Liberal columnist gets off on wrong foot with gun column

I guess we’ve received our first dose of liberalism from the new liberal-leaning columnist who writes for the Arkansas Times (“Guns and demons?” by Gene Lyons, Jan. 3).

I suppose I’m a tad biased, but in my humble opinion, Gene Lyons ain’t no Thomas Sowell, his conservative counterpart (Senior Fellow, Hoover Institute, Stanford; magna cum laude, Harvard economics; master’s in economics from Columbia University; and doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago after dropping out of high school in Harlem to join the Marines), but then few are.

The author criticizes NRA president Wayne LaPierre for demonizing the shooter. He spends a lot of time encouraging the restriction of semiautomatic weapons and high capacity magazines while pleading the necessity of better diagnosis and treatment of psychotics (frequently paranoid schizophrenics) who carry out many of these mass murders and he admits that involuntary commitments for these mentally ill should be easier.

Well, Mr. Lyons, it took you way too long to get to the only valid point of your column. We have become so politically correct in this country about stigmatizing any member of our society no matter how dysfunctional that we would rather leave a potential mass murderer free to move about an elementary school than force him into diagnosis and treatment of his paranoid schizophrenia. Just as the liberal left decries the use of the words terrorism or terrorist, they find it more palatable to allow the massacre of innocent children rather than remove a human threat from society until we are reasonably sure that they are no longer that threat and provide ongoing monitoring to assure that the treatment has indeed been effective.

The omnipresence of violence on television, in movies and in video games is another point that should be addressed. How many kids spend hours playing video games where they use much more lethal weapons than are involved in these mass killings? I don’t hear any moves to limit these murder games or shows which trivialize death.  

It is much easier to blame a high capacity magazine for the carnage than the shooter. I suggest some of these same anti-gun folks go out to a shooting range and see how long it takes to change three 10-round magazines in their delusion that if only we could get rid of 30-round magazines (or less than 20-rounds for handguns) we could solve this problem.

Sorry, Mr. Lyons. The shooter in Connecticut was a 20 year-old who demonstrated extremely odd behavior in high school. I place the blame squarely on the parents and teachers who should have recognized a problem. I also blame a medical-care system and society which has decided the correct treatment of mental illness is to mainstream. With only 7,500 child psychiatrists and inpatient psychiatric beds at a premium, we probably couldn’t treat these patients in an inpatient facility until they were safe to release even if we could identify them early. How many of our homeless belong in an inpatient psychiatric bed or a group home?

Elimination of high-capacity magazines and semiautomatic weapons won’t solve this problem. In this case, a tired old saying happens to be true... guns don’t kill people; people kill people. And these people need to be identified, diagnosed and treated until safe in society if we are to have an impact on these types of killings. Restriction on gun ownership or types of guns might limit the volume of carnage per event, but won’t eliminate the behavior.

Myerowitz is a resident of Columbia Falls.