Well, at least someone’s trying to do something, eh? The question is…are unilateral fiats to tighten gun registration and control going to do the job?
I was glad to see the President dedicate another $500 million to mental health care.
It is, alas, a drop in the bucket. Five hundred million bucks is as nothing compared to, say, the government’s $58.7 billion outlay in 2015 for something called “protection,” or the $813.9 billion in defense spending or the $149 billion for education.
And while no, of course I do not believe anyone who has a mental illness is ipso facto a menace to society, the fact is all of the mass shootings that bring our president to tears were committed by people who were suffering insanity. Our mental health care system leaves a lot to be desired…such as mental health care. Any help there is welcome, but $500 million comes under the heading of “too little, too late.”
Should people who are stark raving mad be prohibited from buying a gun? No doubt.
How about a person who, feeling a little sad, has talked with a doctor about it and now has a diagnosis of “depression” permanently inscribed in the computerized record? That’s a catch-all term applied to anything from passing sadness to profound, pathological, long-term illness endangering the sufferer’s life. Should all of us who wish not to be “regulated” avoid discussing our blues with our doctors, lest we be prohibited from ever buying a sporting firearm or ammunition?
And will this improved rule do the trick? Let’s remember that Adam Lanza, who was seriously ill and had been for quite some time, was supplied with an arsenal by his mother, a woman who seems to have been generally regarded as a normal member of an affluent community.
The people from whom we have the most to fear, in terms of gun violence, are criminals — the type who stick up pawn shops, kidnap the employees, flee into neighborhoods, and hide in little old ladies’ garages. These folks don’t buy guns from dealers; they trade on the streets, within their own gang culture. We already have gun laws that have little effect on the availability of arms on the street. While spectacularly publicized shootings by people who have gone off the rails are alarming, they actually represent a tiny portion of the violent crime in this country. Most of it is perpetrated by people for whom regulatory control is superfluous and irrelevant.
What about the figures being bandied about to justify taking guns out of the hands of the American public? Or at least, of the law-abiding portion thereof?
We’re told 500 people die in gun accidents each year, and of those, 30 are children under five years old. You know…500 people is .00015681% of the US population. And 30 children? They comprise .00000941% of the US population, or .00015175% of children under five in this country.
Those are minuscule figures, microscopic compared to the number of people who die in home accidents and car wrecks. As a matter of fact, despite all the devices we have in place now to protect us from ourselves (I couldn’t even get into a bottle of nose spray to treat the current heavy cold!), home accidents are among the top causes of injury and death.
Are we really in a crisis situation? We’re told that “mass shootings” occur almost every day in this country. But define the term: gang-bangers shooting at each other in street fights or at drunken bashes are different from lunatics shooting up movie theaters and schools. We have a large criminal class in this country. It exists because we have serious problems of poverty, inequality, and injustice. However you define it, though, the death rate for “mass shootings” is under 5 percent of all shooting deaths in the US, and the annual rate of gun-related homicide has been dropping steadily over the past twenty years.
Hysterical reportage a crisis does not make.
Will Obama’s improved gun control regulation help stop the ongoing tragedy of suicides? One wonders.
If you’re really determined to off yourself, you’re going to do it, one way or the other. Having a gun at hand is convenient, that is true. It wouldn’t be my first choice — too messy, and too much chance of missing. But it has to be allowed that easy access to a pistol makes it too easy for an impulsive teenager to harm him- or herself in a moment of adolescent distress or real depression. But shouldn’t control of that access be the family’s responsibility? Should we all have our personal choices restricted because some people fail to keep their guns locked up?
Consider the ways your deceased friends have found to take themselves out of this mortal coil…and why:
• Gunshot to head: had a second stroke, understood what was coming, and decided he didn’t want to die that way
• Tied a cinderblock to his leg and jumped into the deep end of the pool: depression, general craziness, hated his wife
• Drove a car into a concrete abutment: divorce, drunkenness
• Gunshot to head: depression, adolescent angst
• Gunshot to head: unemployment; incurable long-term debilitating disease
• Overdose: depression
This line of thought carries us straight back to the matter of mental health care, something that is sadly wanting in this country. Some people, such as the elderly guy (my father’s best friend) who shot himself after he experienced a second stroke, have good reason to bring their lives to an end. This is not a mental health issue but one of ordinary humane treatment: people suffering terminal illness or looking at a hideous downhill ride in late old age should have a right to end their lives in peace. The rest? Every one of these people needed effective mental health care, and nary a one of them got it.
The answer to the problem of suicide — and to the problem of people like Adam Lanza going on killing sprees — is to fund psychiatrists, medical doctors, antidepressants, antipsychotics, and humane mental hospitals, not to infantilize the entire adult population of the United States.
There’s a limit to how much a culture should protect its members from themselves. This aspect of the question has its parallel in other products from which we’re protected. I find myself now having to remove the caps from every bottle of household cleaner, from every OTC health nostrum, from every pool chemical, from every container of plant fertilizer, from every everything, carry them out to the garage, and break them apart with a hammer so that I can use and re-cap ordinary products that I pay for.
Child-proof caps are consumer-proof caps — they make it difficult and sometimes even impossible to use anything that they’re slapped onto, and they’re slapped onto almost every product we use today. You have to wrestle with these things whether you have a kid in the house or not. Should everyone’s life be restricted because a few people haven’t the sense to keep dangerous products out of children’s reach? Really?
Similarly, should all responsible adults’ lives be restricted because some people are irresponsible, some are criminal, and some are desperate? Or because we’re too cheap to provide universal mental health care and functional mental hospitals? Because we’re too cheap to lift the underclass out of poverty? Because we can’t be bothered to educate people in the skills of common sense?
Really?
Image: SIG Pro semi-automatic pistol. Augustas Didžgalvis. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Very thought-provoking, Funny. I agree with you, for the most part. As for the child proof caps on OTC bottles, I’d say the Tylenol Killer is the reason for those @#$% things. If you don’t remember the Tylenol killings, google them.
Yeah, I do. But the Tylenol lunatic was ONE ISOLATED NUT CASE. We cannot let one isolated crazy dictate national policy, and our lives.
But more on that issue (was on the way out the door when I spotted yours): I think the over-packaging — layer on later on layer of plastic — is the response to the Tylenol lunatic. The child-proof caps are a straightforward effort to cut the number of aspirin and other drug poisonings. Kids used to get into the medicine cabinet and gulp down a bottle, thinking the pills were candy, before a parent realized what they were up to.
When I was a little girl, I ate a whole bottle of aspirin. And once when my dear mother-in-law was visiting, she knocked a medicine cabinet off the wall (don’t ASK!), and before my DH could put it back up, our kid slipped in there, opened the door, and swallowed about half a bottle of prescription Chlortrimeton. That was fun!
That notwithstanding, I still think it’s the parents’ responsibility to keep meds and toxic chemicals out of the kiddies’ reach. It was my mother’s, and it was ours. Fortunately neither kid was permanently harmed — not always the case when that sort of thing happens.
Because so many adults find the consumer-proof lids difficult and annoying, many of us simply take the lids off and leave them off. Or transfer the pills into another type of container with a usable lid. So by and large the lids do the job only in homes where parents are responsible enough types that they probably would have kept the drugs or cleaning goods out of reach anyway.