https://x.com/dylanmallman/status/1960814739136925812
Classifying an entire identity as a mental disorder, then using that label to justify new gun control, all waved in with vague talk about “keeping people safe” is the oldest power trick on earth.
“Mental illness” is an elastic category that expands to fit the fears of the moment.
Once you hand the state the right to pathologize groups, it will be used on whoever scares the majority this week, then next week it will be the people who post the wrong jokes, then the neighbor who argues with a school board, then a veteran after a bad month.
A registry follows. Secret lists follow. Mandated evaluations, soft blacklists, asset seizures, no-knock visits, gag orders, punitive holds, all of it presented as medicine when it is punishment in a lab coat.
The gun piece is just as dishonest. Confiscation on paper means registries in practice. Registries mean inspections, audits, informants, and administrative fishing expeditions.
You do not get that without raids, errors, and dead innocents. You do not get that without turning every bitter feud and messy breakup into a weaponized accusation.
Due process becomes a formality. Appeal becomes a joke. The political class gets a lever that can silence critics while calling it care. And for what. To soothe a moral panic by pretending you can legislate away evil if you draw the circle wide enough to include people you already dislike. I will not play that game.
It happens time and time again. A horror hits the feed. People who already wanted more control seize it as proof. People who already despise a minority seize it as proof. No one waits for facts, because facts are irrelevant when the point is to sanctify an agenda.
The perpetrator becomes an avatar. A single corpse is inflated into a class theory. Guilt is collectivized so punishment can be collectivized.
That urge has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with the pleasure of domination. You can see it in the language. “We have to do something.” “Deal with it.” “Evaluate them.” Vague verbs are camouflage for raw force.
Ask for specifics and watch the mask slip. Who diagnoses. Who compiles the names. What qualifies as disqualifying speech. Which posts. Which clinics. Which appeals. Which knock at which door. If you cannot answer that with precision and with strict limits, you have no policy, you have a permission slip for abuse.
I reject the premise that identity causes murder. Individuals commit violence. Individuals should be judged and punished as individuals. Turning a mass of people into a medical file so you can move numbers on a spreadsheet is bureaucratic superstition.
If you want to talk about causes that actually track violence, talk about prior threats ignored, restraining orders blown off, failure to act on specific behaviors, the incentive for fame created by sensational coverage, the copycat spike that follows every wall-to-wall broadcast, the way schools and venues harden or do not, the choice to leave people defenseless in places where everyone already knows they are targets.
Those are real levers. They do not require a theology of pathology or a national blacklist.
I get it. Some people need purity myths. They outsource their anxiety to a crusade. They call for bans and diagnoses because it lets them feel holy without risking anything. Others need enemies. They pick a group they already resent and glue every nightmare to its face.
Both types worship the same sacred safety that just happens to grant them power over neighbors. The state loves both, because fear gives it reach. Every new emergency becomes a key to a bigger lock.
History is one long record of authorities pathologizing dissidents first, then undesirables, then anyone inconvenient to policy targets. If you hand the government a medical pretext and a confiscation lever, it will be used exactly that way. Do not delude yourself that your faction will hold the keys forever.
As for the “this changes everything” chorus, it changes nothing. A single event proves only that one person did one monstrous thing. We do not know the backstory, the medications, the brain state, the stressors, the handlers, the provocations, the failures and misses along the chain.
Building a national regime on the heat of a headline is irresponsible. I am a skeptic by disposition. If you tell me the story is simple, I assume I am being managed. Maybe there is state rot here, maybe there is simple human horror, maybe there is a stew of both.
None of that justifies collective punishment of people who harmed no one. None of that justifies creating a psychiatric caste system with armed men at its edges.
What I refuse is the demand that I trade liberty for someone else’s sense of moral cleanliness. You want to protect kids. Good. There are other potential ways of accomplishing this. Harden targets that have been hunted for years. Allow voluntary armed defense where the risk is highest. Stop manufacturing fame for killers. Fund voluntary mental health without turning treatment into a badge that gets your rights pulled.
Punish actual threats with actual due process. And stop pretending you need a national dragnet to do any of this. If you insist on medicalizing identity and seizing weapons to prove virtue, be honest that what you want and it is not safety.
abcnews.go.com
