What Can Be Done?

Like everyone who doesn’t have to cover events for a news organization, I’ve been stunned to silence by the events in Newtown, Connecticut.

It was, I’m afraid, inevitable that something like this would happen. Just by dint of reporting on mass killings, we glorify the demented perpetrators, who then become models for the next madman priming himself to go ballistic.

What exactly is to be done to bring a stop to these horrific events?  Locking the doors didn’t help — this one used his long gun to blast his way through a locked door into the school.

Before the stench of gunpowder had cleared from the air, the hue and cry for gun control rose from all quarters. Not surprisingly: it makes some sense to believe that if no one had guns, the insane among us would be unable to hurt anyone. And it is true that the crazies in China who have to use knives to attack grade-school children so far have failed to kill their victims.

Not enough is being said in this discussion, which understandably still borders on the hysterical, about the weak mental health care we have in this country. We closed mental hospitals and, in a well-meaning (and conveniently cost-saving) impulse did away with involuntary hospitalization of the mentally ill. But we do still institutionalize the conspicuously mentally ill: in prisons.

If you’ve ever tried to get mental health care for someone who needed it urgently, you likely came up against a wall. One of my son’s high-school friends locked himself inside a bedroom and told his parents he was going to kill himself. They called 9-1-1, begging for someone to send help before he harmed himself. The police showed up. They smashed in the door, grabbed the kid (who was not very large), slammed him against a wall, handcuffed him, and roughed him up. Great treatment for a mental health emergency.

Dealing with the problem we’ve built for ourselves — violent behavior of unhinged individuals inspired by atrocities committed by other demented individuals — demands a complex response, and it will cost a lot of money.

First: Yes, gun control.

We must get automatic and semiautomatic weapons out of civilian hands. These things are now ubiquitous — on any balmy spring or fall evening that tempts me to open my windows, the tat-tat-tat of automatic gunfire wafts in from the war zone to the north of my neighborhood, and occasionally I’ll hear it closer, from the hectic main drags that form borders between my area and the blight to the north and west, as people shoot at each other in moments of road rage.

No one who is not on the field of battle needs a weapon that fires continuously when you rest your finger on the trigger. This is is a weapon of aggression, not of self-defense. Nor is it a hunting tool: if you can’t hit a deer, an elk, or a dove without an automatic weapon, you are not a good enough marksman to be waving a gun around in the woods. And  as for the burglar: the weapon of choice is an ordinary shotgun.

But taking semiautomatic and automatic firearms off the streets presents an almost insurmountable problem. Many of the things are owned by bad guys. They’re freely available on the black market, and nobody who has one that’s not registered will blithely turn it in on demand. Make owning it a felony? Big deal: committing felonies is a crook’s bread & butter. Too, semiautomatic and automatic guns are expensive. Many legitimate gun owners buy them as investments. No one who has ponied up $500 to $1,000 for a semi is going to cheerfully fork it over to Big Brother.

To rein in these weapons, governments will have to reimburse owners. Thousands of Americans own semiautomatic weapons — one source claims 17% of us do. Fully automatic firearms, which contrary to popular belief are not illegal in this country, cost even more than semis: thousands of dollars. No one who has an unregistered gun is going to hand it over to a government agent for free, nor will citizens who bought their weapons after registration became the law. Many may do so if owning the thing becomes illegal and a buy-back program is put in place. But some people will simply hide their weapons in the walls.

Second: Mental health care

Everyone now knows that access to quality health care is highly problematic in this country. If you don’t have a full-time job or you can’t afford expensive health insurance out of pocket, you have a difficult time getting to a doctor.

Take that situation and multiply it by five, and you’ve got a good picture of our mental health care.

We need to stop using our prisons as mental health hospitals, ensure access to and quality of health care of all kinds, and see to it that people who clearly have mental problems receive adequate and effective care.

That also is going to cost a lot of money. In a time when political leaders are trying to cut back (or one day eliminate) Medicare and Medicaid and when half our elected leaders throw sh!tfits over anything that vaguely resembles an effective national healthcare system, it’s unlikely we will muster the political will to spend what it will take to identify and treat even the most obvious mental cases.

Third: The tenor of “entertainment”

Americans marinate in violence. We think it’s entertaining. Turn on the television any time after about 7 or 8  p.m. You get two choices of  viewing pleasure: mind-numbingly stupid or mind-numbingly violent. The crime dramas that fill prime time are the only alternative to watching amateur singers compete or foolish people indulge in stupefyingly idiotic “reality show” antics, and those crime shows, whose plots are often taken from the news, are so bloody and so violent as to turn your stomach.

Except they don’t. We’ve become so inured to violence that we think it’s a game. Indeed, it’s the stuff of the very computer games our children and teenagers play every day. Is it any wonder that unstable individuals are primed to descend into madness?

All three of these issues cry out for change, and in my opinion the only way we will free ourselves from increasingly horrifying outbreaks of madness will be to open the national wallet and address each issue in a big way.