Gun consensus: Expand mental health treatment
The Toccoa RecordOct 12, 2017
The
The organization, usually pilloried as the root of all evil after mass shootings like the one in
The
This announcement is unlikely to sate the appetite of those who want more stringent gun control.
But reaching political consensus on anything more is an uphill battle.
That's why I was intrigued by a survey
It compared those measures' popularity to experts' opinions of their effectiveness.
It also broke down the expert opinion into a couple of sub-groups: academics who generally oppose more gun control, and law-enforcement professionals.
As you might expect, the first group differed significantly from their peers who favor gun control.
But presumably, gun-rights advocates would take their views, and those of law enforcement, more seriously.
Endorsements by those two groups might point toward policies that have a real chance of becoming law.
The
Out of 29 ideas, just
(Interestingly, among those four, only law enforcement favored barring gun sales to the mentally ill; one wonders if a policy with due process protections, such as the one
More treatment wouldn't be a panacea.
So far there is no indication the
But as a starting point, we could do a lot worse.
We could also do a lot easier, which may be the main reason little has been done on this front.
If we need motivation to tackle such a thorny and far-reaching problem, we can find it beyond the issue of violence.
Clearly, mental illness is at the heart of many suicides. It's also one of the leading problems among the chronically homeless: In 2014, the Treatment Advocacy Center estimated one-third of America's homeless suffered from untreated, serious mental illnesses.
The knock-on effects reach into our jails, where many homeless Americans wind up, and our hospitals.
A constant refrain from
This has been a particular source of shame for
The AJC's 2007 series which revealed scores of unnecessary deaths in the state's mental hospitals led to a federal investigation and, eventually, a settlement between the state and the
Years later, improvement has been marginal.
Answers aren't simple. What is most needed may be public resolve and insistence on progress.
That's exactly what so many say, only to lose interest, after these shootings.
If we want better, we'll need to do better.
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