Here we are again.
More dead children. More crying parents. More distraught teachers. More ashen-faced bystanders. More traumatized medics.
Because someone brought a gun to a school and used it …
We are numbed by it, by now, aren’t we? We’ve reached a point where we don’t care?
No? You’d think so, though, if you look at the callousness of the NRA when things like this happen, or the responses of right wing politicians. Right wing politicians who, at the moment, hold all the conceivable power in the land.
So … are we numb yet? Are we beyond feeling? Have we finally reached the blissful state of not caring about dead children that they so desperately seem to want us to reach, so we’ll stop making uncomfortable demands for tougher gun-legislation or … Gods forbid … even a ban on certain types of weaponry in private hands?
No?
Good!
We must never reach that point.
Because all decent human beings suffer and all decent human beings want to see change … real change … when this kind of thing happens. And we are tired of being told to wait. We’re tired that “this kind of thing” has become a phrase that can be applied to something as horrific as the repeated mass murder of children, or indeed any innocent people, by someone with a gun-fetish and anger-manageme …
Wait.
Let me stop your train of thought right there, before you even finish that sentence in your head.
You were thinking the same thing as everyone else, right now. “Anger-Management issues”. You’ve probably gone down the road of “Mental Health” being the cause of all these woes too.
Let me tell you a tiny little secret, though.
Mental health patients are not bullet-proof.
We die under a hail of bullets just the same as those who don’t have mental health problems do, and we’re far more likely to, according to statistics. Sixteen times more likely to be killed by the police, for instance, than people without mental health problems. More likely to commit suicide as well, and often, it’s next to impossible to get help. Holding down a job is difficult for many with serious mental health problems, but treatment costs a fortune and this means a huge number of mental health patients cannot get the help they so desperately need. Getting insured if you have even relatively uncomplicated mental health problems … and by uncomplicated I mean mental health problems that don’t stop you from having a job or functioning in a mostly unhindered fashion amongst other people, and which is treatable … is prohibitively expensive if you don’t have a regular source of income, meaning a lot of mental health patients can’t even get the medication they so desperately need.
And when someone starts firing guns near us, we die too. Even if the person who’s doing the shooting is mentally ill as well.
Which has become such a wonderful, convenient line of argumentation, hasn’t it?
”It’s not a gun issue, it’s a mental health issue”.
We’re getting killed twice, here. First by bullets, and then because we can’t get the help we need.
Being mentally ill is far more commonplace than most people think, and there is no catch-all terminology that fits everyone. But even the understanding of what mental illness is gets killed over and over again.
Every time someone opens their mouth to declare that they are “feeling depressed today” or “That’s so depressing”, they are destroying the public understanding of a dreadful and very real mental health problem … depression … by watering it down. Which means that next time you meet someone who suffers from actual, clinical depression, you have no idea of its seriousness and you are likely to meet that person with platitudes like “Pull yourself together”, “Get a grip”, “Why don’t you just ...” and “Have you tried …?”
And you know what? Not only are you not helping.
You’re actively increasing that person’s risk of suicide.
Yes. You. You there, who now try to hide in the corner, saying “But I didn’t mean it like that.”
Especially you.
Not only is it lonely being a mental health patient … and believe me, it is … it is a daily struggle. A battle with your own brain. It’s a battle far too many fight and lose alone, because they cannot afford the help they so desperately need.
And you know what else?
The vast, overwhelming majority of us are not violent. No more violent than you, and you, and you over there cringing in the corner because I got to you before.
But we get to carry the blame for school shootings, for mass murder, for all manner of societal evils because we’re easy to blame, we have few advocates and most of us are too busy trying to survive with crushing self-loathing and feelings of utter, absolute despair overwhelming us on a daily basis, to defend ourselves effectively.
Am I denying that men like Adam Lanza or Nikolas Cruz are ill?
No. I’m not.
I’m saying that making tens of millions of peaceful, suffering, pained, desperate people who need help, compassion and comfort their moral and intellectual equals is an atrocity and a crime against humanity. When people resort to the “mental health”-blame game after a mass shooting, they are stigmatizing a huge number of people who have done nothing whatsoever to deserve it. It’s targeting an already incredibly vulnerable minority of people, further casting aspersions on them and making them seem even more suspect and dangerous in the eyes of their fellow citizens.
It is wrong.
But it is a useful tool to those who would like to move attention away from the real culprit … namely guns … and onto a minority who can’t defend themselves adequately.
It’s typically done by specific groups of people. The NRA as an organization, or every single one of their members who support the organization with membership fees whatever else they might personally believe on the issue. Or right wing politicians and tens upon tens of millions of fanatical gun-owners.
Or useful idiots, who try to do right, but who mistakingly point out that a school shooting is a mental health issue.
It’s not.
It’s a dead-children-and-teachers-issue, caused by guns.
The shooter may have been mentally ill, and if so, yes … it is also a factor, but it is not the only factor. And in the end, the real issue is the death and destruction of the lives even of survivors.
We cannot for one moment take our eyes off that central, core problem. And we cannot allow ourselves to be led by our noses into believing that mental illness kills dozens of innocent people by spraying bullets at them. Mental illness kills many millions of innocent people all over the world every year, but it’s self-inflicted.
It’s the gun that is the problem when someone gets shot. This is increased exponentially by every additional person shot in a single incident.
Yet gun-enthusiasts would have us believe that “people kill people”, not guns. This is one of their most absurd talking points. As if they somehow expect us to believe that guns sprout an autonomous intelligence, a pair of legs and a malicious streak the length of Route 66, before walking down the street to the nearest school or kindergarten, to kill innocent kids and the adults in whose care they are placed.
Guns, ladies and gentlemen, are what is known as a a “force multiplier”. Please, if you don’t know the term, commit it to memory right now.
In fact, guns are some of the most efficient force multiplers ever invented by mankind.
A force multiplier is simply something that allows one person, or a group of people, to inflict violence more efficiently. A rock is a force multiplier too. If you hit someone, you inflict physical harm on them. If you pick up a rock and hit a person, you do more physical harm than if you used nothing but your fist. A medieval castle was a force multiplier. By allowing people to defend a strong position, a few dozen soldiers could hold off an attacking force many times their size … a principle still in use today with military bunkers, for instance.
And guns … well … you can kill someone with pinpoint accuracy over a distance of hundreds of yards, in some cases up to a mile away if you’re a good shot and you have a decent scope. Civil War General John Sedgwick of the Union Army of the Potomac is a good example. He declared that the Confederate troops opposite his men during the battle of Spotsylvania Court House, “couldn’t hit an elephant” at the distance they were at, only to promptly fall out of his saddle, stone dead from a gunshot fired from a Confederate Whitworth sniper-rifle hundreds of yards away.
That is a force multiplier. If the Confederate soldier had stood up and tried to punch Sedgwick, he would’ve looked like an idiot. Instead he shot a general at hundreds of yards distance.
An AR-15, or any other modern firearm for that matter, is an even more effective one, due to higher rates of fire, greater accuracy and ease of use than any of the examples I just mentioned.
So stop telling yourself that it is a mental health-issue. Even if you do so with the best of intentions … even if you do so because you realize that the availability of care and the general, societal treatment of people with mental illness is a problem (and it most certainly is), you are helping those who wish to do nothing to remedy the real problem.
Guns.
Never let anyone sway you away from that understanding with arguments. Realize that the real issue is that of ownership of firearms in private hands. We’ve already heard all the “responsible gun owner”-lines, and we’ve already heard the “good guy with a gun” stopping the “bad guy with a gun” myth ad nauseam.
The problem is that people who have no business owning military grade firearms … or any firearms for that matter … have access to enough firepower to supply the armed forces of a small dictatorship’s armies for a year or two.
Other countries have long since realized this. Other countries have made gun ownership so problematic that it is practically eliminated. And consequently, those other countries do not have problems with mass-shootings.
Having a mental illness is enough of a struggle as it is. Don’t further stigmatize us by making us suspect the moment we open up about it. Don’t help create and further a myth, that having a mental health issue means you’re more likely to be violent. We’re already ostracized enough as it is.
We’re fighting to stay afloat every day, in ways those of you who don’t have to live with these problems hopefully never have to even imagine, let alone experience, for yourselves.
And we need your help to win. We can’t do it alone, or we would have. Believe me, if someone came along with a magic wand and offered to cure mental health problems, we’d take it.
But mental health problems are often incurable. Treatable … but incurable. It is about creating a life in which we can function, and that requires outside help.
If you react to us by worrying we’ll start shooting you the moment you meet us … you’ve already killed us.
Thank you for your time.