Guns Or Mental Health?

On February 9, Acadiana's regional EMS Council had it's latest meeting, representing local ambulance services, Emergency Departments, and disaster coordinators.  First we congratulated ourselves on providing tourniquet training to 105 Sheriff's deputies, to stop life threatening bleeding from gunshot wounds. Our next consideration was to provide this training to schools.  We all shook our heads: the world's come to this, that schools need tourniquet training?  Five days later, another school shooting, this time in Parkland, Florida. This latest shooting reignited national debate on preventing these tragedies.  Is it a lapse in mental health care; or is access to assault rifles, designed to kill large amounts of people, too easy?  I see lots of kids in the ER with suicidal and violent tendencies. Occasionally they threaten to shoot up their school, and can get a gun.  When we hear that, we admit them to a psychiatric facility for evaluation. However, there's limited treatment options for these kids.  There's not enough mental health beds or outpatient services for all the teens who need help. When it comes to pre-teens, it sometimes takes days to get them into an appropriate hospital- there's not that many beds for that age in Louisiana.  The closed option for younger kids from our area is Alexandria.  If that hospital's full, it's Shreveport or New Orleans.  That's far for impoverished, working families to visit, and far for those hospitals to coordinate outpatient care for patients returning home. Obviously, mental health needs more money for doctors, therapists, and beds.  Like roads and schools, when it comes to quality, you get what you pay for.  There's also a need for finding lonely, bullied kids and support them before they become risks.  The Huffington Post recently reported on a teacher who uses surveys in her fifth grade classes, asking who wants to sit with whom for the following week, and asking for nominations for the week's exceptional class citizen.  But instead of using those surveys to see where kids want to sit and their nominations, she's finding out who's not getting requests to be sat with, or nominated.  She's looking for lonely kids who needs friends. The sun is about to come up, the woods quiet and dark.  My son, my brother-in-law, and I stand in knee-deep water, listening.  The birds start to chirp, the frogs croak, the sky lightens. Alas, no ducks show up, and when the dawn is over, we unload our shotguns and head home.  Another morning where, instead of "hunters," we're just "heavily-armed nature lovers." As mental health care has again become a national issue after the latest school shooting in Florida, as we discussed above, gun control has also resurfaced.  As many are vilifying the National Rifle Association for it's gun access advocacy, we learn there's actually two NRAs.  The historical NRA, and majority of members, are hunters like us, nature lovers with shotguns.  This NRA is about spending time outdoors with family, gun safety, and how to cook your deer or ducks.  For most of the 20th century the NRA actually helped write some gun control laws, including restrictions on "crime" weapons like submachine guns.  It's only in recent history that there's a political NRA, lobbying for access to all types of weapons. Like them or not, the NRA has important safety advice for parents.  After all, most gun injuries and deaths happen in the home, from suicide, domestic violence, or accidents.  Keep guns unloaded and locked, and ammunition locked up separately.  When your kids get curious about guns, teach them gun safety, to take away the mystery and desire to "play with guns."  If kids find an unsecure weapon, they should run from it and and report it to a responsible adult.  With little kids, or depressed teens, don't have a gun in the house at all. Finally, no one needs an assault rifle, especially the mentally ill.  They're no good for hunting ducks.  The high energy, tumbling action of their bullets, designed to inflict maximal damage to soldiers, destroys deer meat.  Like I mentioned above, our regional EMS council was considering providing tourniquet training for our local schools, even before the latest school shooting.  But prevention, by regulating these weapons, or their ammunition, is way better than having to treat pediatric gunshot wounds.  The only animals that should be at risk are those that are good in gumbo.