Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School this week. We are deeply disturbed at this continuing trend of violence across our country. We are equally disturbed that our government has been unable to cross partisan boundaries and work together to restrain the evil and shrink the violence.
This is more than guns and more than mental health. We can certainly do more in those areas. But, we must fundamentally remember that this issue is an issue of the heart.
Ultimately, we have to find ways to determine those whose hearts are going astray and heading down the path of escalating violence. Those people need help or, if refusing that help, need to be stopped from obtaining firearms that remain legal for the rest of us.
There have to be ways we can approach this sensibly. What if we treat the privilege of owning and operating a gun in a similar fashion to owning and operating a car? With the requirements for training, storage, reselling / re-titling, insurance, etc. that may help prevent guns getting into the hands of the wrong people. For mental illness what if we stopped treating this as a second-class sickness and approached it as seriously as a physical illness. Sometimes I believe there are people who think that folks with mental illness are really choosing their plight when the situation may be a little bit more complicated than that.
What if we had a way where people who kept “losing guns” were revoked their privilege of ownership? What if we revoked the privilege for people who had a track record of violence (until a reasonable amount of time past as decided by the average US Citizen)?
I’m not a social scientist by any means but I do have a sense that we can do better here.
One thing is for sure…I know we MUST!