Write about Mental Health and Guns

Official seal of Newtown, Connecticut (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

by Jean Purcell

When I began this posting, it was the Sunday after the Friday tragedies in Sandy Hook Elementary of Newtown, Connecticut. The principal, school counselor, four teachers, and 20 six- and seven-year-olds in the school...killed by a 20-year-old. 
    In church this Sunday, we prayed for them and for the rapid response people who tried to help them and who did save others who might have been shot if they had not arrived when they did, at the school set in a quiet part of a small town in beautiful Connecticut. 

    We are thankful that we can turn to God, the Creator of all that is good, who is ready to hear our cries of distress over tragedies and able to help. We are thankful that He holds onto the suffering when horror targets little ones and the adults who have devoted themselves to teach and to protect them during school. We pray for their sweet souls and for their parents,siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors, doctors, pets, yes, even pets. The list goes on.  

    I am thankful that God is just. He will do as promised, to avenge, in His way, every evil of this world, every evil since the beginning.

   Someone grappling years ago with another tragedy that hit a co-worker's family agonized over the realities of evil and reached a point of realizing that evil does get into people. Sometimes such realization of evil is the first step to deal with its outcomes.
     Evil, in that situation, got into a father and husband's mind and emotions so firmly that he killed his family rather than have mother and children together after a divorce. Nothing good was accomplished, no resolutions were reached. Jealousy, bitterness, and selfishness fed each other and grew into murder. 

This is a time for writers who focus on gun laws that allow assault weapons and rapid-fire firearms to work harder to effect change. The same goes for writers about mental health issues. It is time to call upon others, including lawyers and jurists, to help the mental health profession find ways to get around privacy laws and gun laws, if they are the main hindrances to stopping anything that enables killers. Lawyers, jurists, and law-makers must find ways to relieve parents of responsibility for managing out of control teens and live-in adult children so that they can get help or be isolated where they cannot threaten or harm others. 

     If you are a writer interested in these matters, there is a great need for writers to learn more and to write about possible solutions, or at least possible aids. You can do this as a citizen, not necessarily someone in law enforcement or psychiatry/psychology/counseling professions. Research, study, write...and continue to pray.  

The President spoke this evening to the mourning and shocked community of Newtown, in the high school that 20 children might have attended later on, if not in the first classrooms that day. Friday. The President is calling for action, as yet undetermined, to address issues of legal ownership of certain kinds of guns, and to address mental health needs. Who could not support him in those efforts in light of what has happened, again?