Here is an article from FoxNews.com suggesting that improved mental health care not gun control would potentially prevent mass killings:
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/01/17/obama-has-set-his-sights-on-gun-control-but-has-forgotten-about-mental-health/?intcmp=HPBucket
President Barack Obama’s gun control measures miss the entire issue  underlying the tragedies in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., and the shooting  of former Rep. Gabby Giffords in Tucson, Ariz.  
The deaths in those cities can’t be attributed to assault weapons.  They  were due to untreated, under-treated or poorly treated mental illness.
Adam Lanza, James Holmes and Jared Lee Loughner had at least three things in  common:  They were male (as are most perpetrators of mass killings), they  suffered with severe mental illnesses (as do almost all perpetrators of mass  killings, other than terrorists) and they used powerful, high-capacity weapons  to destroy others.  
Of those three factors, two were beyond the control of the killers (gender  and psychiatric disorders).  The third—their weapons of choice—were chosen  to inflict maximal carnage.  To suggest that these mentally ill men would  not have chosen other equally devastating means to inflict violence on others  would seem so naïve as to suggest it is disingenuous.
Contrary to common belief, severe mental illness, even psychosis, does not  render people unable to plan.  One can believe, for example, that the KGB  is tracking him and that he must kill dozens of people to earn his freedom.   He can then methodically plan a strategy to do just that.  Thus, if a  future mass killer found it difficult to obtain an assault weapon (which will  still be available illegally and by theft), that person could certainly use the  more common weapons employed in mass killings: handguns, fire, knives, poison  and explosives.  
James Holmes reportedly had homemade napalm in his apartment.  Napalm.   In 2003, George Weller, suffering with dementia, killed 10 people and  injured 63 using a motor vehicle.  Back in 1980, Priscilla Ford, suffering  with schizophrenia, killed six people and injured 23 more by driving into them.   The deadliest school violence in U.S. history was the Bath School disaster  in Michigan in 1927.  The killer, Andrew Kehoe, used homemade explosives to  kill 38 children and six adults.  It’s a fair bet that Kehoe was mentally  ill; prior to committing mass murder he had killed a neighbor’s dog and beaten  one of his horses to death.
I believe that President Obama is not ignorant of these facts, but willfully  using the tragedies in Newtown, Aurora and Tucson to achieve gun control for  other reasons than preventing loss of life (reasons which seem to include an  unwavering, deep psychological desire to disempower individuals and empower a  central authority—“the state.”)   
If that were not the case, his press conference on gun control would have  been a press conference on rebuilding the nation’s shattered mental health care  system.
On Wednesday, I helped a family stop a hospital from discharging their son  from an inpatient psychiatry unit—after spending about a week there.  He  has been severely psychotic and stating he must kill family members.  He  actually tried to kill one of them.  His outpatient appointment with a  psychiatrist wouldn’t have taken place for more than a week after his  discharge—if it wasn’t postponed.  
He hadn’t been evaluated by a forensic psychiatrist.  He hadn’t received  psychological testing to determine if he was continuing to harbor homicidal  thoughts and trying to hide them.  He hadn’t started taking injectable  anti-psychotic medications, which can last a month at a time, even though he had  been erratic in taking his oral medications.  And he’s one of the lucky  ones:  He has a family trying to get him real help within this broken,  sorry excuse for a mental health care system.  And he has insurance,  although insurance companies today are more the adversaries of those folks sick  with psychiatric illnesses than their allies.  They are mostly devoting  themselves to how they can withhold relatively costly treatment than how they  can deliver real treatment, effectively.
So why didn’t Barack Obama hold a press conference about a plan to  reinvigorate mental health care in America, de-stigmatize it and empower its  victims to defeat it?  How could he have so missed the target in trying to  prevent mass killings, as to believe that restricting access to particular kinds  of guns is the answer?  How can a man rise to the Presidency for two terms,  visit the families of so many victims of mass killings and be willing to do  nothing genuine to prevent them?
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Obama has set his sights on gun control, but has he forgotten about mental health?
8:41 AM
  
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