Men, mental health and guns: We can do something about at least two of them. | Opinion
On Sunday, a man with apparent mental health issues was found with a semi-automatic rifle in what authorities are calling an attempt to kill former President Donald Trump.
Court papers detailed how law enforcement found a loaded SKS-style rifle, two backpacks with ceramic tile and a GoPro camera in the bushes at the scene, according to the New York Times.
Two months before, a young man with apparent mental health problems used an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle to try to assassinate former President Donald Trump, and got much closer to doing so, injuring his ear.
In between those two attempts, a boy with apparent mental health problems shot up his school in Georgia with an AR-15-style rifle, and here in Kentucky, a man with apparent mental health problems shot at numerous cars on I-75 with an AR-15 style rifle, wounding five people. Miraculously, none of them died.
Now I’m not a psychiatrist, but I think it’s fair to say that anyone who either uses political assassination to get attention, or talks about recruiting Afghans to fight in Ukraine or shoots teachers or tries to kills random people in cars, is pretty unstable.
So now we can isolate three problems that keep causing mayhem and death — men, mental health, and guns.
I’m not sure what to do about the first one. But on the second two, there are plenty of good solutions that federal and state lawmakers could do something about, such as reinstating a ban on assault weapons, better background checks, longer waiting periods, and better access to mental health resources.
In Kentucky, we had a good option. The Crisis Aversion and Rights Retention Act was filed by outgoing Sen. Whitney Westerfield, R-Fruit Hill, as a response to the Old National Bank shooting in Louisville in 2023, in which five people were murdered by a young man suffering from mental health problems. (Stop me if you’ve heard this before.)
It would have allowed for the temporary removal of guns from someone in crisis, a removal made through law enforcement and the courts.
Currently, 21 states and Washington, D.C., have such laws on the books, including neighboring Illinois, Indiana and Virginia. Here in Kentucky, it didn’t even get a committee hearing.
It could be brought up again by someone with political courage. Or not and we can wait for the next mass shooting.
According to Pew Research, about a third of us own guns, but 51 percent of us favor stricter gun laws.
How much longer do we want to live under the terror of our children being killed and political candidates being shot at? Forever, I guess. There’s no other country in the developed world that lives this way.
Worst of all, it’s a problem with solutions. Our politicians just don’t want to adopt them.
