distinguishes less serious, neurotic disorders in a nuanced way from the intractability of visible ones.

In this sane supremacist era, much of the mad, non-violent, body politic that have been committed against their will are still without access to weaponry, and are unable to insulate themselves against ongoing assault and psychic harm. This law whiffs of early eugenicist policies and, to me, resembles a crime against humanity; that is, disarming an identifiable group of the means to protect themselves when others around them are armed. Regardless of this fact, fewer Americans with a history of violence are prohibited from owning firearms than patients who are discerned as suffering from some debilitating psychiatric illness and thought to (neuro)deviate from America’s sane-centric template (Johnson 2018). It is my opinion that the only precondition met for restricting gun access is when a court determines a ‘patient’ to be pathologically insane in a criminal case, or is found incompetent to stand trial pursuant to USC Title 10 Section 850a. For instance, nonsensically depriving, say, ‘schizophrenics’ of their right to self-defence when they are ‘fourteen times more likely to be a victim of a violent crime than they are to be arrested for one’ (Chmielewski 2013, 4), is an act of sane supremacy. Yet bipartisan measures are being tabled to increase mental health screening, thus ensnaring more of the mad citizenry not showing any discernible signs of violence in its net. This is sane supremacy. Since the 2007 Virginia Tech Shooting, the default motive both sides of the aisle ascribed to the shooter is that he suffered some mental malady. As a consequence of this, gun control discussions have centred on: how do we prevent the psychically imbalanced from accessing firearms? This focus then stops the discussion moving on more productively to ‘how do we prevent gun violence and gun-related massacres?’

Red flag laws and American civil, sane sanctuaries

Red flag laws, or gun-violence restraining orders, are being swept up piecemeal by most states. These ‘laws’ allow for anyone who may be suspicious of family members, neighbours, co-workers, or employees to petition a court to take firearms away from those whom they perceive as dangerous. The thrust of these ‘restraining orders’ is to surveil the sane status quo and obviate mad criminality before its commission. This ‘surveillance’ allows states to licence psychiatry to intervene upon any American seeming distressed or evincing any sorts of slippages consonant with psychotic breaks from the sane-centrist mean. Their ‘break’ itself is not criminal or violent, but normates nevertheless correlate madness through the characterial trope(s) of the mad(wo)man as irrational, and their criminality as symptomatic of irrationality. Red flag laws punish the mentally ill for standing outside of (or incarcerated within) sound societies and threatening the inviolability of America’s civil, ordered, and sound-minded spatialities. Sane supremacy is layered into these civil structures. Civility binds sane-centric societies together. The fear of introducing ‘chaos’ and ‘disorder’ into its midst (interior) threatens to unglue the ‘ordered’ and ‘stable’ adhesive that binds civil society together, and tosses sane normativity up into a disorderly swirl. Americans are surveilled into civility, and any demonstrable disjuncture from being seen as ‘civil’ is a departure from sane civility. Gun-violence restraining orders get more people of questionable sanity circulating through the courts to subject their ‘disorderliness’ under USC Title 18 Section 922(g) and to the psychiatric gaze. This labels more sensible Americans as ‘mentally defective’, who are actually otherwise sane, and disarms more Americans shorn of sanity thought to be a menace to the rigid regimes of healthy-minded spaces. These laws police people appearing to have a debilitated and mad mind who articulate their want (or need) for a firearm. Their want (or need), in turn, is read by normates as them arguably wanting to plot a disruption to sane, civil society. Red flag laws branch into the pathologization of the everyday, making anyone mentally odd and different the ‘everymaniac’. As the list of conditions in the Diagnostic Statistics Manual expands, so will the number of mad citizens fed into the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. In my opinion, this positions mad(wo)men as the aggressed. Whether sane folk are the victim/victimizer needs further unpacking.

Inverting victim dynamics – the ‘sane’ threaten the ‘mentally ill’

Sanestream narratives present psychiatric illness as central to most school shooters’ motives. If no motive is apparent other than the shooter is motivated to murder because of some unfettered ‘brainsickness’, then it is sensical to rethink how healthy, stable minds that typify sane normality, and, in some ways, ostracize unhealthy, unstable minds, occupy the subject position of ‘aggressor’. We need to radically rethink how we posit victim/victimizer coordinates – that is, inverting victim dynamics – and no longer suppose that the ‘mentally ill’ threaten ‘sane normality’, but rather that sane normality threatens the mentally ill. We should favour alignment with the repressed, mentally ill citizen, and shed our mental models that the sanestream has duped too many into believing that we, the ‘mentally ill’, are somehow destined to be the violent, criminally insane types. The more that society tells us we are crazy and violent, the crazier and more violent we could become. Red flag laws depersonalize us and force us to remove our flesh mask(s), securing in its place a deceptive one where we emulate sane hegemonic norms to escape sane supremacist violence and our Second Amendment rights from being further stripped. Red flag laws are a coordinated assault against mad communities – an assault we have not witnessed since the mass institutionalization of the early 1900s. In view of this, we need the means to defend ourselves against the tangible, surging threat of sane supremacy that is bent on our de-citizenship and disarmament. We need to fight for our re-humanization and victim/vulnerable status where we are no longer scorned for our mental difference and disarmed en masse. Broad brushing (or ‘essentializing’) all ‘mad’ communities as one and the same is an act of sane supremacy. The same way in which we scream #notallmuslims when a radical Islamic extremist mows down dozens in a French suburb, if the criminality and madness of one school shooter assails a sane, civil society then the consumer/survivor/ex-patient community comes under fire. The perverted actions of one ‘madman’ are used to restrict thousands of non-violent Americans with diagnosable mental disorders from owning firearms. Blaming all ‘persons with mental disorders for gun crimes overlooks the threats posed to society by a much larger population – the sane’ (Metzl and MacLeish 2015, 242).

When we invert the victim formula, the ‘moral blame attached to individual violent actions’ (Harper 2005, 474) can be removed from those with mental illnesses, and their resultant violence is ‘accounted for by [their] frustration or anger at [their] lack of social power’ (2005, 472). At what point during this whole macabre drama would it be okay to suggest to readers to reorient their thinking towards justified violence against the sane body politic as a rational response to years of negative stereotyping and sane supremacist policy-building? It seems almost inescapable to resist in sane hegemonic cultures that sneer at us ‘schizophrenics’, and which facilitate our exodus from society, capitalism, and the economy. Will it ever be okay for our ‘mad’ motives to digress into seeking retribution through violent reprisal? We no longer need to occupy the detested side of the dichotomy, for this dichotomy becomes moot when we inverse it. We no longer transgress from the mean. Instead, the ‘normals’ who violate our mad communities become ‘threatening’ to us. My proposition is not an incitement of violence, but rather an attempt to place Disability & Society’s readers temporarily into our subject positionality, to see the absurdity of red flag laws as we see them, and to invert this dyadic formula. Reversing the relationship of who is ‘victim’ or/and ‘aggressor’ actually dissolves the structural dyad which separates good from evil itself.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.