It doesn't seem that long since I wrote an editorial regarding the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, or the Gabby Giffords shooting before that. In the aftermath of the Newtown, Connecticut school shooting, which has left 26 dead—including 18 little kids—trying to imagine how such events can be prevented from happening again has become a topic of national discussion that crowds out all others. That is, until the Christmas holiday arrives, and then New Year's, by which point the three-week attention span of the public will have been exhausted and most of us will have moved on to the next source of media-fueled outrage.
Predictably, the Newtown massacre has kick-started an energetic discussion on gun control. It would have done so anyway, but that the shooter used a Bushmaster .223—essentially the civilian model of the same assault rifles our own military uses—made it impossible for anybody with even a mild inkling to discuss gun control not to weigh in. My personal feed on Facebook went nuts over it; there was so much commentary, I could practically feel my laptop heating up from it all.
As a lot of my friends passionately argued for and against gun control, my take was that gun control for the purposes of preventing more spree killings was treating the symptom and not the disease. The disease, both figuratively and literally, is mental illness. Generally speaking, the vast majority of mass shootings and spree killings done in recent years have been carried out by individuals who were most likely mentally ill. We can argue all we like over whether or not a three-round magazine cap limit on all firearms regardless of type or caliber will really keep spree killers from killing so many people. We can argue all we like over whether or not having more guns in society will make it more or less likely for citizens to halt a shooting in progress. None of it addresses why spree shooters ever think to pick up a gun in the first place. And until we address that, the gun control discussion, as worthy as it is, merely distracts us.
Now, can gun control and mental health care be addressed at the same time? Yes. Unfortunately, people seem fond of pointing to one or the other as the greater problem, thereby negating any need to address the problem they are defending. I have seen this aplenty with gun advocates who simply point to addressing mental illness not out of a concern for addressing mental illness, but because it's a handy straw man to absorb attention away from gun control. This in turn, discredits the call to address mental health in the eyes of gun control advocates. Very rapidly everybody's priorities get a bit out of whack.
Here's the thing with mental illness: for many people in this country, their health insurance is a thin and solitary lifeline to getting the treatment they need to remain a balanced and productive member of society. For a lot of people with a mental illness, the insurance they have is simply insufficient to cover the costs of their treatment. It's a bit like having coverage for only 33 percent of your chemotherapy; just enough for you to understand how much trouble you really are in. PPACA has introduced some meaningful mental health care parity, but for a lot of folks, it has come too little, too late. After all, there is still Newtown. There will be another Newtown. And another. And another. And another. At some point, we have to ask ourselves if mental health care is being adequately financed for those who need it most. If it is, then what can be done to ensure that those who need it actually get it? And if it is not, then how to we make sure that the product is adequately structured, priced and delivered so that mental health is treated with the same intensity of resources as heart disease, cancer, or any other major ailment? Difficult questions. No easy answers. But we need to come up with some. And we need to do it now.
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