The Texas shooting and why it is much more than a "mental health problem"
President Donald Trump's response to the deadliest shooting in Texas, is being labelled as a mental health problem, which has many people questioning how far will they go to protect their gun rights.
On Sunday November 5th, shooter Devin Kelley entered a church in Sutherland Springs Texas, armed with an assault rifle and 15 loaded magazines. Inside the church he killed 26 people and critically wounded 10 in the deadliest shooting in the state of Texas.
The gunman once served in the Holloman Air Force base but was court-martialled in 2012 due to assault on his spouse and child and was discharged from the base in 2014. He served a year in military prison and received a bad conduct charge due to the amount of incidents involving his ex-wife and step-son. The Air force has acknowledged that they failed to relay information that may have prevented him from accessing a gun and due to this he passed a background check required for him to buy the weapon he allegedly used in the shooting.
Those that knew him were aware he had a record of violence and was obsessed with a domestic dispute and before his death he had sent threatening messages to his mother-in-law and posted lots of gun violence and weapons he was into on Facebook.
However, Devin Kelley's mental health history has not yet been disclosed and experts have cautioned against focusing on that factor whilst excluding others. President Trump commenting on Kelley's mental health and putting that as the cause of this problem has confused many mental health researchers, as not only do we not know the history of his mental health and whether he has any issues at all he has also fed into a false stereotype that people with mental health problems are more dangerous than others. Many studies have shown that the vast majority of people with severe mental health issues are no more likely to be violent than anyone else and in reality, are actually 10 times more likely to be victims of a violent crime than the general population, making us question is Donald Trump misinformed about Devin Kelley or is he in fact just using mental health as a scapegoat in an excuse to not enforce tighter gun laws?
Instead of his thoughts, prayers and focus on mentally ill people being unable to buy a gun, Donald Trump should be focusing on tighter gun laws. In the past 35 days 2 of the 5 deadliest mass shootings have happened in modern US history, on October 1st a shooting killing 58 people occurred and since then Donald Trump has made no attempt to stop this from happening resulting in more becoming victims of gun crime and almost guaranteeing more deaths simply so gun owners can continue to own guns.