Predictably, in the days following a massacre in an Aurora, Colo. movie theater, there has once again been a rallying cry for tighter gun control laws.
Sadly, this knee-jerk reaction fails to address the much larger issue: No sane person would willingly open fire on an unarmed group of civilians. It’s not about guns. It’s about our appetite for violence and our reluctance to address mental health issues.
But that is a more complex issue, and it is much harder to contemplate a solution for a problem that extends well beyond our nation’s borders, including a July 2011 massacre in Oslo, Norway or last month’s shooting spree in Toronto, Canada, where gun control laws are about as tight as they can be.
Not far from Aurora, lies the smaller town of Littleton, Colo., where two students opened fire on their classmates and teachers at the Columbine High School in 1999.
In response, the U.S. Secret Service, in conjunction with the National Education Association, undertook a study of school violence and published their report three years later, in 2002
The Secret Service Report concluded that schools were taking false hope in physical security, when they should be paying more attention to the pre-attack behaviors of students.
But behavior is a tricky subject matter, and not nearly as sexy or convenient for sound bites as AK-47s or Glocks.
No matter, we still happily and blindly toss around words such as “sicko,” “whack-job” and “nut case” to describe the people who commit these horrific, unimaginable criminal acts.
As someone who struggles daily with a mental illness, I am reminded again why I penned an op-ed that was published in the Portland Press Herald only a few days after the Jan. 2011 shootings in Tucson.
If you haven’t read it, take a gander…and let’s finally have that conversation.
LESSONS IN MEDIOCRITY 