Today, I read about a young man with a gun who shit down a mall in New Jersey. Earlier I read about a young man with a gun who murdered a TSA agent and shut down LAX. These are just the latest two in a depressing, and unending string of gun enabled incidents.
Every generation has some apparently fixed percentage of certifiable lunatics. Instead of finding a way to treat mental illness effectively, which I believe is within our ability, we chose, and continue to choose, exclusion, stigmatization, and jail. Some of them, and I believe the Aurora and Navy Yard shooters were among them, even recognize that there’s something wrong, and TRY, but fail, to get help.
The way in which homicidal maniacs go off the rails–frequently in their late teens and early twenties–is depressingly recognizable: recruited by, nourished by, and enabled by the hateful bigots in our society, and enabled by the NRA to purchase virtually unlimited caches of lethal weapons, they pick out the targets so helpfully identified by the Sarah Palins , Wayne LaPierres, and hate speech radio talking heads, point their legally acquired weapons at them, and kill then.
At that point, the enablers of this violence wring their hands and say MORE guns are the answer.
It needs to stop.
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