by Lynn Mandaville

Tonight, as I caught the late news before bed I saw that there was another tragic mass shooting being reported, this time in the state we called home for 35 years.  

It happened at Michigan State University in East Lansing, on a campus many of you may have called home during your own post-high school careers.

My heart breaks for all of you back in the Wayland area.  We knew many an MSU alumna when we lived there, so this must be an especially sad time for many people beyond just those who live on or near the MSU campus.  

There is no comfort in knowing that America is right on schedule with her remarkable track record of more than one mass shooting per day.  It’s not a statistic to be proud of.

But as the body count rises almost exponentially, the horror and the grief are not enough to make anyone – and by that I mean legislatures and legislators – do anything definitive about it.

I, among others here, have offered suggestions for remedies that could help mitigate the epidemic of gun violence we have in the US.

Those suggestions, sadly, have been met with the print equivalent of catcalls and jeers, or accusations of being un-American and anti-Constitution/Second Amendment.  Clearly, those suggestions don’t appeal to people who claim to be reasonable.

As I sat here at 12:30 a.m. Arizona time and 2:30 a.m. MI time, listening to the last law enforcement briefing of the night, I found myself wondering for the umpteenth time just what it would take to force the actual, constructive grappling with gun reform.

In the past I’ve bemoaned the problem with this issue being tied into political lobbying, campaign contributions, PAC money, and the other pocket-lining aspects that prevent legislative solutions.

Maybe it will take a different type of money problem, however, to force the hands of those we’ve elected to serve our needs yet who fail to hear our voices.

As I listened tonight to MSU campus police and university public relations people politely answer the same old questions from the press, I picked up on one of the old staples of post-tragedy comments, specifically the promise that first thing in the morning there would be grief counsellors and trauma psychologists available to any students, faculty, and university support staff who needed it following the events of this evening.

And my twisted brain asked itself, when will there no longer be enough crisis counselors in the country to handle all the folks with one or another form of PTSD?  When will there no longer be psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, or counsellors who are not themselves riddled with anxiety from exposure to these underpants-filling events to comfort and ease those newly afflicted with crippling psychological damage?

It is one of the common themes of the “unrestricted gun freedom” community to take the position that guns don’t kill people, people kill people.  

Therefore, the solution is to deal with the software aspect of the problem, rather than the hardware aspect, thus foisting the problem onto that nebulous “mental health” category for mitigation.

Unfortunately, mental health is a very broad term for a very complicated condition which resides in that most complicated and least understood organ of the body, the brain.

Mental health can be impeded by an imbalance of natural chemicals, or by the ingestion of “unnatural” chemicals, or a combination of the two.  It can also be affected by physical injury, or by psychological abuse by others.  And none of these things can be fixed by a one-size-fits-all response.

Yet legislators pawn off the gun problem to the mental health community in general, without a thought as to what all that would entail to be a successful and financially viable solution.

Right now in America there is a critical shortage of mental health professionals and mental health facilities to serve all who need them.

I cannot speak to things in MI or the nation at large without taking time to delve into a lot of research, but I can tell readers that in AZ anyone wishing to make a non-emergency appointment with a mental health professional in the Phoenix area will have to wait a minimum of 60 days for an appointment.

For quicker service in our area, a mental health crisis must be in progress, such as suicidal actuation (I think that’s the new, PC term).  Even then, however, once the crisis is past, there are no beds to be had in mental health rehab facilities.  None.  Period.

There are wait lists, sure, but unlike when a person is in a telephone hold queue for customer service where one is given the estimated time for the next representative, there are no estimates given for how soon one might anticipate getting a bed for inpatient care for one’s mental break.

Thus, it would be safe to assume that there needs to be an enormous push for colleges to recruit huge numbers of students into the fields where mental health professionals are produced in great numbers.

This kind of training is expensive, requiring much student debt or federal scholarships and grants.

Once this work force has been created to assist the burgeoning numbers of mentally ill people (maybe even including us?), the fees to pay these professionals will be astronomical, and, I would assume, would fall to the government to pay, because mentally ill people are difficult to employ.

And those who might be employed would probably not be paying the additional premiums for the mental health riders to their policies.

The mentally ill usually wind up being on some sort of government assistance or subsidy.

In-house treatment facilities are expensive, and the numbers of afflicted people are on the rise with every passing year, particularly among teens and young adults.  There would have to be a huge investment in constructing such facilities, and somehow government money would surely be involved.

Though privatization of such services wouldn’t be a new idea, those in the business of providing mental health would put a drain on federal money one way or another.

And one of the worst drains on federal coffers is the insurance fraud that occurs in a percentage of these types of operations, where government programs are billed or over-billed for patient services that are or aren’t performed, or medications that are or aren’t delivered into the patients.

To make a long story somewhat shorter, eventually the mental health solution to our gun problem in America will reach critical mass, and legislators will want to find another way to solve the problem that isn’t so expensive.

That will be the time when even legislatures will have to resort to on-line, national registries of gun purchasers, guns purchased, people with mental health histories, and people who have been convicted of violent crimes with or without firearms.

That will be when legislatures decide that people who want to own and use guns will have to take special, standardized training on that firearm prior to purchase, and will have to submit to periodic proficiency testing and mental health screening, and pay annual fees, to continue to own that firearm.

That will be when legislatures will deem it necessary for firearm owners to carry special insurance on the guns they own.

That will be when legislators stand up to the NRA and “gun nuts” and say “Enough!  We can’t afford mental health measures any more.  We’ll have to enact reasonable gun reform.”

Follow the money.

When the blowback from the costliness of mental health care and intervention exceeds whatever monetary benefits legislators are receiving from lobbyists and gun manufacturers, that’s when anguished Americans will see some movement on gun reform.

Unfortunately, it will not happen before.

Not even if the mass shooting happens on the campus where your own kids go to school, that same school where you were enrolled not a quarter century ago.

If you have a kid at MSU tonight, I pray he or she is safe, and that you have had a phone call reassuring you that he or she will be able to see a counselor tomorrow.

I pray, too, that if anyone has a kid away at college anywhere at all that he or she is safe, too, and that you can sleep reasonably well at night.

These are crazy times we live in.  Crazy as in “not mentally well.”

In an age where we no longer have “funny farms,” it seems we’ve created one great big one in which all of us live together.

Please, everyone, be safe.