Tags
gun violence, guns, Herman Taylor III, mental health, mental illness, Newtown, Open Carry Texas, UCSB
I believe the actual title from The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler is “A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant and a Prayer”, but I have only encompassed three of those.
Here I was, sitting at my computer getting ready to write about Food Stamps at Farmers Markets, when I was scrolling my Facebook feed and I saw that there was yet ANOTHER school shooting, this time at a high school in Oregon. My immediate thoughts: you have got to be freaking kidding me. Then I went and did some sickening research: there have been 74 school shootings since the Newtown massacre in December of 2012. That list doesn’t include incidents of guns being brought to school and not fired, or shootings that have happened near schools (UCSB). It doesn’t include public mass shootings, lockdown orders, or shelter orders. Half of those shootings have occurred in 2014 alone. We haven’t even hit the halfway point of the year.
You would think that since mass shootings have ramped up since 2012, the legislation would follow. To put it simply, it hasn’t.
How can we keep allowing this to happen? The President has come out and said that we “Need to do some soul-searching”, but that has not come with any legislative action.
So why is gun violence a public-health issue?
First of all, people die from gun violence, which is preventable, so if we are to view a preventable cause of death in the typical framework, it ultimately comes back to being a part of public health.
Second of all, gun violence is not merely an individual issue; it is a societal issue. Guns do not kill people; improper background checks, and people who should not have guns kill people. We aren’t looking at these shooters as suffering from mental illness, and aren’t examining the legislation for lack of fail-safes for preventing guns from getting into these people’s hands in the first place. The lack of care we take for our population’s mental health is abysmal. We need to get to the route of the problem: prevention of people with mental illnesses getting guns in the first place.
This isn’t even taking into account the deregulation of gun laws in the US. Texas has new law on the books, called “Open-Carry Texas”, or colloquially, the “guns everywhere” law. This law allows any person (with a registered gun of course) to have guns basically anywhere they want, including airports pre-TSA. Obviously, we are guaranteed the right to bear arms by the Constitution. However, the founding fathers wanted to ensure this so if a tyranny ever arose, the people could over throw it. They weren’t really thinking about a couple of guys going into a Chipotle with automatic weapons just because they could.
So what can we do?
Here are my suggestions:
1. Close the gun show loophole. As it stands in several states, anyone with a valid ID can go to a gun show and buy a gun sans proper background checks. By preventing this, we can make sure all gun sales are LEGAL and go through the proper channels.
2. Increase the wait time for gun sales, and go deeper in background checks. I believe it would be prudent for medical records to be looked into to see signs of mental illness. Obviously, this would create huge HIPAA issues, but we could definitely take software and scan records for key words relating to these types of issues.
3. Make the process for gaining automatic weapons more stringent. These are the weapons that have the most “killing power”. If we make these processes more intensive, we will ensure that they will only be getting into the completely correct hands.
The memory part? I was 14 when the first kid from my high school was shot. I went to school in quiet suburbia, and this rocked all of our collective worlds, and really brought the discussion out of the inner city. When something finally hits close to home, it really makes the entire population think. And as school shootings increase, it’s going to have cause for more and more people to think?
Oh and the prayer? I pray that we wisely revise our legislature. I pray that no family should ever worry about their child in the streets of their neighborhood. And I pray that no parent should ever have pause at sending their child to school.
-ART