Apparently I get an itch between 9 and 10am every morning to write. Maybe I'm at my most creative when I'm well rested, caffeinated, and the sun is shining. Which turns out to be almost every day, because Colorado has an unbelievable number of days of sunshine every year. This morning, I feel optimistic and content. Perhaps it's because it's a Friday. I've successfully made it through the week and my personal growth has come a long way in just the past several days. I've also gotten exercise in most of the week, I've been eating well, losing weight. And it's been warm enough the last couple days for TK and I to get outside for some biking/running. I've had some conversations with people close to me this week after sharing my blog with them. As a result I feel more loved and supported than ever. It's a fabulous feeling.
Despite all this fabulous-ness, what I actually want to blog about today is heavy. And it could get political. The topic of the day is the gun violence/mass shootings awfulness that is happening in the US. After a shooting at Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs, CO the day after Thanksgiving, as well as the shooting at the San Bernardino, CA Inland Regional Center 2 days ago (which was the second mass shooting that day), American news and social media are barely talking about anything else. I've been soaking it all in over the last few days, trying to form my views and opinions.
The issue(s) has been extremely politicized, especially with where all the presidential candidates stand, and some people are still arguing that we don't actually have a problem. I, for one, am fed up with it, I'm sick of the NRA lobbying, I'm sick of the shouts of "don't take away my second amendment rights!", and I'm sick of seeing another mass shooting on national (and international) news. Nasser and I were discussing it briefly this morning and he's almost to the point of wanting to ban all guns. This is coming from a guy who considers himself a libertarian on many issues, liberal on others. But the idea of taking away rights has never been appealing to him. I was shocked to hear him even consider a solution of taking away that "right". (Is owning a deadly weapon really a right????).
The recent shootings have certainly been shocking and emotional, they stir a strong feeling of wanting to change things, but I'm also a data and numbers person. The graph below really speaks a lot to me about the problem, and it's all normalized to number of deaths per 100,000, not number of mass shootings for which the definition can be argued over.
Source: Global Burden of Disease Study. Access the data visualization here: http://ihmeuw.org/3oi4
I don't understand how anyone in our country can accept the amount of gun violence we have as a norm. It's mind-blowing for me.
I'm still not sure what the solution looks like, exactly, but I do feel strongly that it will be at least twofold. Firstly, we need to fix our laws around gun "control". I use the word "control" but I don't mean that banning them outright is necessarily the solution (although I also don't rule that out). I think we need to look at the laws we have, consider if closing loopholes and enforcing them would help, and then we need to consider whether or not we need new laws in place. Meaningful laws, perhaps laws that would enforce universal background checks, perhaps stricter requirements for licensing; the point is, we need our nation's EXPERTS to come together and make recommendations to our Congress. We need Congress to stop bending over backwards to the NRA with inaction.
The idea of stricter and universal background checks ties in to mental illness as well. Theoretically anyone diagnosed with mental instability could be unable to purchase a gun, of course that's assuming that the mental instability is diagnosed or related to a criminal record. (And yes this doesn't fix the issue of illegal gun sales, but that's not where I'm going with this). The cultural stigmatization of mental illness means that fewer people seek help, fewer people are diagnosed. Additionally, funding for mental health programs is limited in this country and the options for help aren't what they should be. We need to take a hard look at mental healthcare within our country and we need to make it better. I do think that if James Holmes (the Aurora, CO movie theater shooter) perhaps didn't live in a world where mental illness is so stigmatized and had been getting the right mental healthcare, 12 deaths could have been avoided, and 70 additional people wouldn't have been injured.
Can't we stop these hideous mass shootings and gun violence? We have to start DOING something. Enough with the prayers and thoughts, enough with the heads in the sand; it's time to have the conversation and come up with solutions that we can enact.
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