Today the second worst mass school killing in American history occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School. 27 people where killed, 20 of them children. Before I continue with my discussion of mental illness and this tragedy, I want to extend my heartfelt condolences to the victims and their families. Mere words will never be enough for those who have experienced first hand such loss, and I fear nothing that occurs in the aftermath will make the grieving any easier.
For those unaware, a 20 year old entered the school, armed with two pistols and committed mass murder. No motive is as yet found for his actions. What is known is that this man was the child of one of the teachers at the school. He killed this person, his mother, and himself during his rampage. Whether his mother was the target or not is unknown.
Since this tragedy happened, there has been a lot of focus on renewing the debate over gun control. In many ways this makes sense. So many senseless tragedies have occurred thanks to a madman armed with guns. Arguably, if these people did not have access to such weapons, they could not have killed so many people. Or so that line of reasoning goes.
Unfortunately, I believe this misses the most important aspect of gun violence, namely the person behind the murders. What I mean is that gun violence requires two things, a gun and a mad person to wield it. We focus on the guns because they are an easy target and obvious. Many believe that if we get rid of guns, the violence ends, or at least becomes less severe. This conclusion however, does not follow. If guns were the only means of committing mass murder, this might well follow. But they are not. One need think only of the middle east, where improvised explosives, often made from common household items, are used frequently to kill large numbers of people. Or, in China, where guns are less common, there have been a rash of school killings. They were committed by madmen wielding knives, cleavers and hatchets. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/world/asia/13china.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1& . Another such tragedy occurred in Wyoming, where a son killed his father in the middle of a school with a compound bow. http://news.yahoo.com/man-killed-father-wyoming-bow-arrow-attack-185326288.html . The point here is that violence can take many forms, and mass murders have occurred throughout history without the aid of guns. Guns may make things easier, but they are hardly the only means
So that leaves us to focus on the other half of the equation, the madman wielding the weapons intent on killing. Worth noting here, I use the term mad traditionally, meaning not sane. For can we truly doubt that a person capable of killing innocents and children is insane? Regardless, it is the person who wields the gun, blade, explosive, compound bow, or what have you, that we should focus on. For in learning about the people behind these tragedies, by finding what connects them, seeing the patterns of behavior that occur, can we find a way to truly prevent another mass killing from happening. What sort of ailments of the mind, twists of thought or other motivations lead to deciding to kill? And what can we do to nip them in the bud, before they flower into a terrible tragedy?
The first thing we need to do as a society is refocus on mental health and therapy. Mental illness is too often demonized and swept under the carpet. People with problems are viewed as inconvenient and ignored, allowed to slip through the cracks, until they pick a terrible means of bringing attention to themselves. Buddhist monks in Tibet immolate themselves as a means of protest against their oppressors. Madmen, it seems, choose to take quite a few more people with them. How much tragedy could we avert if these people had therapists who listened to them, helped them through the hard times, and had the freedom to restrain them should the need present itself. Unfortunately, too few people have access to a therapist; hell, many do not even have a familial safety net to go to for help with mental illness. More over, when people do go to see therapists, they are fed a melange of uppers, downers and antipsychotics. Rarely do they get actual therapy.
The reason why therapy has gone by the wayside is, surprisingly, insurance. It is much cheaper to meet with a therapist once or twice a year to adjust brain meds than it is to meet a therapist with a sympathetic ear once or twice a week to talk through your problems. Insurance, as a means of cost savings, have dictated this change. It is not a change for the better. While there is clinical evidence to suggest that monkeying around with people's brain chemistry can help alleviate the symptoms of mental illness, we know surprisingly little about the long term effects of using such medications. We know even less about how lifelong usage affects brain development. While I do not doubt that such medications can be helpful, I think focusing solely on them is a mistake. More over, I believe that their use should be a last resort, not a first. Our focus on cost is leading to, what I consider, substandard care, and the people who suffer are the mentally ill and their families.
Secondly, we as a society need to recognize that mental illness is far more prevalent than we have been led to believe. Most of these illnesses are benign. The alcoholic who is actually self medicating for depression, the kid who acts up in class due to ADD/ADHD, the social misfit with autism spectrum disorder, or the former honor role student who gets weird, is ostracized and then drops out of school (i.e. schizophrenia). Most of these people never do anything more drastic than engage in self destruction; though self destruction, like the Buddhist monks who self immolate, is often a call to action should anyone be listening. It is the rare person who follows their illness down the road to mass murder. But this does not change the prevalence of the underlying disorders.
So, knowing that these disorders are prevalent, we need to take greater steps as a society to safeguard ourselves from violence. After Columbine, most school districts enacted policies or legislation to make access to schools much more difficult for outsiders. Some schools going even so far as to install permanent security details and metal detectors. While I am not so sure that putting schools on lock down is necessarily the best solution, I think we need to study ways to make things safer. So the next time a madman walks into a school wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying multiple fire arms, that there is someone there to respond quickly and end the threat before the innocent suffer.
In Sandy Hook a 20 year old walked into the school, killed 27 people, 20 of them children, one of the adults was his mother. He was a former honor role student in his high school who dropped out and disappeared from society until he committed this heinous act. This mirrors what happened in Virginia Tech and many other mass killings. Read through a list of historical school shootings and you will notice that some patterns emerge. We should learn from this and do more as a society, not just in making weapons harder for madmen to get, but also in helping these troubled people before they choose to do something so heinous. For further reading, here is an ABC News story listing such tragedies: http://abcnews.go.com/US/mass-school-shootings-history/story?id=17975571#.UMwI1azhd8E . And once again, my condolences to the victims of today's tragedy, their families, and the victims of the many other historical mass killings.
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