It does not make sense that this country is not working
feverishly to improve the mental health system when it accounts for so many gun
deaths. In all the mass shootings from
columbine to Newtown’s Sandy Hook Elementary School, this predictable demon
continues to raise its ugly head and kill innocent people. In the case of Newtown, 20 little children only
six and seven. There are two groups that
will always get guns somehow, the mentally ill and the bad guys, but we must at
least make it harder for each to obtain the weapons with which they do their
destruction.
As an example, just a few days ago, Christian Oberender from Minnesota was arrested for having an arsenal of guns in
his home including an AK-47 assault rifle.
He was able to get a gun permit just last year and build this arsenal of
12 weapons in less than a year. The
catch is that at age 14, in 1995, he had killed his mother with a shotgun,
shooting her five times. Oberender was
determined to be mentally ill and dangerous at the time and was placed in an
institution for an extended stay. He has
again been diagnosed with a serious mental illness and “potential
schizophrenia.”
Here’s an example of his ramblings in a letter from
Oberender to his mother thought to have been recently written:
“I am so homicide,'' and "I think about killing all the time. The monster want out. He only been out one time and someone die.''
Minnesota has a law that requires sending mental health
records to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). Either the state was negligent in its
transfer of the data, or those approving gun permits were negligent in either
receiving or retrieving the data. In any
case, this is a prime example of how the system failed and must be fixed.
Excellent video from Bloomberg on guns and mental health:
Former Arkansas Gov. and presidential contender Mike
Huckabee believes that since "we have systematically removed God from our
schools, should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of
carnage?" This is the kind of crap
you would expect from a conservative trying to take the focus off gun
control. Michael Kimmel on CNN said, “As if those heathen children deserved it?” Kimmel also reminds us that almost all the
recent mass murderers targeting non-work settings—like schools—were middle
class white boys. Not from the ghetto. From upscale middle America.
Here are some more facts that Kimmel has collected. Men and boys are responsible for 95% of all violent crimes and there is concern why so many of these young mass murderers are white. While black kids are killing each other in the ghettos, it “seems to be nearly the exclusive province of white boys to so dramatically expand the range of their revenge and seek to destroy the entire world, not simply the person or group that committed the supposed offense.” Not that race and gender are the primary concern; that remains the lax gun laws and mental illness.
So the only conclusion to be reached here is
that a combination of federal and state laws must be enacted that will require
the reporting of the mental health records of those people affected to NCIS and
any other appropriate databases that are involved in determining whether or not
a person should possess a firearm. The
laws must be stringent enough to discourage any lax participation by those
charged with enforcement resulting in the proper punishment for those who don’t
comply. Only then will we be secure in
at least knowing we’ve done all we can.
