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On guns, we have made a choice

By Staff | Sep 29, 2013

Inevitably, shootings like the one at the Washington Navy Yard that killed 13 people recently bring about calls for gun reform or improvements to the nation’s mental health system.

Our country could use both.

The smart money says it will get neither.

Sen. Kelly Ayotte is calling on Senate leadership to again take up a bill designed to make improvements to the mental health system. We hope it passes.

The bill, which cleared the Senate earlier this year by a vote of 95-2, would provide, among other things, training programs for a host of people to identify and deal with crisis situations.

Like the shootings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., that left 28 people dead last December.

Or the movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colo., last July in which 12 people lost their lives.

It’s a list that goes on far too long.

Suffice it to say that it’s prima facie evidence of mental illness when a person enters a public place and starts indiscriminately killing people. Thus, a strong mental health system must be part of the discussion if we’re to have any hope of preventing such shootings in the future.

But mental health improvements should not be a diversionary tactic used to maintain the status quo when it comes to access to firearms.

Guns are not inherently bad. They are, in fact, neutral, and most gun owners are responsible people who use them for recreation or protection and harm nobody. The Second Amendment gives them that right and we support it, right up to the point where the innocent die. Even then, we don’t think guns should be banned.

It doesn’t matter what the suggestion might be – tighter background checks, closing loopholes that allow for cash-and-carry purchases at gun shows, or limits on high-capacity magazines that allow the deranged to squeeze off dozens of bullets a minute – some argue, and they have a point, that nothing will prevent people who are truly determined to kill.

It’s the “why bother” approach, which says that, since tighter gun laws cannot possibly stop every crazy out there, it’s not worth trying to stop any of them.

We should try. But if our national will is to keep our gun laws as they are, so be it – but let’s at least understand that there are meanings behind that choice:

It means we have decided that mass shootings like the one at the Navy Yard in Washington are the price we willingly pay for our gun culture.

It means we have decided, as a country, that the 20 children who were killed in Newtown, Conn., last December are simply the cost of doing business in a country that covets firearms and demands that access to them be nearly unfettered.

It means we have decided that we are a civilized country, but only to a point.

Nobody likes to think in those terms, of course, but we owe it to the families of past victims and those of future ones to at least be honest about the choices we’ve made.

We have taken a similar approach with the tobacco industry, too – accepting that a certain number of deaths will occur as a result of people voluntarily using those products. One important difference, though: Not a lot of 6-year-olds die from smoking.

We are under no illusions that mental health or gun reform will – in and of themselves, or even taken together – put an end to all mass shootings in this country. That would require a change in culture that is probably beyond our collective reach.

But we must reduce the probability of recurrences by narrowing the cracks between which shooters seem to fall. That means keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, and broadening our mental health system to get people the help they need before they become shooters.

We can, and should, do both.

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