Assuming that we still have human civilization and historians a hundred years from now, the era we inhabit will probably have been dubbed the Age of Insanity.
Wherever you look, the people we’ve voted into power are pursuing “policies” that defy basic common sense. Here in deep Red Indiana, the so-called Second Amendment defenders–aka gun nuts–have eliminated all rational restrictions on the ownership of weapons. Are you a domestic abuser? No problem. Have you given friends and neighbors cause to think you are off your rocker? Hey, buy an assault weapon.
Are you blind? Here’s your permit! I
f you think I’m exaggerating, the linked article will disabuse you of that opinion.
WhenTerry Sutherland argued about gun laws with family and friends over the years, he would often joke about whether he — a legally blind man — should get a gun permit.
Everyone would laugh. Sutherland didn’t think it was possible.
“But eventually it kind of started weighing on me,” Sutherland told The Washington Post. “And I started thinking, ‘I wonder if it’s actually possible, and what would it mean if I could?’”
So last fall, Sutherland applied for an Indiana license to carry a handgun. He expected someone to stop him at some point in the application process, he said, or at least test if he could shoot at a target.
A few months later, Sutherland received his permit, as Indianapolis news channel WISH-TV first reported. He put it in a clear case and wears it on a yellow lanyard around his neck in hopes of starting conversations about Indiana’s gun laws, which he said are too lenient toward blind people. Sutherland hasn’t changed anyone’s opinions, he said, but some people have been shocked that he received the license.
Welcome to Indiana, where legislators regularly demonstrate that the only part of the Constitution they’ve read is the Second Amendment. (They routinely display total ignorance of the First–especially the Establishment Clause.)
And how are the geniuses in the Indiana legislature responding to the insanity of the Trump and MAGA hysteria over (dark-skinned) immigrants? Are they even aware that the U.S. Constitution makes Immigration a specifically federal responsibility?
Don’t be silly!
As the White House ramps up deportation of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, many Republican-controlled state legislatures aren’t just complying with federal directives but taking additional steps to curb illegal immigration.
That includes Indiana.
More than a dozen immigration-related bills have been filed this legislative session, ranging from a bill that would ban children living in the country illegally from enrolling in public school to higher criminal penalties for immigrants caught living here illegally. But lawmakers have ultimately decided to focus their attention on bills that help police enforce immigration policies and detain people living here without citizenship.
The constitutional allocation of responsibilities is obviously irrelevant to our lawmakers, as is the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court has previously ruled that the public schools cannot be closed to immigrant children. Jim Banks–the ignorant and nasty Christian Nationalist who is perhaps the most embarrassing person Indiana has ever sent to the U.S. Senate (and that’s saying something) has threatened to defund the police if they opt to “stay in their constitutional lane.” (Indianapolis’ Police Chief–who evidently has read the Constitution–used that phrase in explaining why IMPD would continue to focus on crimes against the city’s residents, rather than assisting in terrorizing Brown residents.)
Two counterproductive House bills have been introduced by Jim Lucus, one of Indiana’s most deranged “Second Amendment” legislators (he also has a FaceBook page that makes Twitter/X look like a DEI site). His measures–which are moving through the process– add stronger criminal penalties to immigrants found to be driving without a license. Never mind that research shows such laws endanger everyone. They result in fewer trained, tested, licensed, and insured drivers on the road, compromising safety for all. (They also perpetuate fear within immigrant communities and create barriers to immigrants’ ability to contribute to our communities and the economy.)
The MAGA animus toward dark-skinned immigrants is part and parcel of the central MAGA characteristic–racism. If you discount Project 2025, neither the state nor the federal GOP has advanced any coherent policy agenda. As Trump’s coup has proceeded and Musk and his DOGE techno-nerds lay waste to various federal agencies, GOP invertebrates express no concern. The only consistent themes have been concerted assaults on science and on efforts to be fair to those they’ve labeled Other: scrubbing federal websites of information, eliminating DEI efforts, and ejecting the immigrants who disproportionately pick our produce and build our houses.
This really is the age of insanity.