Forget the usual folly about eliminating the Second Amendment to the Constitution, banning this gun or that gun, or enacting a package of “common-sense” gun regulations. They’re not going to happen.
But what a mass shooting Wednesday by a Maine Army reservist and former mental health patient that left at least 18 people dead should do is force Congress and all Americans to get serious about legally removing guns from people who have mental issues.
No, we cannot supply details on how such a plan should work, how long the guns should be kept from their owners or how to get around constitutional concerns about such actions. That’s for lawyers and lawmakers to work out. But can’t we agree it’s a step we can take between doing nothing — again and again — and entering every home and confiscating every gun?
The 40-year-old suspect in the Maine incident, in which a dozen or more also were injured, Robert Card, had been committed to a mental health facility for two weeks this past summer after hearing what he believed were voices in his head and threats to shoot up the National Guard base in Saco.
What’s worse is that apparently he exhibited the behavior while in his role as an Army reservist during training of West Point cadets at Camp Smith Training Center in upstate New York.
“Card was behaving erratically” on July 17, a defense official told ABC News, and “out of concern for his safety, the unit requested that law enforcement be contacted.” Police took him to Keller Army Community Hospital at the United States Military Academy for a medical evaluation, the official said.
What difference might it have made if a law required anyone entering a mental health facility — especially an Army reservist who handles guns — to surrender their guns for a year? Five years? To be required to go through a thorough mental health check to get their guns back?
One report also said Card had a history of arrests for domestic violence and other crimes. There again, between doing nothing and banning guns, wouldn’t a similar law requiring the surrender of guns upon a domestic violence arrest be an action we could take?
Maybe the seizure wouldn’t be for as long — three months? six months? a year? — but perhaps an evaluation would be required to get the guns back.
For our part, we’d just as soon they highly restrict the sales of the AR-15-style rifle Card allegedly used at a Lewiston bar and at a bowling alley filled with young people. Nobody needs such a weapon for daily use. But that’s not a realistic expectation in a country where about one out of three people owns a gun of some type.
But the mental health piece should be realistic. In a June 2023 survey by Pew Research Center, 88% of Republicans and 89% of Democrats said they would support preventing people with mental illnesses from purchasing guns.
And yet we’ve seen over the past six months in our own state how much resistance there is to the mere discussion of removing guns from people with mental illnesses.
When a young woman killed six people at Covenant Christian School in Nashville — a school she previously attended — in March, she’d been “under a doctor’s care for an emotional disorder.” But she’d been able to legally buy multiple guns and ammunition.
So when Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee in April set a special session of the legislature to convene in August on the subject of public safety, he suggested one of the topics legislators might tackle was an “order of protection” law that removed firearms from those deemed a risk to others.
“There is broad agreement that dangerous, unstable individuals who intend to harm themselves or others should not have access to weapons,” he said in a statement. “We also share a strong commitment to preserving Second Amendment rights, ensuring due process and addressing the heart of the problem with strengthened mental health resources.”
But when he announced his specific priorities for the session in early August, the order of protection suggestion had vanished. Legislators had told him in no uncertain terms it wouldn’t even be considered. In the end, almost nothing — save some money that was allotted for mental health supports — was passed in the special session that might have had a direct bearing on stopping anyone from perpetrating a mass shooting.
Though Lewiston is Maine’s second largest city, it has a population of only 37,000, proving once again that mass shootings can happen anywhere. But for a state where no permit is required to carry a gun but which had only 29 homicides in all of 2022, the incident was still a shock.
It leaves an entire country wondering, along with 10-year-old Zoey Levesque, grazed by a bullet in the bowling alley carnage, who asked, “Why do people do this?
“It’s scary,” she said. “I had never thought I’d grow up and get a bullet in my leg. And it’s just like, why?”
Why, indeed? But until the next wounded child has to ask, it’s time to take some steps at least dealing with the intersection of guns and the mentally ill.