Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are right about mass shootings.
It’s not guns, and it’s not mental illness.
And both parties are engaged in partisan exploitation of tragedy and loss.
The Democrats started it.
As the passage of time has brought a sad saga of mass crime, the Democrats – in politics, in the classroom, in the press – have predictably turned tragedy to opportunity. They have latched on to slaughters in schools and movie theaters and elsewhere as a means to advance their agenda to disarm America.
For a party that believes in a strong central government and the sublimation of national identity to global citizenship and control, an armed public is problematic. When you’re a revolutionary, you don’t want the other guy to have guns.
So you disarm him.
And the Democrats as a party want to disarm the American people. The Second Amendment is their obstacle and foe, and they do everything they can to turn people against it and against their gun-owning neighbors.
And so it was that during the Obama Administration, each mass shooting was met immediately with another condescending presidential lecture against those who believe in and exercise the Second Amendment. And last week, before the Florida gunman was even in custody, there was a Democrat on the floor of the United States Senate denouncing Republicans and calling for more anti-gun laws.
It’s a Democratic reflex.
Unfortunately, to rebut it, the Republicans have come up with an equally preposterous reflex of their own.
The Republicans blame the mass shootings on mental illness.
It is not a reasoned position, it doesn’t get close to being a solution, but it allows the Republicans to shout back when the Democrats start caterwauling about gun control.
Republicans say that inadequate services or inadequate screening or some such thing is to blame. To protect society, the Republican counterargument goes, you don’t ban guns, you ban the ownership of guns by mentally ill people.
And back and forth the two parties go. Gun control, or mental illness. Mental illness, or gun control.
But the fact is, both positions are wrong – and for the same reasons.
At the core, they are wrong because they punish a group for the actions of an individual. They seek to advance a social good by suppressing the rights of a group of Americans – a tactic that our history argues against.
The Democrats want to screw people who are gun owners and the Republicans want to screw people who are mentally ill. And they want to do so when objectively neither group has done anything worthy of censure.
About 40 percent of all the men, women and children in America own a gun. That’s approximately 110 million people, more than a third of all of us. Demanding further restrictions on gun ownership oppresses the rights of those people, and of the other 60 percent who might someday want to own a gun.
Likewise, in any given year, about 20 percent of Americans will have a diagnosable mental illness. Over the course of a lifetime, best estimates are that about half of the U.S. population will be at least temporarily mentally ill. That’s more than 60 million people per year and more than 150 million over the course of years. Limiting the rights of the mentally ill to own a gun will oppress the rights of those people.
And that will be done in the face of logic which shouts that the overwhelming majority of gun owners and mentally ill people are law-abiding citizens who pose no danger whatsoever to themselves or anyone else.
So both parties propose restricting the liberty of people who have not and will not break the law.
That will neither reduce mass shootings nor honor our belief in individual liberty.
Gun owners are not bad guys, and neither are people with mental illness.
And targeting them will run afoul of the Second Amendment, for gun owners, and the Fourteenth Amendment and the Americans with Disabilities Act, for the mentally ill.
Both parties are playing politics, not offering solutions.
So what is a solution?
Target individuals, not groups.
How?
In almost every mass shooting, the gunmen have shown many signs of trouble over a long period of time. “If you see something, say something” doesn’t work because, time after time, people have said something, and the officials have done nothing – or at least nothing substantive.
Why?
Because they lack the tools.
For example, when a person is clearly troubled, and school or other officials worry about the possibility of violence, there should be some sort of court proceeding which could compel mental evaluation, treatment or, in the worst cases, civil confinement. If mass shootings are a public health threat, then public health tools used to fight the spread of infectious disease – to include quarantine – should be available.
If one is feared to be dangerous, as so many of these adolescent shooters have been feared, there should be a mechanism – replete with due process – that allows for a brief suspension of the right to own a gun or other dangerous item while the person’s stability is determined.
When young people display dangerous behavioral tendencies, we run out of tools to use after they are suspended from school. Sometimes it is necessary to go further.
If the parties truly want to stop these shootings, they will stop the political posturing and empower the courts to assess and occasionally intervene.
Mass shooters are individuals. If you are going to suppress rights in order to protect society, suppress temporarily the rights of those individuals whose conduct indicates they may be dangerous.
Don’t suppress the rights of untold millions of Americans who’ve done nothing wrong.