When the Columbine shooting happened I read the news coverage obsessively. We were living in the UK at the time, but the London Times covered the event at length. I would read and sob and read and wipe my nose and read and wonder why on earth something like this had happened. I remember talking to my friend Carlene, another American mother living in Edinburgh. Carlene had married into a Scottish family and she brought up the 1996 Dunblane massacre. She said, her eyes wide, "It brought the country to its knees."
The killing of 5- and 6-year-old children in Scotland brought about big changes. Schools became more secure -- schools here will doubtless be encouraged to do likewise -- but the commission that investigated the massacre recommended changes to UK gun laws. As a result, more than 160,000 weapons were surrendered in the couple of years following Dunblane.
Of course it's not just about guns; it's also about mental illness. The NHS is not what you'd call an exemplary system for those with mental health problems, but it provides a safety net that is simply unavailable here in the US. It's possible to get phenomenal mental health services here if you have deep pockets. It's equally possible for someone with treatable mental illness to go off the rails because he wasn't wealthy, because he didn't have insurance, because he feared the "pre-existing condition" label up until he wasn't really capable of thinking rationally about his condition.
It is baffling to me that these ideas provoke as much antipathy as they do in the US-- baffling that the assault weapons ban expired in 2004 and has never made it to the floor for a vote since then, baffling that the idea of a public option to provide basic health care to mentally ill individuals inspires such wrath and doomsaying.
The next school shooting -- and it is not a matter of whether, only of when -- will doubtless inspire even more calls to Do Something. Surely it is not so very hard to see what we need to do. One of the things that still chills me from the Columbine reporting was the reaction of the killers to the destruction they had wrought. "Look at that kid's brains!" they said enthusiastically, according to one of the survivors. The thought of a kid so far gone into darkness that the sight of a fellow student's exposed brain tissue aroused only excitement -- it's horrifying. And yet for a wide swath of America the idea that we should separate the mentally ill and the assault weapons is apparently viewed as an unconscionable assault on freedom.
I am not proposing a UK-style ban on handguns. Still, the reality is sobering. We have had too many school shootings for me to count here in the US.
There has only been one Dunblane.
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