I Love Stephen Colbert

I love Stephen Colbert.  Last night he talked about all the discussion surrounding the failures of security procedures that allowed Aaron Alexis to get into the Navy Yard with a gun and kill 13 people.  If only that security had been tighter, he mused, that shooter would have gone somewhere else to unload his weapon on different innocent people.  So lets beef up security, lock our kids in schools with cops guarding the door, and hope that tragedy finds someone else.

Clearly the focus is in the wrong place.  This shooting occurred because America loves her guns even though they injure and kill her citizens – in military installations and movie theaters, at colleges and universities, in high schools and elementary schools, and yesterday on a basketball court in Chicago where a three year old child was shot in the head.

Mix the access to guns with an inaccessible and broken mental health care system and we have the perfect formula for tragedy.   Aaron Alexis’ story is so familiar—a man with mental illness, untreated and ignored when all the warning signs were there.  Left to figure it out himself after he’d called police about voices and being harassed through a microwave.  Why didn’t they take him to a crisis center or hospital? Could it have been any more obvious that he needed treatment?  He’d also been to the VA hospital asking for help.  Again, the severity of his condition went either unrecognized, minimized, or ignored by professionals who should know better.

When will we have the courage to pass strict gun control legislation in spite of powerful lobbies and misguided ideas about the Second Amendment—too often an excuse to carry a gun than a reason?  When will we have the wisdom to fund mental health care instead of continuing to cut it and to treat those with mental illness instead of leaving them to flounder?  When will we find the courage and wisdom to do what’s not only right, but smart?