Clearly, the gun people will say anything to steer the conversation away from any action that would prevent anyone, anywhere from having a gun. So, we get this exquisitely irrational plan: To prevent mass shootings by mentally ill people, instead of focusing on keeping guns out of their hands, the thing to do is focus on treating mental illness. Or, to put it another way, it’s important to protect the 2nd amendment rights of the unhinged to keep a dozen or so firearms and a couple of thousand rounds of ammunition in the trunks of their cars and to use them to carry out their revenge fantasies on people in classrooms and movie theaters, while we search for the cure for mental illness. Same thing with, say, airline pilots, I guess: The remedy for keeping a mentally ill person from flying an airliner full of people into the ocean isn’t to keep the delusional out of the cockpit. The remedy is to cure mental illness. A few hundred people may die while we’re doing that, but, oh well. In the gun discussion, it would seem the one thing everyone could agree on is the need to keep guns and the mentally ill separate. But apparently not. In the nonsensical words of Gov. Chris Christie, we must, instead “get tough” on mental illness.
So, let's be clear. The way to prevent mentally ill people from shooting up movie theaters isn’t to cure mental illness, as laudable a goal as that is. It is to not let them have guns. End of story. And it is not unreasonable to say that anyone who would commit an act like those committed by Aaron Alexis, James Holmes, Gerald Loughner, Adam Lanza, Dylann Roof, et. al. – and now Chris Harper Mercer -- is by definition mentally ill. At the very least, the act itself is prima facie evidence of thought processes gone haywire.
Like day follows night, the discussion of “red flags” follows these 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 the effort to stem the tide of gun deaths, because it’s both narrowly focused and politically possible. It won’t stop gun crime or gun accidents or gang shootings or suicides. But it should make the slaughter of innocents by the mentally deranged a considerably less regular occurrence, and that would be a huge accomplishment.
Yes, there are obstacles. 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, privacy considerations (and laws), the indifference of gun manufacturers and, especially, gun sellers, and the sheer numbers of guns out there. But there has to be a way to prevent the Chris Harper Mercers of the world from getting their hands on guns and ammo. Never was the cliché more apt: Where there’s a will, there’s a way. But it’s important to avoid getting distracted by blue-sky remedies like curing mental illness or, on the anti-gun side, ridding the country of guns altogether or banning them by law, neither of which is ever going to happen. Keeping guns and mentally ill people apart isn’t everything. But it’s a lot. Let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
No comments:
Post a Comment