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. 

If Democrats' Response is One of Hatred, then What?

After the President called for a sensible, multi-phased, and bipartisan attack against the violence and hatred in America, what was the Democrats’ response?  To unleash more partisan and vitriolic hatred against the President, his supporters, and his suggestions. 

Sen. Corey Booker:  “Such a bulls—t soup of ineffective words.”  Rep. Tim Ryan:  “Fck me.”  Responding to his call to stop the glorification of violence and including as one of his points to look at mental illness, Sen. Elizabeth Warren responded, “White supremacy is not a mental illness. We need to call it what it is: Domestic terrorism. And we need to call out Donald Trump for amplifying these deadly ideologies.”  [We should note here that Trump condemned racism and white supremacy along with hatred.]  Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, the Democratic chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee said, ““President Trump’s words today are meaningless.  We know his vile and racist words have incited violence and attacks on Americans.”  Presidential candidate Julian Castro accused the president of serving as a “national spokesperson” for white nationalism. 

Trump commented on the media’s responsibilities; the response of filmmaker Ava DuVernay was, “Nah. News coverage has got to start calling you what you are. A traitor. A liar. A racist. A coward. A fool.”  The Washington Post found criticism in counting of words: “The president used 105 words of his speech to call out the Internet and social media. He spent 80 words condemning racism and hatred.  He also used only 53 words to address access to guns, compared to 62 words on mental illness and evil.” 

The above are just a few of the comments that have occurred in the 3 or so hours following the President’s address this morning.  More will surely come.  And, they do not include the post address commentary by the media and pundits, most of whom decided that the President was lying when he denounced racism and white supremacy, reverting back to their narrative that he is a racist and he is personally responsible for the two tragedies in Dayton and El Paso.  Others focused on the one mistake in an otherwise fine speech – a one time use of Toledo, a different city in Ohio, when it seems that the reference should have been to Dayton.  Note, there has been no similar ridicule for candidate Biden referring to Houston and Michigan where it seems he meant El Paso and Ohio.

These reactions are in complete contrast to the virtue signaling of the Democrats.  They present themselves as warriors against a hate-filled society that is the sole creation of the President.  Yet, since the day that Donald Trump became president, we have heard a constant barrage of hate-filled words directed at him and his supporters.  We have seen Democrats encourage and some act out violence against the President, his supporters, and essentially anyone who does not stand fully with the Democrats.  Even before 2016 it was the Democrats who were using identity politics to foment hatred among the people of our country.

The Democrats have one solution to gun violence – more gun regulation.   While that was one of the points included in Trump’s plan [and, one must note here that Trump’s administration has done more than others to tighten gun laws as well as ban bump stocks], Trump astutely noted that "Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun."  This statement (which underscores the reasons for the other points in the President’s plan of attack), seems to be especially offensive to the Democrats.  Sen. Amy Klobuchar said it was Mr. Trump’s attempt “to avoid truth.”

Apparently, for the Democrats it is easier to banish the means rather than to actually address the problem of causation.  Those that do consider causation at all are content to conclude that Trump is the sole cause; they seem to have forgotten the mass shootings and violence that occurred pre-2016, not to mention the hatred and gun violence that occurs daily all across America.   

The Democrats love to virtue signal that it is not them but the hated conservatives who foment hatred in this country. But the Democrats and their supporters call for hatred and violence daily.  They turn everything into a political weapon against Donald Trump.  The President is correct that beyond gun ownership there is a cultural problem, a social media/internet problem, a mental health problem, and a lack of unity or ability to address issues in a bi-partisan way for the good of the country. 

The Democrats do not want to work together to try to solve underlying social problems that lead to tragic violence such as we saw this past weekend.  They would rather use the violence to condemn a president they do not like; it simply becomes another weapon in their arsenal in their war to remove him from office. 

The President’s address this morning raised some valid points, issues and questions that deserve serious thought and consideration.  He is right that the country needs to come together and work bi-partisanly to address the hatred and violence.  But, when the reaction of the Democrats is to immediately begin spewing more hatred, then one wonders why even bother?

It’s Not About Guns

I don’t know why, but yesterday’s church shooting really got to me.  A small town, people together in church worship.  How can someone walk in, look in their faces and shoot?  I don’t care what the anger or perceived injustice or justification, how can someone look into the eyes of a child or a grandmother or a family and just shoot them all? This was not a rifle from a high-rise being shot across a field, or a truck driven into an anonymous crowd.  This was up close and personal.   There had to be a complete emptiness in this killer’s soul, a lack of all things that we associate with humanity, or at least those things that we used to believe made us human.

Senseless violence.  It happens every day in America.  Sometimes we notice, because it is record-breaking, like yesterday’s church shooting.  Sometimes we don’t, like when it is just a black kid in a Chicago ghetto, or a mother who sells her daughter for drug money, or a man who rapes a child.  But, everyday this country is flooded with acts of inhumanity by someone who calls him or herself human but who has lost the soul that makes them so.

How did so many lose their souls?  How did America lose her soul?  For isn’t that the real problem. We will of course hear the calls for gun control.  But taking away everyone’s guns (even if that were possible) will not heal this broken soul.  Those bent on evil will find ways to carry out their evil intents, whether they have a gun or not.  Tightening gun laws is not a solution (indeed, the church shooter was denied a Texas gun permit, but somehow had a gun anyway).  Guns can be replaced: with knives, with Molotov cocktails, with homemade bombs, with trucks, with any manner of evil and mass destructive devices, directions for which are easily accessible on the internet.

Guns are nothing more than a symptom; they are not the cause.  We tend to look for easy solutions:  get rid of guns; if not guns, then just improve care for mental illness; tell everyone to say something if they see something; etc.  These are all superficial solutions and it is their very superficiality that belies the real problem:  our society has become one of superficiality and in losing depth it has lost its soul; it has become a place where there is a belief in one’s entitlement to immediate gratification, an entitlement to always feel good with a right to act out all feelings, negative and positive.  It has lost its core values, it has lost its soul.

If we really want to stop the violence, not just the mass shootings, but the everyday violence, along with the everyday hatred and anger that we all experience throughout our daily lives, then we need to look beyond the surface.  We need to look beyond the actions to what is causing them.  We have to ask:  What has happened to our soul?  How is it that we are teaching and accepting that feelings and personal gratification are more important than life itself?  What are we teaching and what are we not teaching our children?  What happened to America?

I have a few thoughts.   First, we seem to have lost our belief in anything beyond ourselves.  This is often stated as having lost our belief in God.  But it goes beyond a defined religion to a belief that there is something (whether a defined being or simply some force) that is greater than we humans.  With such a belief comes some sort of value system that among other things instills a respect for life.  Such value systems are more similar than different across nearly all belief systems and can often be in part boiled down into the golden rule:  do unto others as you would have others do unto you.  Implicit in such a belief is a respect for human life.  (Worth noting is that the Texas church shooter was an avowed Atheist who advocated for Atheism).  Beyond the respect for others, is the idea that when there is something more than what we know then life itself tends to take on a greater meaning and with such meaning comes hope.  When there is nothing more, and when life is hopeless, then there is seemingly little to prevent someone from destroying it.

I think that there is an enormous emptiness in many, an emptiness that they try to fill with various forms of gratification and consumerism.  But that emptiness cannot be filled with tangible superficialities.  It needs instead to be filled with intangible faith which with it brings hope and love.  Faith also brings with it a code of conduct that values human life and teaches respect and understanding of others.  This would do far more to end our inhumanity to one another than even the toughest gun laws imaginable.

We exacerbate the loss of a belief in something larger than oneself with the values that we do honor and teach our children.  Self-restraint and responsibility for one’s own actions are largely missing from our moral codes.  Instead, feelings have become a driving force:  competition and striving to do one’s best are often looked down upon because with winners there are losers and losers might have their feelings hurt and no one should ever feel bad.  Of course, if no one should feel bad, that means everyone must feel good.  Restraints on one’s behavior restrict that good feeling, so we become a do whatever you want society.  Thus, we have the current sexual exploitation in Hollywood – both on and off screen.   We have mothers who won’t tell their children NO because it might upset them and make them feel bad.  We have children who are passed from grade to grade without learning because holding them back would hurt their feelings.  We have people who are drug addicted because drugs make them feel good. 

And we have a society that always finds someone to blame, a society in which no one can seem to simply take responsibility for their own actions but rather will find a reason why they are somehow justified – that is, will always find somewhere else to place the blame.  In the same vein we have a large part of society that expects someone else to fix all their problems.  They place the responsibility for their very existence on someone else.

So, where is the responsibility for yesterday’s church shooting.  First and foremost, squarely on the murderer.  Not on the murderer’s weapon of choice.  If we want to stop these sorts of things from happening again, the answer is not simply gun or health care laws, nor is it simply crying for the victims as the media shows their photos, tells their stories, and plays at our heart strings.   We have had guns since the founding of this country; we rarely had mass shootings or the number of senseless non-mass but daily shootings and other violent acts that we have today.  If we want to really change things we need to look deeply within our souls and within the soul of the country itself and ask ourselves what is missing. 

About Gun Control

So, as always after a mass shooting, the calls for gun control begin. 

Now, understand, I am not a fan of guns.  I don’t like hunting; if I’m in danger I’m going to feel a lot more comfortable calling 911 or even just screaming rather than trying to unlock, load, lock, aim, and shoot a firearm.  On the other hand, I have been to a shooting range a few times and really enjoyed the challenge and competition of target shooting (in the same sort of way that one enjoys striving for and getting a strike in bowling; so maybe we could all just go bowling together). 

Nonetheless, it doesn’t really matter whether or not I favor guns, because we have the Second Amendment which provides for the right to bear arms.  I don’t particularly like this amendment, but, then, there are people who don’t seem to particularly like the first amendment or various other parts of the Constitution.  I defend the Constitution to them, and so I do the same to myself for the Second Amendment, because certain parts of our Constitution are not more important than others.   We cannot pick and choose which parts of our Constitution we will enforce and follow – it all carries equal weight and as citizens we must defend it in its entirety.

But, here’s the thing – why do we only seem to hear the screams for gun control after a mass shooting. Why don’t we hear similar advocacy every day when we have thousands of shootings across the country and especially in big cities like Chicago.  Children are injured and die there almost every day from gunshots, so where are the screams for better gun control there and why not on a daily basis?  Better regulation of gun and ammunition sales to the people who use guns daily seems to make a lot more sense than trying to figure out a way to keep guns from the hands of a mass murderer who, until the time of the heinous act, appears totally sane and normal and who, until the act, avoids discovery of whatever plans and motives he or she might have.    

We have the Constitutional right to bear arms.  That right can be reasonably regulated.  So let’s aim our regulations at the everyday people who commit the everyday murders that kill a lot more people over the course of the year than any single mass shooting.   Personally, I don’t think we can ever create background checks that will catch all or even nearly all people who should not have guns.  And I don’t think prohibiting guns to the insane will prevent gun violence from those who appear sane until they suddenly snap.  And then there’s the plain fact that there’s probably already enough guns out there for every citizen to have at least one. 

So, what would I do? First, make it much harder to purchase ammunition.  I think it may be easier to buy a quantity of ammo at Walmart than it is to buy spray paint.  A gun is not going to be much good without ammo (and yes, I know there would be a black market and people could make their own, but it would at least make acquisition somewhat more difficult which might delay or even stop some gun violence).  I would also ban some of the types of guns that are currently available.  I would allow small pistols, etc. for self-protection, basic rifles for hunting, guns for target shooting.  Beyond that, do we really need to generally sell the warlike weapons that are now easily available? (I do realize that there are some good arguments for a Yes answer to this question) At least make then much harder to purchase with significantly greater restrictions than the basic guns.  

That’s what I’d do, though honestly I don’t think it would make much difference. People who want to kill with guns are going to find a way to do so.  I know it is a cliché, but the problem is not the guns.  We seem to have a growing number of people in this country who see violence up to and including murder, as a way to solve problems.  We seem to have more and more people who do not value human life.  We have a country that is filled with divisiveness and anger.  It is this sickness of the soul that needs our attention far more than, or at least concurrent with, revisions to our gun laws.