Tragedy struck the US this week as a nineteen year old guy killed 17 students at a Florida high school.  While we all mourn some of our politicians just can’t pass up the opportunity to exploit this incident for their own agenda.

Gun control advocates use any shooting as evidence we need tougher gun laws.  CNN, barely even trying to masquerade as an objective news organization anymore, shoved as many high school classmates as they could find in front of a camera who would express outrage that our leadership (President Trump) practically pulled the trigger himself by not revoking the 2^nd amendment and making guns illegal.

This is a common tactic used by both sides – pick a sympathetic victim, put them in front of a camera, and dare your political opponents to disagree with them ‘cuz that would be just mean.  Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s Chief of Staff infamously quoted “never allow a good crisis to go to waste”.  Sadly this is the sewer our politicians live in.

Conservatives do it too.  They will scour the nation to find a heinous crime committed by an illegal immigrant and cite it as proof they are ruining our country.   “Kathryn Steinly would be alive today if we had tougher immigration laws!”  Shame on both sides.

Average Americans don’t see these disasters as political opportunities despite the way our politicians and sycophant media spins them.  We feel a blur of guilt, sympathy, anger, and fear that we don’t know how to process.  So we polarize around platitudes:  More Gun Control.  Police should have known.  Should have seen the warning signs.  Fix Mental Illness.  Find a scapegoat person, policy or process to execute so we can go back to believing that nothing like this could ever happen where WE live, not in OUR town, not to OUR kids.

But the world is more complex than we want to see.  And complex problems usually aren’t corrected with quick, simple bumper sticker solutions.

The Constitution and Bill of Rights aren’t that verbose so the founding fathers had good reason for calling out the ‘right of the people to keep and bear arms’.   A cogent debate would have to consider centuries of governments history in which an armed citizenry was the only defense against tyranny.  One side would surely argue such a concept is antiquated and society has evolved far past this barbaric distrust.  I wonder sometimes if gun control zealots realize they are advocating giving ALL the guns to Trump and his government.  Does that make you feel comfortable?

I won’t pretend to give the topic due attention here, but I am annoyed by the non-starter position that we can somehow put the genie back into the bottle and get rid of all the guns in America.  Utopian suggestions are pointless for real-world problems.

Another common fallacy is “They should have seen the signs”.  What signs are guaranteed tipoffs that a person is about to go on a killing rampage?  And do we want to live in a society where the police can kick down your door and drag you to jail because a neighbor said ‘He seems weird’ or ‘he was bitter about his breakup”?  How many people could claim right now that you ‘were not very social’, ‘seemed angry often’, ‘said racially insensitive things’, ‘and sometimes yelled at others’?  Are those the signs we’re talking about?  Would you feel better looking at the inside of a jail cell knowing that maybe somewhere a tragedy may have been averted?

Then there’s the mental health angle.  Nobody denies that a person who murders 17 schoolkids or concert goers is mentally ill, but nobody tries to define the threshold that defines mental illness.  Politicians have recently illustrated how subjective these claims can be by declaring that the President must be ‘mentally unfit for office’ because he doesn’t think and act like they do.  If this is the standard we use then half the population can judged mentally ill by the other half in any given election cycle.

Does the mental illness label apply if a person get depressed?  Do they surrender their right to own a firearm if they consult with a mental health professional?  This doesn’t seem like a dichotomy we should force on a person who wants help.

Nobody argues that mass shootings are awful, horrible, terrible evil.  We wish the evil away, and we all feel for the victims and survivors.  We crave comfort in answers, in remedies, in assurances that it won’t happen again.  But finding a solution to a problem sometimes requires connecting more than 2 dots.  We need to be willing to entertain those discussions.

We can be passionate, but anyone who thinks there is a ‘simple solution’ hasn’t spent enough time thinking yet.