More lives lost;
more parents devastated; more families destroyed; more hand wringing; more
anguish; and more inaction.
Once
again a mentally disturbed person was able to get his hands on guns with
horrific consequences. Once again a deeply troubled individual was allowed to
act out the worst horrors of his deeply troubled paranoid world and exact
“revenge” on innocent victims. And little or nothing will be done.
Parents
scrimp, save and sacrifice to send their children to college only to have them
become targets for unstable and disturbed individuals to get retribution for
imagined insults. Almost all mass shootings in this country are done by
mentally ill males. And, most of these men have problems relating to
women—making females a primary target.
Improving
mental health care is critical to ending this nation’s epidemic of gun
violence. It will take hundreds of millions, if not billions, to tackle mental
health problems and gun-related violence. Until there is a public will to put
all the resources we can to tackling this problem, Santa Barbaras, Virginia
Techs, and Sandy Hooks will continue unabated.
The
NRA, the gun manufacturers and some Second Amendment advocates call for
unlimited access to guns—no restrictions even for those who are deemed a threat
to themselves or others. These gun advocates are so shrill and so powerful that
they drown out attempts to discuss the mental health aspect of the violence.
They will be shrill again, and just as after Sandy Hook, the politicians will
cower and nothing will be done.
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