This week in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, five families' loved ones will never come home. Eight lives are forever altered. The hand wringing, finger pointing and politicizing began before the Muslim terrorist shooter in a gun-free zone who didn't use an "assault" rifle was even arrested.

Even well-intended, well-informed people grope for answers and are sometimes deceived. Some concede more gun registry. Some say to eliminate automatic weapons, large magazines or even certain guns. Some say to add more law enforcement, even if it creates a police state. Some say to fund mental health to diagnose and withhold guns from those who are mentally unstable.

All of those answers are not only wrong, they are dead wrong.

Like Marxism, at first blush, mental testing to own firearms sounds so logical and reasonable for those wanting to eliminate mass shootings, since we can all agree that anyone who would kill innocents is crazy. That's easy. As a mental-health professional myself, I can assure you that, like Marxism, the "easy answer" would only exacerbate the problem and create more victims.

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The problems with mental testing to own firearms are vast, but start with this one: Who gets to decide who is "crazy" and what classifies someone as insane?

Government? A bureaucracy? An activist judge? A mental-health "professional" who likely got into the profession to self-diagnose?

No matter which party you espouse, let's consider for a moment what that might mean. You would turn over your Second Amendment rights to someone who might disagree with your politics. That's dangerous. Here's why:

To me, anyone who has ever gone to a Black Lives Matter rally is crazy.

To them, anyone who has ever attended a tea party is insane.

Do we really want to give that labeling power to those with a political or personal agenda, regardless of party?

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The second problem is that labeling mental health as the real problem hands all power over to mental-health "professionals" who are either academics or bureaucrats. Data proves that many in the profession went into the profession to self-diagnose, so let's start there. But it gets more ominous.

Ninety-nine percent of so-called mental-health professionals are indoctrinated leftists who don't arrive at conclusions via logic or data, but they instead rely on a politically correct narrative that's force fed to them by media that have lost their own collective minds.

The media today are not media. Most media today make no attempt to investigate waste, fraud or abuse for their consumers. They have instead adopted the role of manipulating stupid people for votes, money and power. They have traded their impartial cards in for an invitation to the next who's who party in some ivory tower somewhere, and they have lost credibility with the American people. Newspapers are going the way of the dinosaur, and leftist cable media are dying on the vine. Mass layoffs and huge financial losses due to their own lack of credibility have diminished the capacity of the mainstream media to even do the work of traditional media types. More balanced media, along with citizen and social media, have taken over and have won the hearts of a distrusting America, with good reason.

But the plot thickens from there. Academia is more sold-out than media. I could cite hundreds of examples, but I want to stay out of the weeds on this point, so just read my other columns on academic corruption, if you like. I spent most of my adult life in academia; the groupthink lunacy abounds. Recall also that 98 percent of academia who did donate to a candidate donated to Hillary Clinton. That puts them directly at odds with the American people who rejected her agenda.

The data speaks for itself. If we want to look at cause and reason, we would do three things:

Keep families together

Arm and train law-abiding citizens

Eliminate gun-free zones

I have written extensively on Points One and Two, and you can read those arguments here, here and here.

But if you look closely at where almost every single event of gun violence occurs, you will see that almost all incidents of gun violence occur in one place: gun-free zones.

Dear Politicians/media: when will u discuss the 1 ban we need? A ban on #gunfreezones lk #FortLauderdale #sanbernadino #Pulse etc shootings — Gina Gentry Loudon (@RealDrGina) January 7, 2017

Until we decide to look bluntly at results-oriented solutions, people will die. Returning power to families to self-regulate and stay together, empowering law-abiding citizens and eliminating gun-free zones would drastically reduce the number of deaths each year in America, as it has in places like Switzerland, Israel and counties (like Cobb County, Georgia) around the country who have tried each of these tactics. Until we are ready to have an honest conversation based on data rather than emotion, and until we are ready to hold our all-too-quick-to-politicize politicians accountable for their greed and deception, people will continue to die.

That is the sad reality. Answers sit out there waiting to be used, while we believe lies and refuse to act.

Man up, America.

What do women want? Find the answer in Gina Loudon's best-selling co-authored blockbuster, "What Women Really Want" -- available at the WND Superstore