I won’t outline the details of the Obama executive order for you.  You know the details.  The order included submission of names to the FICS who were social security recipients and who also had someone other than themselves handling their personal finances.

This is a fairly simple thing.  It’s routine for elderly people to have someone acting as power of attorney, and it’s also fairly routine to have someone other than themselves (e.g., their children) who handles personal finances.  This isn’t just commonplace with the elderly.  Seldom do both spouses handle the finances, and seldom do both spouses want to handle the finances.

The Congress has punted this ridiculous order (although why this couldn’t be punted by another executive order, I don’t know).  According to the progressives, the end of the world is upon us.  Consider these quotes.

NJ.com: “It was deemed that the ability to manage one’s own finances was a suitable proxy to identify the severely mentally ill.”

ARSTechnica: “Beneficiaries affected would be those suffering with mental illnesses so severe that they require a representative to manage their finances for them.”

CNN: ” … those who are considered incapable of managing their own disability benefits due mental illness.”

The Sacramento Bee: ” … Obama administration regulation intended to keep guns away from people so mentally disordered that they cannot work, and so depend on Social Security benefits.”

And finally, The Hill: “If your mental impairment is so significant you cannot work and cannot manage money, chances are you cannot safely manage an automatic weapon.”

Forget the fact that retiring to take advantage of social security benefits has nothing whatsoever to do with so-called mental illness.  Forget also the fact that handling finances today requires online presence unfamiliar to many Americans currently on social security.  I seriously doubt the authors of any of these commentaries know anything about the computer they use as a dumb terminal anyway.

Most of them couldn’t code their way through a hand held calculator and are likely only barely able to operate the calculator on their iPhones to multiply two numbers together.  I’d like to see them solve a differential equation, and upon failure perhaps I could cast doubt on their mental readiness to operate a vehicle.

No, these elderly folks are characterized as mentally ill, not only that, severely mentally ill, and moreover, disabled and disordered.

These anti-gun commentaries have become so outlandish that they’re cartoonish and laughable.  One can only suppose that they are receiving their talking points from Everytown or some Bloomberg apparatchik.  They are in good company along with Hamilton Nolan at Gawker who exclaimed:

When you’re old you’re slow as hell and decades of muscle erosion have made you weak. Pretty much any healthy young person can beat you up. Is a gun gonna even things out? Nope. In order for that gun to work you have to pull it out and aim it in a moment of crisis. While you’re fumbling to do that, all slow, a young person is just pushing you on the ground. And taking your gun out of your feeble hands.

Leave the guns to the young nuts, oldie.

Smoothly drawing a gun from a holster, aiming it quickly, and firing it accurately despite the kickback require a level of strength and dexterity that you just don’t have. I’ll lay 5-1 odds that any street criminal can kick you in the knee and chuckle as you roll around on the ground, grasping for the gun you dropped, as they rifle through your purse and then steal your gun, too.

How we treat the weaker among us is as good a metric of our national character as it ever was, perhaps the best possible metric.

One of the commentaries poses the question for a poll.  Should the mentally ill be allowed to have guns?  In my response I refuse to play their game.  Mental maladies have no correspondence to propensity to violence, so says the mental health experts.  The elderly have the right to self defense just as anyone else.

I believe we should restrict gun rights, but only for those who believe that we can define mental health in such a way as to restrict the rights of those we define.  Unprovoked violence has to do with wickedness, not mental illness.  In other words, if you believe that we should take guns away from people based on your definitions of who should have guns and who shouldn’t, I believe you are too dangerous to have guns.

The desire to control the actions of other men is pathological.  Acting on this pathology is wickedness.  I don’t believe you are actionable people for compromise or open discussion if you fall into this category.  You are a danger to society and should have your gun rights restricted.  If you would lord it over other men to control their lives, fortunes, self defense, children, work and other aspects of their lives, you are suitable only as an opponent in battle.