If universities want to know about mental health history, they have to require a background check of mental health history that will go all the way back (not limited to five years, as with the firearms identification card Steve obtained in Illinois). You can’t rely on self-reporting, and it’s difficult to know whether to trust the anecdotal reporting of others.
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All of this is to say that there’s no easy solution. And mental health practitioners are not reliable. One asked Steve whether he wanted to kill but didn’t ask whether he owned a firearm, for instance.
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So if universities really want to limit shootings, they’ll have to take a lot of steps that I can’t imagine them taking:
1. They’ll have to group together to fight the NRA and push for gun control, including the elimination of all handguns, since handguns are made to kill people.
2. They’ll have to require mental health background checks.
3. They’ll have to flag anyone who has served in the military or been in the prison system.
4. They’ll have to use metal detectors, more police at campus borders, etc.
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I think universities will wring their hands at school shootings, do what they need to do to cover their own liability, and not take any of the important steps, because the important steps all seem un-American. It seems ungrateful and unpatriotic, for instance, to flag veterans as potential risks, even though they've been taught to kill people without emotional or psychological response. It will seem politically unpopular and impossible to fight for gun control in many parts of the country. Background checks on mental health history will seem like an invasion of privacy and also will seem counterproductive to improving access to mental health providers.
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When you think of how many universities there are in this country, and how important they are in their communities, and when you add all the community colleges and high schools and think about the political power they could wield if they came together clearly on an issue such as gun control, that's an enormous amount of power. It's enough power, certainly, to unseat any politician who would be stupid enough to still say "guns save lives" in the face of the facts ...
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It’s important to understand that the pro-gun lobby in the United States has as its basis the paranoid belief that the federal government wants to enslave us all and is going to take away our guns as their first step. This is insane, and it shouldn’t be a mainstream force in our national politics, but it is.
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Universities in this country have the power to change this. They should have banded together in 1966 to fight for gun control, and it’s a crime that they didn’t. But starting now is better than starting next year or never.
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I have residency in New Zealand, and I'm spending only a couple weeks in the U.S. this year.