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.

(>^_^)>#