This is the way to approach the issue of gun violence if you really care about the individuals being killed and what is causing their deaths. If you are a professional politician, you only think about getting elected again and pandering to those that financially support your campaign. This solution needs to forced down the throats of those currently in power by public opinion. If you read this and agree, send a copy to your elected representatives as well as the President. “We the People” are tired of the political game being played and demand results.
The “gun-problem” has many components and has taken many years to rear its ugly head. It cannot and will not be solved by new laws and executive orders. It needs to be attacked at the source. Initially, it has to be established and agreed to that we are looking at three problems here. First, is the “lone-wolf” shooter. This is the single guy/gal acting alone out of hate, anger, or delusion. Second, is the terrorist-action. This is the shooter or shooters acting in a coordinated manner against a planned target in order to further their cause, religious or otherwise. Third, we have the person-to-person gang and drug related shootings over turf, drugs or machismo.
This last category is where the most shootings and killings take place in the US, by far. In 2015, in Chicago alone, over 3,000 people were shot and 450 killed with guns during gang-related violence. This is largely ignored by the politicians and media, because the causes of this phenomena are of the government’s own creation, like segregation, economic isolation, and the flawed workings of our criminal justice system, just to name a few. Want to make a huge change? Ending the drug war and legalizing drugs is probably the single most dramatically positive step that could be taken to rehabilitate these places, because without a black market to sustain and enable them, much of the rationale for gangs to exist at all dries up. Unfortunately, the only lives that matter to politicians are their own.
The second category, fairly rare and mostly involving radicalized Muslim fanatics, could be reduced with better immigration controls and actual tracking of those people here on limited-time permits. Right now, nothing is done in this regard that is any different from what was done September 10th, 2001.
Category number one is the trickiest, because it involves a single-actor, usually acting with advanced planning. He/she “just snaps” and then acts. These are things like the Cinemark Century 16 Theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University shooting in Blacksburg, Virginia, and the Sandy Hook Elementary School and a residence shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Most of these shooters have a very lengthy list of legal, mind-altering drugs that they were prescribed for various mental ailments they had. Is this a coincidence that they were all taking something (Zoloft, Prozac, Luvox, Paxil, Ritalin, Celexa, etc.) to alter their mental state, and they went off the deep end, so to speak? I think for this final group, there needs to be a serious study of how mental issues are being treated and establish the fact that there is not a solution inside a pill for every ailment of the mind.