The amygdala is the part of the human brain that is responsible for emotional processing. The fight or flight response also fires out of that organ of our brain. Our survival system works fast and must interpret reality at a speed beyond conscious thought.  That is why the training of any person carrying a lethal weapon must be so very intense.  If you are not a professional baseball player and thought you could approach home plate to skillfully hit pitches from a major league pitcher throwing 99 mile an hour fast balls you can consider yourself foolish. The batter must have mastered a technique that is unnatural to the human response to deal with an event so fast it is out of conscious perception. Police and military are trained to respond to situations that trigger the amygdala and a decision must be made not in seconds, but in milliseconds. It seems clear the current immigration enforcement force lacks such preparation.  Putting guns in their hands is like sending your grandfather to the major league batting box. But when you put a lethal weapon in conspicuously untrained hands the mistake is more than foolishness.  There should be liability for the gross mismanagement of said operation.

When I was a kid in Wyoming, the NRA trained me how to safely handle a hunting rifle. Now the NRA is acts more like a retail association for the gun industry selling merch to every willing hand in America. We have armed America’s amygdala and the bearers of those arms are largely ill prepared to handle lethal weapons in an emotion loaded emergency. What the founders of the the Bill of Rights had in mind couldn’t have been what we see today when it comes to the right to bear arms. The current approach is more like leaving loaded pistols with the safety off laying around your local kindergarten classroom. A crayon is knicked and blood spilled. Worse yet, the adults wonder why.

A Modest Suggestion for Good

The first suggestion here is simple: leave policing to the police and the formal trained law enforcement agencies. The hiring of an untrained private enforcement agency by the DOJ is more than unprecedented, it is an insult leading to extra-legal activity. I would call it criminal activity but that term belongs more to the top of the agency and on up the highest office. The second suggestion to cull out some good in this situation is for Congress to pass a bill on immigration reform that builds in humane safeguards against what is happening today and makes immigration something other than a mishmash of executive orders. The last immigration bill was killed by the current administration to make room for the present day revenge tour. The third suggestion is to disarm the amygdala. Not one in umpteen hundred gun owners has a clue how to safely and legally make decisions on the microsecond lethal time line, much less good decisions. If we are ever to be a great nation again we must stop being simply foolish. That would be good.