Again: dead school children, semi-automatic weapons much too easily obtained, mental illness, missed opportunities to act on an observed behavioral pattern. Is this ever going to end?

It is easy to get emotional at a time like this. I certainly have, just imagining the unspeakable pain in the hearts of bereaved parents, grandparents, siblings, and friends—pain that will oever really go away entirely—caused by Nikolas Cruz. But emotions alone won’t solve this problem. So what will?

The first task is to separate out the multiple problems involved here. Let’s start where most people start—with the guns.

I know rather little about guns, but I have a problem imagining why a sportsman needs an automatic or even a semi-automatic weapon of the sort Nikolas Cruz used to go hunting. The gun people will have ready-made answers to my puzzlement, I know. They are well practiced, and maybe some of the answers cling near to some truth. I still don’t buy any of them, looking at the bloody other side of the argumentative coin, and I certainly don’t buy the strained ahistorical interpretation of the 2^nd Amendment peddled by the NRA—and the paranoid “black helicopter” government conspiracy theories that often go with it.

There is something very deep and even mystical about the American love of guns, so deep that most Europeans, for example, think we’re mad. Logic, and certainly Europeans, can rarely even budge it. Consider the obvious reality that the main reason it is so dangerous to be a policeman in the United States, and hence as a consequence so dangerous to be an ambiguous object of police attention, is the fact that there are more guns in the United States than there are people. Yet few professional law enforcement groups in the United States have ever argued for more stringent gun control—the National Law Enforcement Partnership to Prevent Gun Violence is an exception, and you’ve probably never heard of them.

Consider, too, that every state in the union requires that people pass a test before they get a driver’s license. Automobiles, motorcycles, and trucks can be dangerous, so we expect people to be able to show that they can operate them safely before they can get a license. Are guns not as dangerous? At the very least, common sense suggests that every state should require gun safety training before enabling someone to buy and use a weapon. Reports suggest that Cruz did take a course in gun usage, but that’s a far cry from a rigorous state-staffed program. If conscientious trainers espy an erratic personality seeking a license, just maybe that filtering process alone could save lives. What if the State of Florida had required Nikolas Cruz to pass a gun safety course before he could buy that AR-15?

Of course, that’s not enough. Suppose a trainer had spotted Cruz as an erratic and suspicious individual: What could he or she do about it? Plenty of people in Parkland apparently understood the potential danger Cruz represented. But it is not so easy anymore to lock up someone against his or her will to protect public safety on suspicion of mental illness—there are plenty of cases in the past where such authorities were abused and misused. And Cruz is 19-years old—legally beyond parental and loco parentis control.

It is all very well for President Trump to address the children of the nation and urge then to seek help if they think they need it. His words were well chosen, and appropriate for many cases. But Nikolas Cruz was beyond all that, both in terms of his mental state and probably in terms of his age. Reports tell us now that Cruz received counseling after his adoptive father died, and again after his mother passed away. Nice presidential words, and perhaps not unhelpful; but they don’t really fit the Parkland case.

It makes sense, it seems to me, to provide authority to police, health care professionals, and in some cases school authorities to order individuals held temporarily for mental health evaluation—48 hours may be enough in most cases. We should not want to go back to the bad old days when avaricious children could have granny committed so as to get their hands on the farm. But it seems irresponsible to have no way, no recourse, to legally get people like Nikolas Cruz off the street once a potential tragedy hovers into sight.

The point: gun control isn’t the only avenue of remediation we have.  If that road is blocked for political reasons, the response should not be to throw up our hands and scream or tweet obscenities at the President—as one distraught young woman at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School did—but rather to keep thinking about alternatives.

This problem—of the excessive blue sky between law enforcement authority and mental health vulnerabilities—is part of a broader issue in American society. Over time we have medicalized a lot of behaviors that arguably should never have been medicalized, and indulged in pharmaceutical fixes for such behaviors that in some cases have caused more problems than they have solved. Never mind for now how and why the DSM handbook has ballooned in size in recent decades—a subject that has been the focus of much analysis and debate. As I see it, Philip Rieff’s warning in his 1966 book The Triumph of the Therapeutic qualifies as modern prophecy; and essays on the therapeutic university by Matthew Crawford and Frank Furedi in the backpages of The American Interest are mandatory reading for anyone concerned about the trend.¹

You can sense the trend by analyzing the use of the common phrase to “reach out.” It used to be that “reach out” was said only in the context where someone’s emotional needs took center stage. Now everyone uses this phrase for least causal thing, and I doubt very much that this is entirely coincidental. With everyone “reaching out” all over the place for every little thing, if you didn’t know better you might think that we’re all prospectively fragile mentally and in need of near constant collective vigilance lest we lose our shit.

But ironically enough, while we medicalize some behaviors that arguably should not be medicalized, we fail to medicalize some behaviors that ought to be medicalized—and nowhere is this failure clearer than in the interstice between law enforcement and mental health.

When mentally ill or drug-crazed people act out weirdly and sometimes violently in public spaces, who are the first responders? Usually the police, or sometimes the fire department. But they’re not trained mental health professionals. They do what they can, they’ve learned as they go, some big city police forces now have mental health professionals on staff, and those that do not know how to liaise with local hospitals when necessary. But this isn’t the ideal matchup between someone in need and someone who can help, to say the least. Back in the day, before the Reagan Administration all but destroyed Federal support for the mental health infrastructure in many American towns and cities, it was fairly common for hospital emergency rooms to go expeditionary in such circumstances—the “men in white coats” coming to take a poor soul “away.”² This has become much rarer as the definition of responsibility for such contingencies has shifted, or in many cases been left more or less in abeyance, as cost disease has ravaged the availability of quality health care for so many Americans.

It would be nice to have a saner gun control regime, and certainly in the Parkland case—once all the factors are weighed—it really does seem to come down to the easy availability of the gun. But that’s not the only problem that enables tragedies like Parkland. There are these other problems, but there are also ways to solve some of them. We need to think harder and act resolutely on putting those solutions into action, at the state level if not also the Federal one. Better gun control may have to wait, unfortunately, but we don’t.