Today, April 10, 2023, just after 8:30AM, there was a mass shooting incident in downtown Louisville at a bank. Between deaths and injuries, there are 14 people who were directly harmed, with that pain and fear radiating out to their families, the others working and living in downtown Louisville, and our community at large.
Not long after the resolution to that shooting, another was reported not far away at a community college. While that was unrelated to the first shooting, and was not on the same scale, there are two more people added to the long list of victims, and two more families with unnecessary trauma looming over them now.
These are just two public shooting events in a matter of hours in one city – a grim reminder that we are now witnessing large-scale homicide occurring at a daily rate in the United States. Each time one of these mass shootings happen, we get farther and farther away from plausible deniability as a nation, and each event has begun to feel like a thumb pushing into a bruise; eventually we’ll forget to feel the pain.
It’s to the point where scrolling through the trends on Twitter after each shooting produces the same eye-roll scoffs from half of the population that one would expect from a lame dad joke. We know it’s coming, the slew of ‘It’s not the guns’, the ‘It’s the mental health problems’, and now ‘It’s the pronouns’ – the trifecta of irresponsible quotes that basically mean ‘I have no interest in solutions, only maintaining self-absorption’.
At some point each person advocating for action of any kind has heard the inevitable line, “More laws won’t matter to criminals”. Sure, a criminal by default is going to break laws. No one is suggesting laws build utopias here, only that laws help regulation; they give some people barriers to otherwise illegal activities, and give citizens a way of punishing those in court for disobeying. Will it prevent every shooting? Of course not, but it will mark a change.
We’re also quite used to the “It starts with mental health” line of ignoring the problem as a whole. Again, no one is arguing that mental health isn’t a crisis here in the United States. In fact, most of the people calling for gun reform have been calling for mental health advocacy and resources for the past decade only for it to fall on deaf ears – the very ears of the people now all about mental health if it means they get to keep their precious arsenals.
But here’s the thing, these two company lines from people unwilling to attempt change don’t support one another when used together. How can you correct mental health without enacting laws to limit severe cases from having access to weapons? By the logical being pushed forward, that won’t work because they still will break the law, and therefore we live in hopelessness?
To reasonably put effort into reforming mental health care in the States, there will need to be laws in place to prevent those deemed a danger from gaining access to weapons. It also means allocating funds to mental health resources and research, and rehabilitation when needed. Both the laws and the funding have been openly criticized and rebuffed by the very people saying mental health is the sole issue. Again proving that their purpose isn’t correcting the issue, it’s to lay blame elsewhere so they can feel guiltless in the face of a national crisis.
It (should) go without saying, but no one knows a sure-fire way to resolve this issue, but not trying is never going to be the answer. It may take a mix of new laws or reforming old laws alongside mental health care funding and access (because yes, that is sorely needed, too). It may mean taking old laws off the books or updating them to match the society we live in today. It will take time and sweat and unfortunately more tears to find reasonable solutions that diminish the amount of times every week we have to listen to our local, state, and federal politicians wish us thoughts and prayers, but we have to start trying something – anything – to turn the tide around.
The United States is drowning under a sea of bullets, and instead of looking for life boats and jackets, far too many people are happily sitting at the bow of the boat watching the stern disappear.