Marc Yacht
The recent Lafayette, La., theater shooting left two young women dead and nine injured; some with multiple gunshot wounds. The killer took his own life. The carnage has followed too many recent gun-related tragedies and demands attention for adequately funded comprehensive mental health services and sensible firearms regulation.
The conservative mantras that “government cannot be trusted” and “no new taxes,” take a daily toll on American communities’ quality of life. The tax revenue being sacrificed should go to public education, starved human services, and local infrastructure needs. Our communities literally are being strangled by short-sighted unrelenting austerity.
Americans must decide whether their communities are important enough to open their pocketbooks and reject self-serving policy. Our elected officials need to hear such a message.
The deinstitutionalization and defunding of state mental health system has made our communities unsafe. Law enforcement and incarceration cannot effectively address sociopathic behavior. The mentally ill must be housed and treated and never released until a team of mental health professionals agree they can return safely to society. Treating the criminally insane in the penal system has not worked and will continue to leave law-abiding families at serious risk to crime and tragedies.
This is a nation of individual rights, but it also must consider the public good. A safe community must take precedence. To argue individual rights amid a preventable carnage cannot be justified. No one disagrees that mental health services need a drastic revisit. The solution is to accept the cost of revitalized services.
Tackling mental health is expensive and only the government can address it. Taxes will be needed and perhaps long overdue universal health care needs will be addressed. Suggesting that government can’t do anything right is foolish rhetoric and blocks efforts to address mental health needs along with many other concerns. The state mental health system once kept dangerous people secured and medicated. Now the seriously ill are on the streets and if incarcerated may be released, untreated, from jails. Serious threats to our communities continue.
There are as many guns as citizens in the United States. Gun rights advocates argue that there are so many guns there is no value to regulate them. It’s an empty argument and joins the rationale that guns do not kill people; people kill people. The Second Amendment crowd worries that Americans will be unable to protect themselves from each other and a rogue government. That’s a foolish rationale backed by lobbying dollars by those who profit from unrestricted gun ownership. There are similarities with the tobacco industry’s efforts to promote unhealthy tobacco use. Both efforts have been associated with high mortality.
Certainly, gun restriction is a conundrum. Does a politician turn his back on necessary campaign funding and crush efforts at needed gun policy, or resist such financial influence and pressure? Does adherence to ideological positions prevail when it disallows collaboration on something as simple as effective background checks and closing loopholes for unrestricted gun purchases? So far no effective gun regulation has been made law in decades of preventable human tragedy. Guns take 36,000 American lives each year: The vast majority are preventable.
The two sides, pro-gun and pro-regulation must sit down. Both issues need attention: mental health services and sensible gun policy. Presently, the entrenched positions keep opposing groups from meaningful discourse. Mental health needs are cited by both groups. Perhaps, that’s a good place to begin needed collaboration.
Marc Yacht M.D. is a retired physician living in Hudson, Fla. This column is courtesy of Context Florida.
