Mental Health and Mass Murder: The Elephant in the Room

Immediately following the mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary, the infamous U.S. gun control debate was revived, resulting in a lot of the same political polarization, anger, fear, and of course huge spikes in gun and ammunition sales that one comes to whenever the national argument rears its ugly head.

     Gun control advocates obviously are fighting for greater regulation, more thorough and standard background checks nationwide, and removal of assault weapons, if not all guns available on the market today, as a way to prevent future shootings like those committed by Adam Lanza (who had also killed his mother before continuing to Sandy Hook Elementary), James Holmes, who killed numerous people by breaking into a theatre in Denver, CO, and Seung-Hui Cho, who was responsible for the Virginia Tech Massacre.

    Meanwhile, Gun Rights advocates continue to fight to uphold the guarantee of the 2nd Amendment, which protects U.S. citizens' rights to bear arms.  Instead, may of these activists have pressed the need for more widespread gun ownership, often agreeing with NRA Exec. Vice President Wayne LaPierre's statement that "the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun, is with a good guy with a gun," though it could be argued that if one takes away all the guns, the good guy with the gun isn't needed because the bad guy with the gun no longer exists (if all bad guys get their guns legally anyways).

But, I digress.

    Throughout this cutthroat fight leading all the way up to the federal government, the bulk of which centered around the mass shootings that seem to happen more and more frequently, I haven't heard any statement at all about possibly reforming the U.S. mental health system, which most everyone agrees is grossly ineffective.

    Besides the use of guns and the large number of fatalities, what each of these heinous crimes have in common is that each perpetrator had a psychiatric history that unfortunately fell by the wayside as a result of a system which has been crippled by numerous state budget cuts during the duration of the Great Recession (2007-2009), chronic understaffing of mental health facilities, and sky-high prices which severely curtails access to psychiatric health care.  A few of these facts are detailed here, but unfortunately the severity of the U.S. mental health system has not yet been expressed in the Gun Rights/Control debate.

But...I suppose what else could be expected from a political system whose leaders (I'm talking about the U.S. congressional and the executive branches if you weren't aware) have resorted to political posturing, moving to the fringes of their parties for support, and utterly polarizing and stagnating that which they were elected to work EFFECTIVELY within.

Ah well, one can dream.

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The Absurd Debate on Gay Marriage

    In recent years, the politicians in the United States have focused more and more on social issues like abortion and gay marriage.  While it seems that a good portion of the population have gotten caught up in the heated debate over gay marriage in particular, I think it might be worth stepping back to see the larger picture surrounding the debate.

The year 2007 marked the beginning of the Great Recession, the year that our economy and many banks' stocks (notably A.I.G. who received the largest bailout and just a few days ago threatened to sue the U.S. government over the terms of that very bailout) collapsed in what felt like a matter of seconds.  The housing bubble burst, and years of fraudulent and predatory lending practices caused the U.S. economy to implode, quickly taking much of the world economy with it.

The next year brought with it many milestones: the first black president Barack Obama, the Eurozone Crisis,  the fight in California over Proposition 8, a rather poorly worded document (in my opinion) which pressed the state's public to vote yes for retaining the definition of marriage as only between a man and a woman, and the beginning of the worst political stalemate in the U.S. Congress in decades.  Political posturing, extreme rhetoric, and especially a tendency in the G.O.P. to navigate themselves toward the extreme right of their party are very familiar aspects of what we see in congress today (and what I believe lost them the 2012 election).

This all surrounds the gay marriage debate, which is undoubtedly a tool being used by politicians on both the right and the left to distract and stir up their various constituencies.

Because really it's not a difficult debate.  If we're looking at this through a religious perspective, then it's simple.  There are religions which condone same-sex marriage.  So to deny those religions the ability to continue marriage ceremonies between same-sex couples is an obvious violation of the first amendment, the freedom of religion.  Moreover, there are many couples who are not religious at all, and would not seek a religious ceremony of any kind, and to deny them the right to marry is an infringement on their rights as well.

To those religions who do not agree with same-sex marriage, such as sects of Christianity like Catholicism and Evangelical Protestantism, members of which have been at the forefront of the fight opposing gay marriage, I would say that it is not an infringement on their rights, to give others the power to marry because the government cannot force new beliefs on religion, just as religion cannot legally force its beliefs onto the government or the population it serves. 

Remember Separation of Church and State?  This is the reason for it.  Gay marriage is the same as any marriage, the joining of two people who (hopefully) love each other, and its time that our society own up to that truth, legalize gay marriage, and move on.

We've got more pressing problems like the debt ceiling and an inept congress, to worry about this any more anyway.

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