“Open carry went into effect on January 1, and concealed carry will be allowed at the state’s public universities beginning August 1,” Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun agitpropmeisters at The Trace inform in their email blast. “Amid the debate over those changes, less-enthusiastic opinions on guns have begun to challenge attitudes that were once nearly unanimous. Texas Monthly spoke to five Texans whose thoughts on gun ownership and gun restrictions vary wildly.” Yeah, it’s one of those “fair and balanced” deals. Only it’s not fair and the most outspoken pro-gun control activist’s account makes an unbalanced argument. Like this, from the gun control activist and mother of a mentally ill man . . .
When Lex started becoming more critical in his illness—I would say it was in eighth grade. And we didn’t realize it, but I believe he started showing signs of schizophrenia. Then he started getting more and more detached the older he got, which is a pattern. Kids hit their late teens, and that’s when schizophrenia kicks in. He was spending more time alone, more time in his room.
That was all up until his eighteenth birthday. That was the day I got a call from Joe McBride up at McBride’s gun store. As soon as they opened, Lex walked in there and tried to buy a gun. Joe said, “Your son’s here. He looks like he’s on PCP, and I’m not selling him a gun.”
Result! Without any government interference, a potentially dangerous person was denied a firearm. And responsible people were notified so action could be taken to prevent a tragedy. But, according to Leslie Ervin’s account, neither she nor the police could remove her schizophrenic son’s gun rights. He’d reached the age of majority and hadn’t committed a crime.
You know where this is going, right? Wrong.
He went to Academy and Cabela’s and started buying guns. He bought pistols, he had a long gun . . .
That’s when we really started getting scared, because he had guns now. But Scott always said, “We just have to love him unconditionally. We can’t change him. He’s not going to hurt anybody. He’s our son.” This is the worst part. You don’t know somebody’s going to do something till they do it . . .
So I said goodbye to Scott. Lex had been kind of pacing around, which is not unusual for him. He paced. But he was waiting for me to leave, of course. I pulled out of the driveway, and he must have gone right in and done it.
I got to the restaurant, walked in, sat down, and [my youngest son] Max called. I answered it and Max is screaming, “Lex stabbed Scott! Come home!”
The way that it happened—well, the police said Lex walked in and hit Scott on the back of the head with a pipe wrench. Scott spun around in his chair, and Lex stabbed him twice. And those two puncture wounds were fatal. The ER doc would say that once he was hit with that knife, even if there was an operating table in that room, we couldn’t have saved him.
But it takes a long time for someone to bleed out. Scott called for Max and was yelling at Lex, “No! No!” Max ran in and grabbed Lex. And Lex was saying, “Stand back. I’m a trained assassin. I work for the CIA. This man is an impostor. He’s going to kill the family, and I’m here to protect you.”
Max was able to pull Lex away. Finally, they broke a vase over Lex’s head. At that point, Max walked Scott out into the kitchen, laid him down on the floor, and stayed with him until EMS came.
It bears repeating: Ms. Ervin’s son murdered his father with a pipe wrench and a knife. Not a gun.
You and I understand that a murder’s method is not the proper focus for anyone seeking to prevent a similar incident. Nor is it particularly useful to focus on firearms when trying to reduce suicides or gang banging or even negligent discharges. The proper focus: the mindset of the person using the tool.
After the period where I was putting my life back together, the first thing I wanted to do was get involved with NAMI [the National Alliance on Mental Illness]. At the same time, I started working with Texas Gun Sense [a group advocating “commonsense” gun control], because I realized what was necessary was a gun-violence protective order, which could have temporarily taken away Lex’s guns, because he was clearly unstable.
It’s not complicated. People who are in crisis should not be allowed to purchase or own firearms. “Crisis” being the key word. “Crisis” means not in your right mind.
Had we had a gun-violence protective order as a law in Texas, when I called the police and said that my mentally ill son in crisis had guns, they would have interviewed him. If they agreed he shouldn’t have guns, they would have confiscated his guns pending an evaluation by a professional.
When I sit down and tell my story, I ask, “Do you think that a young man who would murder his dad a month later with a knife should be allowed to own firearms?” I don’t think there’s one person who would say yes. This would be an unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic having delusions going and purchasing firearms. I haven’t met one person at the Texas Capitol who has said yes.
That’s what happens when you ask a trick question: you get the answer you want. As Ms. Ervin’s own story indicates, a Lone Star State Gun Violence Restraining Order would have done nothing to prevent her husband’s murder. But it would violate the Second, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
I know where Ms. Ervin’s coming from. A friend’s schizophrenic brother beat her father to death with a hammer. But she’s like the drunk who looks for his lost car keys under streetlamp because the light’s better. While the anti-gun community no doubt offers her the emotional support she needs, their GVRO “solution” to the challenge of dealing with dangerously mentally ill individuals is a grave danger to us all. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.
And…
So much fail. Husband is killed with pipe wrench and
knife, but if junior didn’t have guns…….
Exactly, if junior didn’t have guns, he would still have access to a pipe wrench and a knife, and still be able to kill. How do people get committed? Can’t family members, especially parents under the same roof, suggest to have someone taken under a 72 hour hold and have them checked out by a professional? Sorry your son is not well, but he was/is YOUR responsibility, if you neglected/ignored the signs then shame on YOU! Perhaps you should have had him checked out BEFORE he turned 18, an ounce of prevention and a pound of cure and all.
I’m Michigan there is no 72 hour hold. It’s a petition by family, police, or anyone. This then forces the person to be seen by a physician (usually ER doc) or psychologist this keeps someone under care for at least 24 hours until they are seen by a psychiatrist. If the psychiatrist finds reason to hold the person then they are held until they get a court hearing or sign deferred(agree to treatment instead of hearing).
The antis have gotten so desperate that they have to use knife murders as examples of why to ban guns, because they “could have been a gun murder ” this is insanely funny.
The biggest lie so far is that she was not able to do anything about her son. She could have easily had him committed for a psych evaluation. They would have likely treated him and maybe even taken away his gun rights AFTER he was afforded due process under law.
If his wife had been sane, Scott may have realized potential danger and *HIMSELF* been carrying, after being beaned with a pipe wrench from behind and seeing my son coming at me with a knife, sorry, adios. And the problem would have been solved.
Knife Violence Restraining Order (KVRO); coming to a kitchen near you.
gonna take our knives?! Me and every other patron of my favorite sushi place will band together! Do not mess with a good sushi joints customers, we will fvcking cut you!
CJ Palace in Sparks NV, FYI. love it!
They’re professionals they can have knives after taking a knife safety class and getting registered and permitted. Of course the knife has to stay at the place of business in a locked safe until being used by the chef to make sushi and immediately locked back up after he is done.
And how is gun control going to help a stabbing victim? I really think involuntary commitment, long before this tragic incident would have been a far better solution.
They might have a little more credibility IF they had started some sort of commitment proceeding and he had SHOT somebody before the proceeding was allowed to go through.
I would be ok with a law in place that allowed for a person to be added to the NICS temporarily as soon as a relative starts an involuntary commitment process , provided they are scrubbed as soon as the party is determined to be. It a danger.
HEY! Stop being picky! A bloody shirt is a bloody shirt. And I have no confidence in a NICS entry ever being “scrubbed”.
Do you or do you not support the Second Amendment?
The very existence of NICS is a blatant violation of the “…shall not be infringed.” portion of that amendment.
Keeping weapons/arms out of the hands of mentally disturbed persons is and individual responsibility, not something to be handed over to the government.
If you concede that the government has the authority to create, maintain and enforce a list of persons who may not exercise their natural, civil and Constitutionallyt protected right to keep and bear arm, how will you keep your name off of that list?
Nailed it. Well said.
Wow. The disconnect from reality is strong with these people. Can you inherit a mental illness? Did mom pass it to the son?
I had a cousin killed in our youth by a car. I should have joined an anti gun group according to this woman’s “logic”.
If the driver of the car was intoxicated, I would have definately joined an anti-gun group.
I happen to be one who believes that a fitting role for government is operating safe and secure mental health facilities for people like this guy. Along with common sense (yes I said it) rules for when a person can be taken for not just a 48 hour hold but for a longer evaluation and mandatory treatment as necessary. Crazy is crazy and crazy people need to have a lot more than guns removed from their reach. For this guy, the one in Newtown, and many others like them it means a secure facility until a treatment that actually works. And if released, it means mandatory monitoring because they often go off their medications. Yes it takes away the rights of a very few crazy people. But it leaves everyone else’s rights intact. And then it is our fitting role as the not crazy people to police the government and make sure it does not overstep its bounds.
You really want to give more of that kind of power to the government?
Worked out so well for the Soviet Union…
As someone said… the family had the responsibility, the opportunity (for ten years yet), and the right to get their son into treatment. They didn’t do it, and the man died.
We actually had this sort of a system until the SC closed it down in the ’70s as I recall, I used to work in one as a kid. And the SC was correct, it amounted to prior restraint, as well as imprisonment without due process. Wishing for it to come back is like wanting to reenter the stone age.
There’s an inherent and critical flaw with giving the government the power to take away the rights of any group of people, and also the responsibility for defining the criteria for inclusion in that group. Sure, it may be a “very few crazy people” initially, but how long before the definition of “crazy” expands? How long before politics gets dragged into it, and those government-employed psychiatrists are gently persuaded to diagnose as “crazy” people who are perfectly sane, but have unpopular views?
Setting aside the slippery-slope issue, I remain unconvinced of the competence of any government agency to run “safe and secure” mental-health facilities that provide effective and humane treatment, and don’t just end up being a place to warehouse heavily-sedated mentally-ill people until they die.
We already know the slippery slope is there. Apart from governments in the near past that have used mental illness to imprison dissidents, we see “commonsense keeping guns out of objectively crazy people” turning into what California has which is “take away rights of others basically indefinitely and not really get in any trouble for lying about it”.
The government cannot be trusted to administer something like this. It’s never worked in the past and it simply can’t work because governments are by their very nature, unaccountable.
I know the feeling of wanting to help people with severe problems/protect innocent people from their unstable minds, but until they actually do something we can’t really do much. Because the alternative is that we allow a system to exist that will be abused and probably still fail to adequately help/stop crazy people who will hurt people.
I used to think anti gunner advocacy was irrelevant, until I looked at the 21st amendment, the only amendment repealed. The 18th (prohibition) was repealed not by state legislature, but by state convention. Convention Allow politicians to eascape the wrath of voters from the temperance movement. If anti gun dialog becomes the norm, we could be denied our 2A rights by a small contingent of delegates.
We must defend our 2A rights by all means necessary for its preservation. Fall short of this and our country no longer exist.
Did she do anything to seek treatment? Does she not know that an adjudicated mental patient is barred from owning firearms? It sure seems like she tried to dismiss the problem until it was far, far too late and now is trying to blame us for it. If she loved her son so damn much, why didn’t she try to get him help?
Yep, if only the kid hadn’t been allowed to own guns, her husband couldn’t have been killed with a wrench and a knife. By the same logic, I advocate banning pizza. It’ll cut down on drunk driving deaths.
Government is masterful at shifting cost onto citizens. Remarkable that Lex had to murder his father to prove he was mentality ill. Only then did government decide treatment and housing he needed was warranted.
The scary part is that at some point the government “experts” may decide that he is responding well to treatment (psychotropic medications) and turning him back out into society. All well and good until he decides to stop taking his meds and the delusions return.
Nice parenting. Caring so much for your child and your community that you let someone who should clearly be committed roam free.
The only blame here should be laid at the feet of who is really responsible, The parents.
A gut wrenching story, her words cut like a knife.
So you’re telling me your son had clear signs of paranoid schizophrenia and you didn’t get him any help, and then you blame guns because you can’t take responsibility?
Perhaps her son thought the CIA was out to get him, but the mom thought that open carry advocates were out to get her.
The merry go round circle jerk continues to twirl.
According tot he story the son thought he was a trained assassin working for the CIA.
I am reasonable sure that Texas has a system in place where they could have interviened with her sons mental illness and had him helped.
Shame on her for not getting him the help he needed. Instead, they let him isolate and pace.
Academy and Cabela’s sold pistols to an eighteen year old? Really?
Yeah I’m not buying that either.
If you can’t be trusted with a pipe wrench in public you can be trusted in public.
If you live with crazy unstable people while deluding yourself about the danger then your putting everyone else at risk. Like Lanza. And then when it happens everyone needs to be disarmed for our own good.
Sure.
So she fails to get her son treatment and then he kills somebody. He uses a pipe wrench and a knife and she doesn’t say a thing about those. Instead we must ban guns. Because guns. Got it.
Not “because guns”, but because there are no deep pocket billionaires willing to finance Moms Demanding Anti-Pipe Wrench Legislation.
A responsible gun shop told her that the kid had something wrong with him. That he wasn’t getting a gun. What did she do?
She “loved him unconditionally,”assumed “he wouldn’t hurt anyone,” decided “we can’t change him” and “he’s our son.”
In short, she did nothing. There is no mention of medication, trips to the doctor, or any proactive actions. In fact, missing is “We talked to the police…”
She and her husband ignored what was going on in front of them. As you can’t ban wrenches and knives, she’s selected guns.
That Fruitloop couldn’t of had a job, he was too kooky. Where was this guy getting all this money to buy all these guns?
That was my thought. We do not have the whole story. I am not buying that he was being paid by CIA.
And he was living at home (obviously no money=can’t afford his own place) and yet no one in the family noticed that he had accumulated an “arsenal”?
A truly righteous person does not need to lie. A loving mother will not dance in the blood of her son’s father. Grief and guilt does strange things to a person. Is Ms Ervin still carrying Bloomberg’s flag, or has she changed her advocacy efforts to mental health treatment?
[W3]
She apparently started out with mental-health advocacy, and changed to gun control.
Parental fail. Thanks for failing society. The fact that it’s a tradegy doesn’t make that fact go away
Read the whole series, 5 articles. The cop was “neutral” on gun control overall, he just talked about how being a cop in NYC was different from being a cop in Houston. The hunter just talked about enjoying hunting–neither Fudd nor 2a purist, just talked about hunting. The “gun-control activist” we all know about now–but I have to wonder why Texas Monthly didn’t see how ridiculous she appeared, arguing that gun control would have prevented a bludgeoning and stabbing attack. TM did cheat a bit on the gun-control side (quelle surprise!), as “the chaplain” was just another gun-control activist. But they did get a stout, clear, persuasive (and female) voice to speak for gun rights in Suzanna Hupp. Overall, as mainstream media go, quite a gun-friendly performance.
The lib nuts got rid of the nut houses in the 60s
I live in texas. Never seen one open carrier anywhere.
The antis were wrong about texas becoming the wild west again.