18 children are dead, along with 2, possibly 3 adults in Texas.
This just on the heels of 10 people at a grocery store in my city of Buffalo.
As a colleague of mine put it: “This is a gun issue. Not a mental health issue.
But it damn sure is going to lead to countless trauma and mental health issues for people. So if you actually care about mental health in this context it’s pretty clear what to do.”
Politicians’ thoughts and prayers are worthless. A substantial minority of this country thinks that any type of law, unless it forces someone with a uterus to be nothing more than a vessel, is some kind of impingement on “freedom.” But our country’s children no longer have the freedom to grow up. We need real, effective, sensible gun control reform (Not the myth of Obama coming to take your guns, because that was never a real thought except in Republican speeches).
What we’re doing now is not working. And again, if you’re gonna comment and talk about how we need better mental healthcare (or, since the shooter today was Hispanic, more humane immigration policy) in this country, you wouldn’t be wrong, but that’s a distraction from the real problem that stigmatizes real non-murdering people. Incidentally, we’ve been legally and financially stopped from improving that, too.
It’s a layered problem, but the biggest problem here is a lack of control over access to and dangerous use of firearms. We must stop this, and that means we need effective gun control reforms and enforcement.