Editorial: Guns are a part of it

It’s about guns. No, it’s about mental health. This is how our discussion of gun violence breaks down. It’s about both. We are doing very little about either because of our paralyzed politics, urban v. rural, Democrat v. Republican. In Storm Lake, it appears we are doing all we can with the resources allowed to keep people safe. They probably thought so in Uvalde, too.

A couple of researchers studied every mass shooting since 1966 for the Justice Department. Jillian Peterson of Hamline University in St. Paul and James Densley of Metro State University in Minneapolis found a few threads running through the data:

Nearly all mass shooters suffered childhood violence or trauma: sexual abuse, extreme bullying, physical violence, that led them to further problems as years progressed. Signs are visible to friends. Mass shootings are acts of suicide. In school shootings, 90% involve students in the system; they are insiders, not outsiders.

In Storm Lake, the schools and police long have worked closely on early intervention with troubled students. We have placed resource officers in the schools. We added mental health counselors recently. Educators from Storm Lake and Iowa Central Community College track truants and drop-outs. The police and schools train on emergency response.

We need to offer more mental health services. It’s hard for schools when their budgets haven’t tracked with inflation for several years. At least, we are on the right track. We are doing all the right things.

The facilities are as hardened as they can be until a door doesn’t quite lock.

The gunman finds an opening and slaughters a classroom. It doesn’t work with a knife, a sword or a bow-and-arrow.

Ultimately, the problem remains the gun, which is not restricted to massacres.

There are street shootings every night across America, from Baltimore to San Diego, as guns proliferate. Local regulations in Chicago cannot control the flood of guns coming in from unregulated Indiana. There has been more gunplay, by far, away from schools than on-campus in Storm Lake.

Every country has people with mental health issues. No country has the problem of gun violence, or fewer restrictions on firearms, than the United States. We should do more about mental health. We should do more with police training. We should increase education and public safety funding. And, we should do something about gun safety — background checks, waiting periods, etc., that the public overwhelmingly demands. But we don’t.