On School Shootings, Or God, Not Again

Another shooting.

Another round-and-round about the 2nd Amendment, mental health, societal values, individual liberties, and legislation.

Mostly, I'm heartbroken that it's becoming easy to be complacent about it.

Every time, we go round and round.

Every time, nothing gets solved.

That's the way with complicated issues.

Don't get me wrong: that doesn't make the conversations any less worth having.

It also doesn't make it any less truly fatiguing.

How do we make it better?

Outlawing guns won't work any more than outlawing marijuana has.

Enforcing the laws already in place might help, but enforcement requires manpower, which requires money, which means tax hikes, which, I mean, *I'm* willing to pay, but it's a hard sell to the public, even when the bodies haven't cooled yet.

Providing better mental health services won't fix this particular problem. How do I know? Most people who struggle with mental health issues are more likely to hurt themselves than someone else, and the ones who are likely to commit violence like this are unlikely to seek help in the first place. This is not to mean that I'm not in favor of better mental health services in general, becaUSE OF COURSE I AM, but I am tired of mental health being used as a scapegoat.

An argument could be made for toxic masculinity being the real mustache-twirling villain of this tale. The perpetrators of these kinds of violence are, by a significant majority, men. Young men convinced that the world should work a certain way, that they are entitled to [x] or deserve [y], that their victims "have it coming." Men who are discouraged from seeking counseling because it's seen as weakness. Men who are shown every day that might makes right, so strength and force are the only ways to solve their problems.

So what do we do?

How do we change our society in such as way as to keep these things from happening?

I don't know. I wish I did.

I wish the answer was as simple as saying "Let There Be No More Of This Mass Shooting Foolishness."

It's nice to want things, I guess.

Tl;dr: Gun violence in America is an overwhelmingly complicated problem, and I wish it had a simple solution.