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Unfortunately the US Constitution does not have a clause stripping an American citizen his rights if he is certifiably insane. So we live in a nation where if you are crazy and wish to make a statement get your 15 minutes of fame you too can march down to a school, movie theater, shopping Center or your former work place shoot your way into the nations collective minds !
There is already a screening requirement on the books for mental health, not very effective when 40% of guns are sold in trade shows. The NRA even went along with screening applicants that had mental health issues, the 2nd amendment doesn't guarantee people who unfit to acquire a gun.
So you'd be happier if they used something else? What a strange outlook. People would be just as dead if he drove his car through the mall, set off a firebomb or hacked them to death with a machete. A nut in China killed 4 and stabbed 12 people in an attack in a mall using a knife, after he drove a truck through a crowd killing 3 additional people. I'm sure they're glad he didn't have a gun.
How many reminders do Americans need of the insanity of their gun culture? How many more must die so that Americans can continue to get whatever psychological satisfaction it is they get from having guns around?
For those who love to blame America's gun culture for these senseless violent acts [we've already forgotten about the lunatic who recently pushed a man to his death on the NYC subway; no gun required to murder]-
For those of us who came of age in the 1970s, one of the most shocking aspects of the last three decades was the rise of mass public shootings: people who went into public places and murdered complete strangers. Such crimes were rare which meant that they were shocking.
Something changed in the 1980s: these senseless mass murders started to happen with increasing frequency.
Why did these crimes go from extraordinarily rare to commonplace?
For a while, it was fashionable to blame gun availability for this dramatic increase. But guns did not become more available before or during this change. Instead, federal law and many state laws became more restrictive on purchase and possession of firearms, sometimes in response to such crimes.
If gun availability does not explain the increase of mass public murders, what else might?
At least half of these mass murderers (as well as many other murderers) have histories of mental illness.
In the 1960s, the United States embarked on an innovative approach to caring for its mentally ill: deinstitutionalization. The intentions were quite humane: move patients from long-term commitment in state mental hospitals into community-based mental health treatment.
[...] These problems were not specific to the United States and its "gun culture" as some contend. Other nations which started down the same road toward deinstitutionalization a few years after the United States have suffered many similar mass murders.
Studies in Denmark and Sweden similarly show that psychotics are disproportionately violent offenders.
The news media's reluctance to acknowledge the role that deinstitutionalization played in this human tragedy meant that the public safety connection was generally invisible to the general public.
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