When mass shootings happen, as day follows night, the tug of war begins between those who favor gun control and those who want to restrict access to the mentally ill. They toss them in a bag and label them like a problem to be solved, as if those with mental illness are easily identified. The answer is simple - just don’t arm the “crazies”. The mentally ill are lumped together with the worst of humanity and called “sickos”, “psychos” and “monsters”.
I get why people do this. Anyone who could kill us, is somehow “other” than us, or anyone we know. It makes us feel safer to distance ourselves from someone who would kill anyone. But who were they the day before the crime, the decade before the crime?
Something has to change. All the talk centers around “preventing mentally ill people from...” but we need to consider a strategy where we can “empower the mentally ill people to...”. We need to arm them with better weapons to fight their demons of illness, thought distortion and loneliness.
These shooters, mostly young men, are shunned and isolated. They lay dormant in their rooms like sleeper cells. Under the surface they are fighting a constant battle against unseen, unknown enemies; until someone or something from their tortured brain offers them a way out which we, with functioning brains, would never consider.
It reminds me of those jumpers from the towers on 9/11 - the only thing worse than the death they chose, was the fire that was consuming them. Counting on humans with broken brains to think logically about their future or the consequences of their actions, is like demanding someone with a broken leg run for help.
We must create a better alternative for these souls. They too, are someone’s baby, crying for change. They are also dying in senseless deaths far too often. Most of them don’t take captives as they go, but instead silently dismiss themselves from a world who has already written them off and let them go.
Jill Brehm Enders
Comments