I live not far from Uvalde, and it's truly tragic.
There are people calling for banning guns, but the problem with that approach - it doesn't work. At least, it did not work for Canada, Australia, or the UK when they severely restricted guns in the 1990s. Their murder rates used to be lower than in the US and now they are higher. Here is actual data:
https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/lbrr/archives/cnmcs-plcng/cn32226-eng.pdf
What about banning men? Every single mass shooter seems to be a young man, most of them white. (Tongue in cheek here)
There is also the fact that racists used to try to keep black people from owning guns. I wrote about this a while back:
https://shefaliohara.medium.com/racism-and-gun-control-c220358b8f65
Now, why would racists want to keep blacks from owning guns? Hmmm?
An older friend of mine told me that when he went to high school, he would bring his rifle to school for a marksmanship club he was part of. He kept it in his vehicle until after school. A few times people got into fist fights, but no one ever went to their vehicle and got a gun and shot another kid. I asked him why, and he said, "If we were mad at each other, we might call each other names or punch each other. No one even thought of getting their rifle."
The culture has changed. Meanwhile we publicize things like these mass shooters, and it's horrific, but how many kids die every day in places like Chicago and does anyone actually care? Chicago has tough gun control laws, but people just buy guns in Indiana. Maybe we need to ban guns nationwide. But they did that in other countries, and people just killed each other in different ways.
If I thought banning guns would save lives, I'd be 100% for it, but the data doesn't support that.
Would better mental health care help?
I think the most important thing (but this is just my opinion, what do I know) would be to foster community again. I am old enough to remember when mothers and grandmothers sat on the stoops of their apartment buildings and kept an eye on the kids. If a child got in trouble, there were plenty of aunties around to help. I grew up in NYC, and we felt safer because they of it.
