I posted an article yesterday about the experiences of a mother who knew her child was dangerous and struggled with that child daily, without meaningful support from the rest of society. The mother in the article that I posted called the cops to help with her son twice, but if that intervention had gone wrong, her son picked up a knife or gun and was killed, she would blame herself until her dying breath.
Inexplicably, the Lanza mother went from fearing her son to having guns within his reach. Maybe she started by buying a gun to protect her from a violent son, but I fail to see how a mother could pull a trigger on her son. None of us know what went on during the last seconds of the Lanza mother's life. May be she did attempt to stop her son. May be she had a gun drawn on him but could not pull the trigger, allowing to take the gun and kill her. We will never know. As things now stand, she was a person that enabled a monster.
I have read post on Du that range from no action on guns to taking all guns away from the public. The reasonable solution is somewhere in between. Millions of sane people like guns, shooting guns, taking guns apart, hunting. Many people like the rush that comes from shooting an assault rifle. To the no guns people, you aren't going to take away people's guns, this comes from a person that doesn't own a gun and see no reason for owning one. To the people that always cry Second Amendment when regulation of guns come up, get a fucking clue, the Founders of the country lived during a time when most of the people lived on farms or in small towns and the only mode for raising an army was to bring together farmers and small townspeople and their guns, we have a professional fucking military to protect us now and most of us live in cities and suburbs where a trained cop is minutes away. My solution is multi-fold.
First, we must address the destruction of mental health care in this country, we are letting dangerous people on to the street and not addressing issues like the Lanza mother faces or the woman of a mentally ill teen, whose story I posted yesterday. We need to make it easier to institutionalize mentally ill people and build institutions for those people that are safe and allow them to live as normal a life as possible while they get professional care. We must not tolerate any abuse of people in institutions and must insure that only caring, professional people work with them - if there is abuse, we must investigate, take appropriate action and then make reforms to insure the abuse doesn't happen again.
Second, we must pass and implement uniform federal laws that cover background checks, gun registration and owner control of guns. The first two should be logical no brainers, even though now, they aren't. The third is more problematic because if not done properly would put owners at risk of lawsuits or jail time when they had taken proper pre-cautions, but because of circumstances they could not control, their guns were taken and used in a crime or mass killing. Every gun owner should know where their guns are and perform frequent checks on the guns to insure they are secure. But people travel, if the guns are taken while the person is away and used in a crime, that person shouldn't be subject to the same fines and penalties that a careless gun owner should face. EVERYONE that owns registered guns should be expected to report their theft as soon as the owners become aware that guns have gone missing.
Third, as a society, we must get serious about bullying and insure that children and people are not bullied or singled out because they are different or physically weaker than others. We must teach children that being a bully is not about being strong.
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