Reform Needed Following Las Vegas Shooting (and Not For Guns)

I hate this fucking feeling.

Do I have your attention yet?

I said that nasty word to get it.

Go ahead and pray a prayer of forgiveness for me. My preacher is gonna be mad at me.

I really don’t care. I am mad.

I don’t deserve any attention. After all, I am your normal everyday American entrepreneur who lives paycheck to paycheck and tax bill to tax bill. Sometimes I pay those taxes and sometimes I don’t.

I live in a constant state of debt. I owe financial debts, spiritual debts, and even some emotional debts. I owe every kind of debt imaginable.

Yet, the biggest debt I owe is to society as a whole.

I owe to the Las Vegas victims my thoughts about what happened to them. I don’t expect anyone to care or listen. I am doing this for those innocent souls.

The 1st Amendment gives me the right to write this. In fact, the very next amendment gave the shooter (who shall forever remain nameless in my mind) the ability to own the arsenal he used to kill.

There is no point in me talking about regulations. I could care less if we regulate firearms. The only real government prohibition I would fully support would be a complete ban on sour cream. It is nasty.

Life is taken in many negligent ways. Murder just so happens to be the ultimate sin in the Christian Bible. Murder on the level of Las Vegas is almost unimaginable.

There are people killed purposely every day in savage beatings, suicides, and countless other ways.

We, as Americans, are conditioned by media to believe that there is always a single answer to the question of “Why?” After all, it only takes, at most, a couple hours to get to the bottom of an intricate web of detail on Dateline NBC and 20/20.

There is no right single answer.

However, I believe there is one thing that is present in virtually all intentional deaths.

Mental disease.

America is the home of the strong and brave. It is engrained into our skulls from an early age. America is a badass.

But this mentality has stigmatized that being mentally weak is unacceptable.

Depressed? You’re not normal. File Bankruptcy? You’re a loser. Get sent to prison? Go ahead and book your one-way ticket to hell.

Instead of worrying about whether the government is going to take away your guns, start demanding our elected officials to do something to address the broken mental health system in our country.

How do we do that? I have no idea.

There are lots of smart Republicans, Democrats, Communists, Libertarians, and others out there who could collectively come together on the topic of mental health instead of continuing to fight about whether to increase the polar bear population in Nunavut (look it up…. it’s in Canada).

Cade