Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Santa Barbara: The Crisis Continues



           
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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