Is gun control the solution

Good Saturday morning to you,

I don't like weighing in on hot topics with so much emotion involved, but I want to address exactly what we are trying to accomplish with all this new gun control talk.

I am not real pro gun or pro gun control. I am worried though that what we are trying to do with gun control is not going to stop the problem that caused the uproar in the first place and that is the shootings in Newton.

Think about this; mostly humans are social animals, we interact, have conversations, even arguments over gun control, and everybody though gets along with each other to some degree. What we run from is when we see people not interacting with society. For some reason we don't address alienation very well or mental illness. And quite frankly this is the problem we need to be addressing.

There is so much political capital being spent on gun control verbiage back and forth and the real issue is getting no press. Go back and look at most of these types of incidents in the last few decades and people alienating them self from society seems to be more of the problem. Did the unabomber use a gun, did Timothy McVeigh, or how about that guy in China who stabbed 20 kids the same week as the Newton shooting? Could better gun control have prevented Newton? Actually we don't know. What we do know was there were some problems that were not addressed with him, and now for society in general not being addressed. What gives?

Taking a real quick look at the New York legislation, what do we find, but something that sounds good, but how effective will it be. Does lowering the amount of a magazine allowance from 10 rounds of ammunition to 7 really effective? I hate to be morbid, but are we thinking that now we have saved three children because we did this. What good is this? Yes there is some verbiage about better background checks and mental illness being scrutinized, but what about trying to deal with mental illness. People will get around regulations, so why aren't we addressing the root problem?

All the gun control legislation is only going to create a way for criminals to make more money selling the stuff people want. Now at least we have background checks, I don't know how effective some background checks are, but much better than taking them away completely. If we truly want gun control, if we, as a society, want to make a difference with gun control, lets sit down when the emotions have died down and seriously spend the time deciding what will work, and what will create problems. Right now gun control is no more than putting a band aid on our feelings. Yes this was a heinous crime, a complete atrocity. I have children and I have no idea how it would feel to lose one, but lets address the real problems, not do something that is so ineffective that it causes other problems down the road.

I don't know how you feel, but mental illness is hard to deal with, and we really don't even know how to define mental illness. You probably see it more than you realize because we cannot put it into terms we can identify. Right now though if we want to prevent the atrocities of multiple killings we really need to spend more time finding ways to identify: when people start to check out from society, what are the causes of alienation, where does it start, and many more questions I cannot think of right now. Basically we need to put our political capital and energy into helping our society by evaluating the research that is out there, find solutions, and start creating a way to report problems without interfering with some one's privacy. A person who is ill, even mental illness, still has a right to medical privacy, but as a society we have a right to prevent problems. This will be a fine line to create, but much more effective than spur of the moment legislation that doesn't do anything.

As always, there are probably answers out there amongst the vast amount of information we have built up over the years. And we may need to do more, resolve conflicting information, decide what is physiology vs psychological, see if we can even find a cure, or at least identify someone to work with family etc to keep the individual involved with society so they don't get so lost they commit these atrocities. It should be our job now to recognize we need to get together to make sense of mental illness.

If we don't, well, again; we are putting band aids on our feelings instead of curing the disease.