Recent events at my school, University of Maryland-College Park, have compelled me to alter my posting schedule a little bit. I had originally planned to post something related to Tuesday night's "State of the Union" (or "Misstatement" as detractors jokingly called it), but that just has to be tabled.
For those of you who do not yet know, at approximately 1 a.m. on Tuesday morning, there was a murder-suicide at a house just off campus. The shooter set multiple fires in and around the house and when his housemates came to investigate, they all went outside. Once on the front lawn, the shooter opened fire, killing one of his housemates and injuring the other as he tried to flee the scene. The shooter then went to the backyard off the house an killed himself.
Of course almost immediately, rather than mourning, some liberals on this campus broke out in cries for gun control yet again. They did the same thing right after the Newtown shooting. Can this country get all the way through any tragedy without politicizing it? Just once I would love to see us get all the way through a tragedy before bringing politics into it. It is something we are all guilty of, me included, and something we all need to work on.
Within hours it came to light that the shooter was, surprise, surprise, mentally ill and had been for over a year. Various media outlets are reporting the shooter suffered from schizophrenia and maybe other issues. Yet in the time the shooter, 23-year-old graduate student Dayvon Maurice Green, was mentally ill, he was able to pass a background check to legally purchase a 9mm handgun and another to join the University Police as a police aide.
This issue really raises some red flags. The biggest concerns those people who are pushing for more and more background checks prior to purchasing guns. Clearly that might not do anything to stop a mentally ill person from purchasing a gun because, according to the Prince George's County Police, Green was already ill when he passed his background check to purchase the murder weapon.
The second concern that I have is this: with all of the studies which show college students are among the most stressed people in the country and with the mental health services already in place here at Maryland, how did Green slip through the cracks? How did his housemates, his classmates, his professors, co-workers (Green was in a NASA internship program), etc. all go through this past year without noticing anything wrong and trying to get Green the help he needed? And obviously people did know he was mentally ill, otherwise the police wouldn't have been able to report it. Was Green really that good at hiding his problems? Or was everyone else really that unaware?
I know no one could possibly hope to answer the questions I have posed here, but they definitely make one wonder. Obviously no one wanted to see this situation come to this, but why did Green have to involve his housemates in his problems? If the only option Green felt like he had left was suicide, why did he have to try to take his housemates' lives with his?
This is a very said situation for the university community, but trying to say that more gun control measures would have stopped this just isn't true based on the facts of this tragedy. Mental health has become a real problem, especially over the last several months, and that is the problem that really needs to be focused on. We don't need more gun control or more background checks. Before we try and impose additional laws on gun owners and potential gun owners, perhaps we should actually enforce the laws that are already on the books.
Jimmy Williams
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