Gabrielle Giffords, her companions, and the families of the dead children and teachers from Sandy Hook know better than anybody else that they are the victims of violent crime. They also need to know that they are victims of psychological crime at the hands of Barack Obama's Beggar Mafia.

I learned about the real Beggar Mafia only when I researched this article. I remembered that medieval beggars exploited physical disabilities, especially those of children, to gain sympathy and charity from passers-by. Some beggars did more than hope for a special needs child; if the baby was born healthy, they broke its legs themselves. The keyword search revealed, however, that this barbaric infliction and then exploitation of other people's pain is alive and well today:

So just who would chop off the leg of a healthy child? The boys are victims of India's so-called 'beggar mafia' -- criminals so violent and amoral that they are prepared to hack the limbs off children, as well as steal new-born babies from hospitals.

They use the children as begging 'props' to maximise their earnings from sympathetic passers-by.

Barack Obama and his anti-Second Amendment allies, unlike the real Beggar Mafia, obviously had no hand in the deaths and injuries that they now seek to exploit. There is, on the other hand, ample proof that they are glad these deaths and injuries happened. Identifiable people in their camp have expressed open gratification that Adam Lanza slaughtered more than two dozen innocent people. Their own words provide far better proof than any argument that could possibly come from the National Rifle Association or other Second Amendment advocacy groups.

"Never Let a Dead Child Go to Waste"

Rahm Emanuel advocated openly the exploitation of human tragedy for political gain: "Never let a good crisis go to waste." Former Pennsylvania Governor (and DNC Chair) Ed Rendell added, in effect, that one should never let a dead child go to waste. "The good thing about Newtown is, it was so horrific that I think it galvanized Americans to a point where the intensity on our side is going to match the intensity on their side." If you listen to Mr. Rendell himself, you can confirm that his words are not being taken out of context.

Former President Bill Clinton also admitted that mass shootings were useful for his anti-Second Amendment agenda: "And unfortunately, our cause has been aided by the deaths of all these children in all these schools, and in other settings." His open statement that mass shootings were useful to his political agenda was at least qualified, whether sincerely or not, with "unfortunately." The former head of the Democratic National Committee, on the other hand, said without reservation or qualification that he was glad that Adam Lanza killed 26 people instead of being stopped at, for example, two fatalities the way Joel Myrick stopped Luke Woodham at Pearl High School. "Armed Teacher Stops School Shooter" is not the kind of headline that Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, and the rest of their Beggar Mafia need to get the results they want.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg expressed a wish for more firearm-related mass murders for the same purpose:

"No, I think that's right this time. But that doesn't mean you're not going to come back again," Bloomberg said.

"Keep in mind we're likely to have more tragedies like you saw in Connecticut. Each one of these builds on things."

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) also said explicitly that Barack Obama should "exploit" Adam Lanza's crime, and added that more shootings might be necessary to realize his agenda.

Mr. Nadler was asked whether the Newtown tragedy could be the turning point in many Democrats' longstanding struggle to enact stronger gun laws.

"I think we will be there if the president exploits it, and otherwise we'll go on to the next" incident, Mr. Nadler said.

The war against the Second Amendment is far from the first time that somebody has shamelessly exploited, or even perpetrated, a human catastrophe for self-serving gain. The International Solidarity Movement, which claims that Israel "murdered" peace activist Rachel Corrie after she deliberately and repeatedly stepped into the paths of bulldozers, is on record as saying how useful her death was for propaganda purposes. It is generally poor judgment to use the word "murder," and then talk about how much more useful the decedent is to you dead than alive, but the ISM's leaders are not the sharpest knives in the drawer. Neither are Emanuel, Bloomberg, Nadler, and Rendell, as shown by their mistaken belief that ordinary people are too stupid to recognize what they are doing.

The Glorious Leader's exploitation of Sandy Hook families is strongly reminiscent of William Allen Rogers' cartoon of Woodrow Wilson with the "little lost children of the Lusitania." It has been proven, by the way, that the Lusitania carried rifle ammunition whose sole purpose was to kill German soldiers. Rogers' psychological crime therefore helped murder more than 100,000 Americans along with countless Germans with whom we had no legitimate quarrel. Compare the following Rogers cartoon to the Glorious Leader's cynical exploitation of Sandy Hook survivors.

Citizens Must Learn to Recognize Psychological Crime

Adolf Hitler was, unfortunately, the German who learned the most from his country's failure to recognize and counteract Triple Entente propaganda that portrayed Germans as butchers of women and children. He said this explicitly in Mein Kampf, and he used the lessons he had learned to perpetrate the most monstrous psychological crimes in history. The techniques that the Triple Entente used to depict Germans as subhuman enemies of humanity worked equally well against Jews, and other enemies of the Third Reich.

This, along with Henry Ford's own experience, is a strong argument for making the study of basic psychological warfare mandatory in high school civics classes. Ford defined psychological crime, but he became its unwitting victim and accomplice when he believed, and then re-published as The International Jew, Boris Brasol's anti-Semitic propaganda. George Orwell's 1984, meanwhile, points out that whoever controls the past (by rewriting history) controls the present and the future.

It was bad enough that Gabrielle Giffords, the people with her, and the children and teachers at Sandy Hook are the victims of violent criminals who are fortunately either dead or in prison with no chance of parole. It is truly appalling that Rahm Emanuel, Ed Rendell, Michael Bloomberg, Jerrold Nadler, and the rest of the anti-Second Amendment's Beggar Mafia are victimizing them a second time with false hopes, phony and ineffective solutions, and treatment as props in a cynical propaganda circus.

William A. Levinson, P.E. is the author of several books on business management including content on organizational psychology, as well as manufacturing productivity and quality.