To borrow lyrics from the venerable Christmas song, it's beginning to look a lot like hysteria, everywhere you go.
From the attention-grabbing Madea Benjamin of "Code Pink" screaming about "NRA bullies" as she was dragged from the NRA's news conference this week, to New York Governor Mario Cuomo acknowledging that "confiscation" (his word) of legally purchased firearms is part of his state's stricter approach to gun violence, to CNN's Piers Morgan and the media terrorizers harping every other minute of every newscast about assault weapons, our commercialized Christmas has been regularly interrupted by rantings about how to solve the violence crisis.
Sure, we can, and probably will, ban assault weapons. It's the chest-thumping, cheap, reaction typical after enough children have been killed. It's also a little like putting thousands of dollars worth of window dressing on a slum building and calling it rehabilitation.
The meaty approaches aren't easy or cheap. Politicians will give them lip service but balk at the cost.
One simple and immediate change? Instead of handing Coach/Prinicpal/Custodian/Teacher Jones a .45 to strap to his hip, bring back school counselors, at all levels and give them authority within the school hierarchy. Let teachers assign math problems. Leave the job of diagnosing emotional problems to professionals trained to tell if little Billy is a quiet child or just quietly planning to hose down his third grade class with Daddy's favorite war-relic flamethrower.
But sweeping changes are required in the way we approach mental health treatment on all levels.
Parents shouldn't have to file criminal charges to get help for their kids with violent tendencies. Instead of boxes and blankets in alleys and homeless shelters, those suffering from severe emotional illness should be hospitalized in psychiatric facilities just as up-to-date as their medical counterparts. And the federal government must twist the arms of state bureaucrats in demanding they stay up to date adding the names of those adjudicated with mental problems to the gun background check system or NICS.
Don't get me started about violent video games. They're the way many troubled kids acquire the eye-hand co-ordination and killing lust that sends them in search of human targets. Just read Lt. Col (Ret) David Grossman's comments from an interview in Executive Intelligence Review:
"If you truly dwell on the magnitude of what you are doing when you kill another human being; if you truly dwell on the reality of another living, vital person, who is loved, and thinks and feels; that's a very difficult thing to do. You've got to separate yourself from the humanity of the person you are killing—turn them into just a target. And the best mechanism we ever found for doing that, was this killing simulator, in which, instead of using bullseye targets, as we did in World War II, we transitioned to a man-made silhouette, and we made killing a conditioned reflex. The same phenomena that the military and law enforcement uses to enable killing—which is done with the safeguard of discipline—is being done indiscriminately to our children with violent video games."
Will the President, Congress and the hyenas of the media take the really tough approach and along with guns, deal with mental health issues and video games?
Sure.
Right after we fall off the fiscal cliff.
