Guns and the Mentally Ill

Without getting into the ins and outs of firearms legislation and the entrenched positions of the ideologues that come at this from left and right, can there be any doubt that we have to find a way to keep the unhinged and guns separate? It’s not an easy thing to do for a variety of reasons involving the difficulty of determining the mental health status of a given individual, the indifference of gun manufacturers and, especially, gun sellers, and the sheer numbers of guns out there.  

But on that relatively limited objective – keeping guns out of the hands of the delusional – is where the focus needs to be if the depressingly regular front page appearance of mass shooting news is ever going to stop.  The quixotic efforts of the left to rid society of guns altogether, or at the very least, guns whose appearance they disapprove of – viz., so-called “assault” weapons -- are politically impossible and doomed to failure.  Worse, they drain energy and focus away from gun control efforts that might actually do some good and that there is some possibility of getting all parties to agree on – the more narrow but reachable objective of stopping mentally unbalanced people from playing out their revenge fantasies with bullets.

Every bit as futile (and nonsensical) as the left’s obsession with the impossible or the irrelevant is the insistence by the right, as personified by the National Rifle Association, that a gun in every American hand is a constitutional imperative, and that any effort whatsoever to regulate guns, including keeping them away from felons, insane people, and small children, is the camel’s nose under the tent.  (In this connection, it’s worth mentioning that we already have a considerable amount of gun control legislation on the books: Automatic weapons – machine guns – are heavily regulated, and you can’t have bazookas, hand grenades, or surface-to-air missiles, to name just a few.  No one – okay, hardly anyone -- considers these prohibitions violations of the right to bear arms.)

It can be argued that anyone who would commit an act like those committed by Aaron Alexis, James Holmes, Gerald Loughner, Adam Lanza, et. al. is by definition mentally ill.  At the very least, the act itself is prima facie evidence of thought processes gone haywire. Which is to say, these events are virtually always connected to mental illness of some type and/or severity. And so like day follows night, the discussion of “red flags” follows the shootings.  And there is never any shortage of flags, nor is there any shortage of theories about why they were ignored or misunderstood or went unseen – why the dots weren’t connected.

Heeding the flags and connecting the dots -- identifying people who shouldn’t have access to guns and then denying them that access – seems like the most productive area of concentration in this effort, because it’s both narrowly focused and politically possible.  It won’t stop gun crime or gun accidents or gang shootings. But it should make the slaughter of innocents by the mentally deranged a considerably less regular occurrence, and that would be a huge accomplishment. True believers on the left and the right should quit worrying about unserious ideas like no guns or more guns and put their efforts behind something that can actually happen and that can do some good.