Emotions are still raw from Friday’s shooting in Sandy Hook. We want explanations. That’s natural. The media and legal system will examine Adam Lanza’s history and mental health in detail in the coming weeks, but in the final accounting, those answers may be inconclusive and unsatisfying.
Certainly none will come from politicians who jumped into the fray to capitalize on this. Less than an hour after the first reports, the Brady Campaign sent out a press release calling for new legislation. Dianne Feinstein and Charles Schumer spoke of it “finally being time” and of this incident serving as a “tipping point” before we even knew the exact name of the shooter or what weapons he’d actually used.
The “conversation” we keep hearing the pundits bandy about on the evening news isn’t any such thing. It’s a set of canned talking points and legislative proposals that predated this massacre. The new laws being pushed are the same old laws that get reintroduced every year. What’s different now? Twenty dead children. To them, that’s a tremendous amount of political capital, and they’re going to use it to their advantage.
That’s a predatory and disgusting sort of opportunism. We don’t need to engage it, and if Bob Schieffer doesn’t understand why we wouldn’t want to jump into the fray so soon, I’m truly sorry for him.
But this debate is only tangentially about guns. The real conversation we need to be having is about mental illness and how wretched our treatment of it is in this country. We stigmatize those who suffer from it, we dope them up, we punish them, or we simply ignore them. It’s no wonder that some veer into deviant or violent behavior.
Then we wring our hands. We ask the politicians to placate us with laws that don’t address the underlying problem, and to do so at a time it’s impossible to approach such matters with a clear head. How sane is that?
3 thoughts on “A Time to Mourn”
Well said, Eric. Mental illness in this country are constantly swept under the rug. Instead of , you know, actually treating guys, with PTSD, the VA justs wants to take away a vet’s rights to own guns and not address the multiple tours, stringent ROEs, horrid commanders, and concussions that cause it.
What is being talked about is not the same old thing. Mental health as a component of background checks is mentioned alongside most of what I’m hearing about guns right now.
It trivializes the dead to say nothing. If that’s the case we would never speak of those we lose at all and learn nothing, change nothing. It’s painful, but we really must confront this.
The dean of the national cathedral said in an interview, essentially, that something like this happens and everyone says not yet, we need to grieve. Then in two or three days of grieving the narrative changes and we go back to not talking about it.
Then steel our nerves for the next mass shooting.
Mental health is already a component of the background check. In fact, Lanza attempted to buy a gun at retail earlier in the week, and he was denied on the check. That system worked; it simply didn’t stop him. He then resorted to theft at murder to procure the guns he used. We have laws against those acts as well.
I’m not implying that we shouldn’t talk about the dead or the incident. We should. However, turning the issue into politics minutes after the incident is in poor taste. Schumer and Feinstein weren’t greiving for these kids. Their proposals aren’t written in memorial for these kids. This was simply a political opportunity for them.
That’s what disgusts me, and that’s what we don’t need to encourage. This won’t be solved by banning tools. All that does is punish the 100 million or so gun owners who don’t harm anyone. Criminals and the mentally ill will ignore those laws in any case.
As long as we leave the underlying causes unaddressed, we might as well do nothing.