A former co-worker of mine is now serving a 60 year sentence for murdering his room mate. Why did he kill her? Because the voices in his head told him to. He was diagnosed with Paranoid Schizophrenia 8 years before he started working for us. He was very disruptive in the office and made many people uncomfortable. He made threats to co-workers and talked about violence. He was with my company only for 5 months but his behavior was the same in all the other companies he worked for until the murder.
How did he kill his room mate? He first strangled her and when she became unconscious, he butchered her with a knife. (It was so violent, he broke the knife in 3 different pieces) When the mentally ill kill or assault, it is typically with everyday items: knives, blunt force objects, hand guns, their bare hands, etc. They can use guns as weapons but its not that is not the common method.
Cruz could have brought a knapsack to school filled with explosives and detonated it in the crowded cafeteria killing 17. Or Cruz could have taken his car and used to to run down fellow students on the school’s sidewalks when they were leaving school, killing 17. These common methods are used by both terrorists and the mentally ill nowadays to kill. It would be easy for Cruz to do either one especially the car since it would have taken little to no planning and create no suspicion.
The bottom line is that if the mentally ill are determined to kill, they will and will use any means around them to do so. To single out one weapon that is rarely used and act as if that will make all the difference to stop the killing is ridiculous. In my research, it is estimated that 3-4 people are murdered by someone with a severe mental illness everyday in this country. These are typically individual murders and the weapons used are usually knives, bare hands, handguns, hammers, etc. You never hear about these crimes since they are only involving one person.
Those with severe mental disorders can become violent and deadly. They need to be watched constantly and once they are deemed a threat to themselves or others, need to be institutionalized. Somehow making it hard for the mentally ill to access just one weapon is not going to have any significant impact on the problem.
The institutions are gone.
And the other reason these loony tunes kill is because their misery is someone else’s fault, never their own.