We need to address mental illness

So we're going to try to ban guns again. It allows us to feel like we're doing something about the awful shootings recently, as well as the many that have gone before.

Yes, we need to do something about the shootings, but think about this: Our nation is brimming with so many guns that even if we ban some of them - or all of them - someone who wants to be a mass killer will find a way to get his hands on a gun. Pandora's box of gun control was opened long ago. We cannot stuff all those guns back into that box. Like diamonds, guns, if well-tended, are forever.

I'd like to see us, as a nation, focus more on the killer than on his weapon. In virtually every case of mass slaughter by a shooter, the shooter is a person with a mental illness. We need to address our current attitudes toward and approaches to mental illness and find better ways to treat and manage it. We cannot continue to dump the mentally ill onto our streets and into our prisons due to an unwillingness on our part to provide the necessary resources to keep them from suffering such a fate.

We cannot continue to allow mental health funding to be one of the first things on the chopping block when there's a budget crisis.

Lawrence Rettig

South Amana