Reasons behind Trump shooting are easy to find: too much mental illness, too many guns. | Opinion

We have no reason to be mystified at the motivation of a would-be assassin of the former president at a rally last weekend in Pennsylvania: the guy who pulled the trigger was s 20-year-old emotionally troubled American male with access to one of the 40 million AR-15 style assault rifles in U.S. citizens’ hands.

And this is what emotionally troubled American teenage and 20-something males do: play out their feelings with high powered weaponry. At an elementary school. In a movie theater. At a campground. In a nightclub. In a high school. At a music concert. In a downtown bank.

The country has 130 million males aged 15 to 75. With 40 million assault rifles floating around, everyone has easy access to put their hands on one. Twenty percent of American adults experience mental illness. Five percent have “severe mental illness,” according to Mental Health America.

So, six million males aged 15 to 75 in the nation have “severe” mental issues.

Let’s deal with just those late teens and twenty-somethings, the most likely shooters. The emotionally disturbed man in a Louisville Old National Bank last year, for example, who shot and killed five people, was 25 years old. Kentucky has 450,000 males aged 15 to 29.

If we just try to deal with this age range, statistics suggest 22,500 of these guys have “severe mental illness.” Greater Lexington alone has seven percent of Kentucky’s population. Probabilities would be that at least, and probably more given urban stresses, 1,575 guys of this age in Fayette County have “severe” mental health issues.

Nothing stops them from accessing high powered weaponry. If they’re 18 years or older, they simply walk in a gun shop and purchase the weapons. Even if we know they’re emotionally disturbed, we can do nothing to stop them.

Kentucky has no “red flag” law. Republican legislators insist America’s right to bear arms means gun nuts who actually are nuts—sorry for political incorrectness: replace “nuts” with “emotionally disturbed young men”—can always get their arms around arms.

So, disregard those pious political statements that “this isn’t who we are.” This is exactly who we are: a nation, unique on the face of the earth, who not only accepts but embraces, our standing as the only country whose leading cause of child deaths is bullets.

Other nations don’t have this problem, and not because they don’t have any emotionally disturbed young men. You know what the reason is: they don’t have legislators with our mentalities.

If I may be so pessimistic: we won’t solve this problem ever. Even if we started banning assault weapons in civilian hands. If a serious movement—highly unlikely—arose to do so, in the months leading up to such a ban, while legislators debate, assault weaponry would fly off gun shop shelves. We would double those 40 million floating around.

No, this is our firearms legacy, and we’ll live, and die, with it. If you don’t believe this, you must be emotionally disturbed. Come to think of it, knowing this is true should be enough to emotionally disturb you.

Larry Riley is a former newspaper columnist in Muncie, Ind., and journalism/writing instructor at Ball State University, now living in Georgetown.