Eighteen (TWENTY now)

This is my blog.  It belongs to me.  I can write what I want to and not have the same level of public that Facebook has.

So here goes.

Eighteen babies -- twenty-seven people altogether -- died today because a mentally ill man had a gun in his hands.  Reports are early.  Maybe there were two shooters.  Maybe more than twenty-seven people died.  Maybe the shooter wasn't mentally ill.  Maybe he was just having a really bad day/week/month/year/season of life.  That level of reaction and violence speaks to mental illness, though.

So here's my rant.

If he hadn't had a gun those children might have only been injured and not killed.  Maybe the number would be lower.  No matter the mental state and motive of the perpetrator, you cannot kill as many people as easily with a knife or any other weapon as you can with a gun.  You cannot kill them from as far of a distance and you cannot kill them as easily without training.

A gun in the hand of an imbalanced person is a dangerous, dangerous thing.  A knife in the same hands isn't nearly as dangerous.

Mental health services in our culture are abysmal.  For people with money who want treatment, it is there and wonderful.  For people without money who are perfectly content to live in their delusion, it is next to impossible to get help.  Parents, spouses, adult children cry out for help for loved ones and hit brick walls over . . . and over . . . and over.

I don't have answers.  I have absolutely none.  I see the problems, though.  It's way too easy to get a gun.  It's way too hard to get mental health services.

Surely . . . surely there's a way to change at least one of those problems.