NOTE: This is not directed at anyone or anything said here, but I will use some examples said here just as starting points. Mental health and suicide are a hard thing to come to grips with. My wife was placed into a hospital 18 years ago because she was planning to kill herself and has been in the hospital once again about 12 years ago just for precautions. I have struggled with it daily since and have had hard time understanding it where it comes from and why. And as I have come to understand it, it isn't because she is sad, or mad or depressed. Everyone gets sad, mad and depressed. But she has depression, which is a different thing all together. Someone else I know described it as carrying a giant weight around, and it keeps you in bed, exhausted and with no will to get up and do anything. And it is constant and it is a form of pain that cannot be seen or detected with a machine, yet is just as bad as a liver tumor that is wracking the body with unbearable pain. Until you just cannot stand the pain any longer. This was put sadly, yet wonderfully, by one of the daughters of Naomi Judd when she said "our mother lost her battle with mental illness today". I had never heard it put that way, but it is true. It is no different than cancer or heart disease. It is a killer and the person, while we might say "made the choice", really didn't have a choice, or they wouldn't do it. It has taken me nearly 20 years of living with this daily to come to this understanding. I just felt compelled to say this today. Thank you.
I heard an interesting discussion around bipolar the other day. You always hear someone diagnosed as "xxxx is bipolar." Yet you never hear anyone with another disease described as being the disease (i.e., xxx is cancer.) I will never describe anyone as being bipolar anymore. They have bipolar disorder.
No, it’s primarily guns. Senator Murphy said it best -“ Spare me the bullshit of mental illness. We’re not an outlier on mental illness, we’re an outlier on firearms.”
Now that I am off of my soapbox, let me weigh in on the topic at hand, suicides counted as gun violence. I am on the fence about counting suicide by gunshot wound counting as gun violence. I think of violence as something you do to someone else, not necessarily yourself. If a person didn't have guns, they would hang themselves, jump off a bridge, overdose, etc, and they would still be dead. The reduction in deaths would be negligible, I think. Whereas gun control to stop violence against others will help reduce, imho, the carnage we see with these mass shootings. A baseball bat or knife can kill a lot of people, yes, but you can run from those. You cannot really run from a guy with a rifle. I think the reduction in mass deaths would be dramatic. just my 2 cents.
Nothing can be done with guns, and won't, even if this became a daily occurrence. The 2A isn't going anywhere, even with a convention, and this court is set for at least another decade. States can try to do what they can, but they'll fail worse now than 2 years ago. Take whatever solution you think should be done, on any side of the isle, and you'll find it's locked up: Increased funding for education to secure classrooms (education funding always cut). Guns (been tried, loses in federal court) Healthcare (private industry) Law enforcement (needed to send people to jail for drugs, since no medical facilities for addiction) Any others?
Are you saying that if we aren't willing to do anything different, nothing changes? One thing that comes to mind is people changing how they think. We are more concerned with being inconvenienced personally for sure than maybe having our child murdered.
Something in our society will have to change, yes. Something major to how we do things. And major changes are not something that Americans do well, and when done, done slowly. Guns aren't going anywhere, education isn't going to be super funded, law enforcement will always be otherwise occupied, even if we had full mental health funding, Americans view it as fake. So...
Probably the same number that were bullied out of them. I don't think kids self select out of social interactions. There is a reason.
If you want to decrease school shootings then you have to ban guns completely and take away the ones people already own.
we’ve seen people just bring multiple loaded guns. Im all for banning anything I’m just not convinced it will do much
I don't believe any of this. This dude bought his weapons on his 18th birthday. In this instance, that isn't true
I’m not either. But a more stringent gun ban is a nonstarter in this country. Ban high capacity mags and make people work harder to get a gun (there are other countries we can copy on this part). That’s where you start, imo.
We pretend like there is only a ban/take guns lever and nothing else that could be done to deter these dipshits from procuring weapons as easily as hotdogs from 7/11.
we have much stricter gun laws in California and we don’t have less school shootings. Bunch of these situations have been parents guns too. I’m all for making it harder to get, but those laws don’t seem to work.
Agree. Hell, let's just do something to make it more difficult. One or two actions aren't going to solve this issue. However, we have to stop looking at this as an all or nothing; take some meaningful steps, even if small. Throwing our hands up isn't the answer
Bullied out of art club, math club, chess club, FCA, band, drama club, robotics, science club and all team sports, etc? I don’t agree. And kids do self select out of social interactions. I have 2 which have
You do have less than Texas, per capita. That's a fact. 4.5 school shootings per million vs 4.2 since 1970, just did the math myself.
