Okay so apparently one of the things that the whole March For Lives things wants to do is let cops have access to mental health records right away no questions asked and like uh no fuck off fuck you and fuck anyone that supports that
nothing could possibly go wrong
is the march for life the thing for ‘ending gun violence(except the state yknow)’?
all crazies must take their pills, go to therapy, and drink water, sweaty. we care™ about your well being.
the database is there for YOUR protection
More school cops too! Gee, these kids are nailing it on all fronts.
This is ridiclous because one of the biggest demographics harmed by police brutality are disabled people, many times the police are fully aware of their mental or neurological disability and continue to abuse them anyway because they can! Like holy shit this is a terrible idea
It’s moments like this that I’m reminded that these are children who lack nuance who are being guided by adults who also lack nuance and/or purposefully want to shoehorn dangerous shit like this into the “progress” being made.
This narrative that the mentally ill are violent and dangerous is pervasive. It invades ideology to the point that people don’t even realise the assumption is there. That’s what’s happening here. These are kids. They are absolutely right that change needs to happen, but they have not learnt nuance when it comes to deconstructing the assumptions underlying their theoretical premise. So we get this.
They are of course right that we need new gun laws, but frankly this attitude scares the shit out of me. Because they do not see the danger this poses to the visibly mentally ill. It stigmatises us further and puts us in massive amounts of danger. Doing everything we can to stop the school shootings is good, but this is not going to help.
Because the worst people I’ve ever met for nuance is the police force. Always. If this legislation is passed, forced hospitalization will go up. Police brutality towards the disabled will go up, and to people of colour, because it’s acceptable to hurt the disabled now because we’re dangerous, which compounds the idea that disabled people of colour are super dangerous.
Legislation like this, aside from being invasive, threatening, and violent by nature, will lead to police thinking that attacking the disabled will be something they can get away with more easily than before. It will make the public more frightened of us. It will lead to anonymous tip offs and to violence and death.
Legislation like this fundamentally fails to recognise the disabled as equally human. It’s dehumanising and terrifying. And it will not be used to prevent violent people from accessing guns. It will be used to allow the scapegoating of the mentally ill for EVERYTHING. It’s making being mentally ill criminal in and of itself.
What confuses me is that this does NOT sound like what the kids wanted at the march. Some of the kids were openly saying they felt like criminals in their schools because of heightened police in their areas.
And it really doesn’t ring true to what I’ve seen of them. Which begs the question – who’s actually pushing for this by piggybacking off these kids to do it?
As far as I can tell, these “demands” for expanding police presence and criminalizing mental health do not stem from the actual official March for Our Lives movement.
These proposals come from an article from The Guardian which allowed 10 students from the MSD high school newspaper, Eagle Eye, to write an article for the website. (article can be found here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2018/mar/23/parkland-students-manifesto-americas-gun-laws) These students are not the ones who have been leading the march or the ones who have been seen speaking out to the media recently.
The March for Our Lives petition/website does not include these suggestions.
The actual March for Our Lives petition demands only include an assault weapons ban, prohibiting high capacity magazines and closing the loophole in background checks. The official petition can be found here: https://marchforourlivespetition.com/ The March for Our Lives website includes funding for gun violence research and intervention and eliminating restrictions on the ATF (which includes things like digitizing gun sales records and instituting safety requirements, did you know guns shown to have manufacturing defects are not required to issue a recall, even if people are killed because of it?) Information found here: https://marchforourlives.com/how-we-save-lives/
Thanks for the clarification/correction
Tumblr doesn’t like anything with traction however so the immediate instinct is still going to be to pin this on March for Lives
We need to get better about spreading unbiased (okay, LESS biased) facts, and not the spin versions of stories we see.
Gee, I wonder who benefits from a) spreading this misinformation and b) undermining the movement for gun control?
Hmmm who *is* it who consistently pivots from gun control to blaming mental illness, violence in the media, anything but guns?
gayfeline 