Culture, Mental Health, and Guns

The Democrats focus solely on gun control, perhaps because it is easier for them to mess with our Constitution than to grapple with the mental health and cultural issues that underlie most mass shootings.

The Dayton shooter (a Leftist and Elizabeth Warren supporter by the way) had problems since middle school.  His classmates say they knew and even said he would shoot someone someday.  The manifesto of the El Paso shooter, while perhaps in part couched in the language of a white supremacist, reeks of hopelessness and despair from a young man who feels that he is ignored and forgotten and has no future.

These shootings were less political acts than they are screams of hopelessness and despair from young men who mentally could not cope in a culture that overwhelmed them while ignoring their mental issues.   Lost young men who turned to the internet and a violent culture for solace and for guidance on what to do – how to act out their hurt and despair.  By the time they got their guns they were well into some sort of downward spiral of depression and hate.  Feeling alone and unloved, they lashed out.

Let us ask not only how could we have prevented them from obtaining a gun at that point, but more importantly, what could we as a society have done to prevent them from getting to that point? 

Barbara Bush once said, “You must read to your children and you must hug your children and you must love your children. Your success as a family, our success as a society, depends not on what happens in the white house, but on what happens inside your house.” 

No, I am not blaming parents for mass shootings conducted by their children.  But this quote does suggest that we, our societal family, need to look at what sort of a culture we are creating for our children.  Are we teaching them how to cope with the heartaches and disappointments of life?  Are we showing them non-violent methods of addressing conflict?  Are we loving them and teaching them how to love and respect others as well as themselves?  Are we treating them fairly?  Are we paying attention and when someone needs professional help are we reaching out to find that help?  Or, are we simply willing to stand by and ignore cultural problems and related mental health issues until they erupt in an individual’s heinous act of violence, and then satisfy ourselves by blaming the white house and the weapon?

Clearly, with the 2020 election on the horizon and the ever-present hatred of Donald Trump, the Democrats are happy to make the Dayton and El Paso shootings nothing more than a political battle sword in their never ceasing war on the President.  This is not helpful. 

Yes, we have guns in America.  We also have the second amendment.  And, we have a variety of gun control regulations (including those put in place by President Trump).  But these things have been present in our society long before Trump took office.  And we have had mass shootings throughout our history. 

We can argue about what types of guns can and should be restricted and what individuals should not be allowed a gun, but we need to go well beyond that.  As the President said in his speech yesterday, we need to look at culture and at mental health.  We need to address the underlying causes.

Teenagers and young adults (and others) have long struggled with angst and despair as they grow up and begin to face the world and its many realities, some pleasant, some not.  Children act out when they are hurt or confused or troubled or simply not getting what they want.  We used to teach children as they grew that such behavior of acting out, especially when it hurt anyone else (or themselves) was not acceptable.  We taught them other ways to cope.

Yet our culture today seems to fail to provide coping skills other than destructive acting out.  Are our growing teens learning how to cope with life’s disappointments  and their own sadness and depressions without hurting others?  Have we taught them how to deal with a situation in which they do not get what they want, how to respond constructively rather than destructively?  Do we show them examples of people treating other people with respect, or do the movies, music, and other entertainment teach them disrespect and violence?  Do we find a way to give our children hope rather than hopelessness, a strength rather than an emptiness in their soul?

We cannot change a culture overnight.  But we can begin to examine ours and ask the hard questions of what we are doing, what are we teaching our children, and what does that mean for our society.  We need to do this, to ask these hard questions.  And we need to do it with an open mind, with a non-political mind, a mind that truly seeks to make any necessary corrections in the path of our society.  But, as long as the Democrats want to make this a political weapon, that is not likely to occur. 

So, we will argue about gun laws.  We will hear the Democrats blame Trump for all the evils of the country and the world, call him racist, and continue their one-sided hatred and vitriolic language against him, his supporters, the office of president, and ultimately the country.

Meanwhile, we, as families and neighbors and citizens, can ignore the political firestorm and ask ourselves how our culture is contributing to underlying causes of violence and we can demand that our elected officials, our media, our entertainment industry, and ourselves go beyond the means and address those underlying causes.