Perfume on my Mind wrote:I will say for my own part that I've long thought the "mental illness" defense was a red herring, but since it seems to be a popular talking point from the gun rights crowd, it might be good political strategy to counter that argument with one for universal health care.
I mean... if they're serious about the mental health thing being the cause. How else are we going to get these poor troubled folks to seek help? Are they just going to volunteer to pay for the care they probably don't think they need?
The moral of the story: We should have universal health care, and maybe we can talk some people into it this way.
I find myself agreeing with universal health care, even Medicare for all at this point. If you want additional private insurance, have at it. So far as I know M4A can coexist with private insurance. Perhaps the easiest and more seamless solution would be to reform and improve the ACA<----we need to stop referring to it as Obama care and let it come through as bipartisan.
I believe some of the Democrats who are saying that this country is in a chokehold on the part of insurance, pharma, etc. If you ask most any medical professional, I believe they'd tell you the same. I have personal accounts wherein you can see the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on our health care.
I think Tulsi called it "sick care". From where I sit, she's exactly right. She's not the only one to refer to it as such.
I don't think mental illness is the cause of these shootings. I do think it's presented itself as a significant factor in many of the mass shootings we've seen. We even saw it in a car running through a crowd of protestors in Charlottesville.
Take the mass shootings off the table for a second. Shouldn't we be alarmed by and address the rate of suicide in this country? Because there's the mental health piece again and it's there in our homeless population. These are just large groups of people, mental illness is there when you go into the office or your kids go to school every day. I guarantee you it is. It's in the board room, in the cubicles, it's in classroom seats and it's teaching the class.
This country does not do a good job of taking care of it's own. I like to think that our communities try their best to remedy situations but if we were good at it, our suicide rates would be lower, our homeless population reduced.
Guns and mental illness are just two pieces of this.