The secret to eliminating the epidemic of mass shooters may not be in eliminating the AR-15, but removing the stigma of mental and letting people seek the help they need.

Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness. Isaiah 41:10

The other evening, I pose a statement on social media that I knew would receive many divergent opinions from both sides of the political fence. The emotions of yet another mass shooting would bring those responses out in the aftermath of the recent Fort Lauderdale shooting. The statement went something like this:

'We must ban the AR-15 gun-they were used in every mass shooting in recent history.'

Sure enough, the length of that conversation grew with each new comment. I pose that statement to prove how divided this nation really is as we strive toward understanding the 'why's' of this shooting. Afterall, we want to find a root cause of this problem and we want to solve it immediately- so in one sense, it seems easier to go after the gun that was used to kill innocent lives.

There is an even bigger problem our nation is facing and that would be the lack of effective fathers in the lives of these young men. In the case of every single one of these mass shooters, the lack of a healthy dad in the lives of these men leads to their increasing feelings of rage. In an article in Huffington, the writer highlights the things boys need from their dads. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/01/father-son-relationships-dad-raising-boy_n_3186191.html


Some of the things include:

“Does my son know that he matters to me?”

“Does my son know that I love him?”

Does my son know that what he does is important to me?

Does my son know how proud I am of him?

Our boys and girls need words of affirmation from their dads. They need their dad's to show them how they should do life. In virtually every case of these mass shooters, they didn't have affirmation when their father's left home, abandoned them, didn't spend enough time with them, or had patterns of severe dysfunction through addictions that it rendered them useless as dad's.

In addition, we need to stop treating mental illness as a stigma by referencing 'those people' should be locked up. Instead, we should treat mental health just like we would treat an open cut- we see a doctor and have them stitch us back up without repercussions of what might happen if they see a 'shrink'. The crisis we're experiencing can be remedied through the care and compassion of a therapist- if only those in crisis can access the mental health system.

 The reality is every one of us is capable of succumbing to a mental health crisis and often we are just one major crisis away from one- the loss of a job, the death of a spouse, death of a child, being a survivor of a mass shooting for that matter and the list goes on.

The warning signs of the recent shooter were there, but we didn't see the- father who died when he was in grade school, the mother who died unexpectedly in November, that he was filled with rage over the injustice of seeing other friends with fully alive parents and he didn't have that for his own life, feeling misunderstood and referred to as 'that weird kid'.

If we could have reached this kid through the roughest patch of his life through timely intervention, just maybe those 17 lives would still be among us. How?

By removing the stigma from mental health and finding ways to bring people in crisis to seek the help they need so they can function once again without feeling the stigma of that label, just maybe we can keep people out of the criminal justice system. Our schools need to hire more counselors and mental health social workers to make sure students in crisis receive the necessary help they need. If we can find money for sports, certainly we can find money to support the mental health needs of our community. 

If the proper intervention could have been given to this shooter, he might have been able to overcome that mental health crisis and gone on and become the next Engineer.

Finally, I encourage everyone encountering the loss of a loved one (do not underestimate the powerful grip this pain has on you) and find a 13-week Griefshare group near you through this link: griefshare.org  Your mental health is counting on it.