And so history spirals once again

I betray my age somewhat here by saying I was alive when Robert Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles in the late 1960's.

To this day, no one has managed to extract a valid or logical reason for that murder from the man who still rots in a prison cell for his crime.

And after this, and other outrages against politicians and social activists, the voices of the commons demanded laws.

Laws they felt would prevent further blood from being drawn. Laws that would end the flow of tools used to commit such mayhem.

And the violence continued.

For every effort to regulate morality by legislation against the wrong variable, the one variable that should have been reenforced and strengthened was our ability to prevent those predisposed to commit such crimes from gaining access to weapons.

After the outrage at Virginia Tech, where another mentally ill man killed so many, a list of such people was begun, yet never followed up on. The costs, it seems, was too overwhelming to the states. And the federal government had other priorities to pay for.

The press claims that over one million people are barred from buying guns of any kind, and that over another million mentally disturbed people should be listed.

Where is the outrage for this gaping failure on the part of our government? Why is it so much easier to pass laws that will never end the bloodshed? Where is our mental health community in this time of darkness?

Lost in the fight over defining who is mentally ill. A new set of medical rules governing diagnosis is about to be released. And many who should fit the mold for being prevented from gaining access to weapons will, most likely, never be diagnosed.


Forget the rhetoric that claims that gun laws have done any good. They have not. The proof is simple. Anyone who is determined to cause havoc will find the ways and means to execute their will. Timothy McVey was able to end the lives of hundreds with nothing more than fertilizer and diesel fuel.

The only end to violence does not lay in the weapons we ban. It lays in the hearts and minds of people who can see the logic to promote and enforce the use of science to divert men of violence to the help they need.

It is not enough to ban guns or turn violent or disturbed people away from your institutions and schools. They must be healed or corralled. We will all continue to wear targets as long as medical science refuses to use what tools they have now, and abandon their moral responsibility to their patients and the victims of the crimes their missing patients commit.