The topic in Something to Think About is “Gun Control or Mental Health.” The mass shooting at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, or those in Oregon, Arizona, an earlier shooting in Colorado, Connecticut and unfortunately other locations were not seen as acts of terrorism but involved people alleged to have serious mental illness.
Amid the public mourning came the fight over gun control. However, is it the lack of gun control legislation that causes these horrific acts or is it the state of federal mental health policy? Has the national mental health system been ruined, as some would say, by 50 years of bad policy and oversight that fails to identify and help the severely ill? Are we once again seeing a problem of politics that sees mental illness as a diversion from a gun control agenda? What is a more substantive approach to dealing with the problem of non-terror related mass shootings?
