I have a few questions for the community and legislative members who advocate for increased school security and mental health spending instead of gun and ammunition control:
How will you ensure funding for school security and mental health in perpetuity?
How will you increase the number of mental health professionals to deal with the increase in caseloads? Will you commit to supporting, educating and training these additional professionals through at least a master’s degree, plus their training and licensure, a timeline of perhaps six years or more? How much will this cost and how many are needed — again, in perpetuity — to ensure enough mental health professionals are available to all who need help?
What is the cost of funerals, traumatized workers or parents who need to care for injured children, leaving the job market after mass shootings? How much does it cost for one critically injured person to spend weeks in the ICU or hospital and perhaps for a lifetime of care? Remember, your insurance premiums are determined by total insurance claims.
While you spend years figuring all this out, let’s pass gun and ammunition control. My gut tells me it’ll start working faster than the six-plus years it will take to bring the mental health piece to fruition.
Joan Baumgart, Robbinsdale
•••
Here we are again, caught up in this familiar little joust over the slaughter of our children.
The jargon is so predictable that I’d laugh if I weren’t crying. Every single time some say, “Ban assault weapons,” others, “Guns don’t kill people.” And those who won’t even venture a solution once again offer their thoughts and prayers. What a joke!
Tell you what, here’s an off-the-wall solution: Instead of just banning some guns, or just identifying and treating likely perps’ mental illness, or just thinking and praying, why don’t we do all three!
That’s right, instead of this repugnant notion that somehow we might do too much to protect our kids, why don’t we do it all!
We build the programs and services it takes to mitigate the rage fueling these acts of evil.
For those still crazy enough to want to kill as many innocent kids as possible, we deny them weapons specifically designed, not for target practice, hunting or personal security, but for mass murder.
We double down on the thoughts and prayers, knowing we’ve actually done something to help our higher power fulfill them.
Done! Both sides claim victory. And the real winners — our children and grandchildren — reclaim the innocence we all say we want for them.
Jeffrey Willius, Minneapolis
MINNEAPOLIS
No more needles — we moved
Recently the Star Tribune published a commentary where a Minneapolis family described the horror of realizing their 6-year-old had stuck themselves with a discarded needle on their front lawn (“An open letter to Mayor Jacob Frey on the state of Minneapolis,” Strib Voices, Sept. 15). A witness to (another) Minneapolis mass shooting related how he hurried his family inside “to hide until the bullets stopped” (“12 shot in Minneapolis in the span of 12 hours,” Sept. 16). I get the appeal to living in a city; I lived in northeast Minneapolis for 20 years. But once it became apparent that Minneapolis was no longer safe for my children, and city leadership had no desire to make it safer, we moved out. Sure, we miss biking to our favorite brewery. But if you have to dodge needles and bullets on the way there, is it worth it?
Ryan Sheahan, St. Anthony