Guns vs. Mental health

Back in February, a tragic shooting occurred at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, killing seventeen students. I send my condolences to those affected by this horrible incident and applaud the young men and women who chose to stand up to advocate for safety. My heart is with you.

However, I have focused on a different subject, the debate between guns and mental health.

Lately, people have been discussing the cause of tragedies like the Parkland school shooting, Orlando nightclub shooting, and the Las Vegas music festival shooting. However, some insist there are several reasons for shootings.

“I would place more blame on mental health but only by a little,” said Grant Hess, 11. “A gun is simply a tool, and while it can be used for evil, so can a knife, but it is the mindset of those people which allows them to commit such atrocities, which ‘normal people’ find horrible and unthinkable, in other words, mentality is the enabler.”

I would like to disagree to some extent: There will never be an ultimate cause for these shooting, especially in the case of the Florida school shooting. The world is more complex than ever, weaving together topics one would never expect to have a need to discuss, even two decades ago. The cause is not solely be because of a gun or the shooter’s mental health. There will always be more factors that play into these tragic events.

For the Parkland shooting, it was an interlocking of the mental health of Nikolas Cruz, who was described by a public defender as “deeply disturbed and emotionally broken,” and the easy access Cruz had to a gun. Among these reasons, some adults do not take teenagers seriously.

Although the Broward County Sheriff’s Office claims that the sheriff only got 23 calls about the shooter’s family, the number of calls reached at least 45 according to CNN. The deputies say that they did not make an arrest due to the lack of criminal or dangerous activity at Cruz’s home.

I am sorry, but if I was sheriff and I received more than a dozen calls about a particular person, I would become concerned. Even if it seemed as though nothing harmful was happening at the house, I would still have done more due to the concern shown by the rest of the community. After all, the police exist to serve the public and the safety of the public.

Now, that does not mean that we should place all the blame on the police. No, not at all. Although people have a tendency of judging before fully knowing, we must, at least try to understand all sides of a situation without any bias before inserting our own bias. After researching what exactly happened in Parkland I was able to form my opinion on the different potential causes of this tragedy, and that is an action all people should take.