I'm still not blogging as much as I want to be, but I am doing better with my writing, and expect to publish my novels with Kindle Direct Publishing before the end of April. Exciting stuff.
This particular entry has been percolating since the Parkland shooting on February 14. I am sick and tired of people talking about mental illness when it involves mass shootings.
I don't think these mass shooters are mentally ill. I think they have embraced hate to such an extent that they are evil. Not sick. Not redeemable. Evil.
My religious side rejects my previous paragraph. My spiritual side demands that anyone can choose to embrace the light, embrace the good, and be redeemed.
My pragmatic side says no.
Mental illness shouldn't even be a term. Illness covers it. Whether you have a brain, or a heart, or a respiratory system, or an endocrine system, or a digestive system that is working in such a way that your quality of life is negatively impacted, that system or organ should be treated so that you can enjoy a good quality of life. The very term mental illness carries a connotation that is offensive. So let's just stop using it.
I completely understand that gun violence and depression have a correlation. I understand that gun violence and inappropriate anger management have a correlation. I understand that gun violence and hopelessness have a correlation.
To fix the gun violence problem in America, we have to find an answer to how to provide appropriate health care to every person in America. Without creating a financial burden that in and of itself will provide a correlation with gun violence.
But we have to stop with making excuses of any kind for mass shooters.
They are hateful. They have embraced hate of the other, whoever they perceive the other to be. Now that we have caught a couple, and not had them die in the act of cowardice that took multiple lives, we are able to study them, and find they have no remorse. If anything, they are only sorry they didn't get the chance to kill more people.
So let's stop pretending it is anything other than what it is. Some people have been raised to be full of anger and hate. Some people gravitate towards anger and hate, and seek out like minded people.
It doesn't really matter how they got there. Whether it is nature or nurture, some people choose hate. They choose anger. They choose violence.
These are not the same as people who in desperation take a gun and kill themselves or their loved ones. They are not the same as people who accidentally shoot a family member showing them a new weapon. They are not the same people whose children shoot each other because a weapon was inappropriately stored or secured. They are not the people who discharge a weapon in self-defense.
We need to stop pretending that gun violence in America is one problem that will have one solution. It is a multi-faceted problem that will take a complex solution set.
That is why the Centers for Disease Control need to study gun violence and its outcomes, both injury and illness. Once we have the data, we can start to parse it, and find out the subsets of gun violence, and seek to understand the chains of cause and effect that can be interrupted to stop this plague in America.
As for the mass shooters? If we can keep weapons of war and high capacity ammunition magazines out of their hands, perhaps we can limit their carnage. How to prevent them? I just don't know. In the study of human history, it seems we have always had those who choose evil, who choose to do harm rather than good.
The struggle of good versus evil is the most enduring story of humanity. It seems that certain nations and cultures manage that struggle in their populations better than America does. Arguably, some cultures and nations have an even more apparent struggle between the two forces.
I afraid that until America gets serious about doing something about the proliferation of guns and the celebration of violence as a problem solving technique, we are going to continue going in a terrible direction. I hope I'm wrong.
