On June 30th of this year, America achieved a milestone that set this year apart from previous years. And no, it had nothing to do with eating contests or Celebrity Jeopardy. No, this had everything to do with how many mass killings we achieved in the first half ot this year. We had 28 mass killings (more than four deaths in one instance) wheras in 2006, we had 27.
27 of those deaths involved guns (4 of which involved AR-15s) and one involved an arson, so this could easily be one of those articles about how guns are out of control. But I’m going to spare you from that. Instead, I want to talk about something more important, a factor that we should have been talking about a long time ago.
I’m talking about mental health.
One thing I’ve always found to be interesting is that after one of these minor massacres, politicians tend to stake them out on specific platforms. Liberals will generally commit themselves to the idea that guns need to either be removed or regulated while conservatives will pretend guns don’t exist at all and say either we need more thoughts and prayers or they will talk about the need for mental health focus.
And then they’ll never mention mental health again.
The reality is that we need mental health coverage and focus for a lot of people who have been targeted as needing such coverage, but in reality that costs money, and one thing conservatives won’t do is spend money, unless it’s to cover defense spending.
And while liberals are generally for mental health coverage, they’re generally not interested in focusing on it as long as their energy is centered on controlling or eliminating guns.
The biggest problem we seem to be facing is that neither side is capable of focusing on more than one issue at a time. But it shouldn’t be hard to see that if we started to focusing on mental health, we might solve one of the bigger problems that has reared in American society.
Let’s look at mental health in recent history: In 1967, the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act allowed for those struggling with mental health to be placed in mental hospitals in hopes of improving their mental health. But there were a lot of problems during this period, including horrible methods of treating those in custody. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter created a presidential commission on mental health with the idea of reforming a lot of these procedures. In 1981, when Ronald Reagan became president, he ended the Lanterman-Petris Short Act and pretty much kicked all of the people with mental health issues back onto the streets. Today, we don’t have much of a process with dealing with mental health issues unless police or medical officials can get a patient to admit that he or she intended to cause someone else or themselves some type of bodily harm. Then, and only then, can they admit someone into a medical facility as a danger to themselves.
That’s where we are today and why police services have such a hard time handling risky cases of potential mass killings. Their hands are tied, and the citizens are left fending for themselves.
Unfortunately, the only way to solve this is to either be viligent all the time (which is practically impossible) or for our elected leaders to do something to protect the people. Either this has to happen from Congress, which is the entity that in all theoretical terms should be the one to make such a thing happen. However, the president can do so as well through executive order, although ironically such an order would be constitutionally appealed by members of Congress and then sent to the Supreme Court, which in today’s environment, would probably reject the order on those grounds. That would leave a challenge to the Supreme Court, but if there’s no court case that is making the grounds to the Supreme Court, then they have no grounds to hear one. It is doubtful another fanciful cake bakery case would make its way to the Supreme Court covering this issue, so that’s not an option either.
In the old days we’d argue that if we wanted to get such a thing done, you’d need to write your member of Congress, but our country now exists within a vacuum, meaning that our representatives rarely respond to our interests any more these days, so one can only wonder if the second half of 2023 is going to lead us to reach another zenith in numbers of mass killing deaths.
For context, in 2019, there were 46 mass killings. We’re now at 28, which means we’re 18 away. I hope we don’t continue this trend. But all I have is hope, which isn’t much considering both hopes and prayers haven’t helped us in the first six months of this year.