End the violence

At least 27 dead, dozens wounded and countless people who will never recover from the trauma. Now we get to start hearing the same old arguments again. Violent video games. Poverty. Bad parenting. Mental health issues. But guess what? Every major nation has these problems, but we are the only country who is enduring this constant onslaught of mass violence from our own people.

Let’s look beyond gun control here for a second. A major difference is we don’t have many of the globally-common safety nets in place. Access to higher education has become a horrible Catch 22 — you can’t go to college because you can’t afford it, so you take out loans so you can go to college, which puts you in the grip of lifelong, strangling debt, which keeps you poor. People are literally dying because our health care system is unsustainable. Mental health care is still fraught with stigmas. Even those of us with health insurance know we will have to fight the insurance companies every single time we need something important.

We have fostered a nation of angry, unwell and hopeless people who have no safety nets in place and we make sure guns are available to all.

Yes, we need some common-sense gun legislation right now, but the people who say, “Well, they’ll just use a knife or a rock” are right. We need to clean up the sources of this rage and violence, so all of our people can feel safe again.

Lavonne Weller

Spokane