What Greg Abbott gets *totally* wrong about the Uvalde shooting | CNN Politics

CNN
 — 

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott this week tried to elucidate why an adolescent had murdered 19 kids and two lecturers at an elementary college in Uvalde.

“Before coming out here, we had a long discussion with law enforcement at all levels,” said Abbott at a press conference on Wednesday. “I asked the sheriff and others an open-ended question and got the same answer from the sheriff as well as from the mayor of Uvalde. The question was, what is the problem here? And they were straightforward and emphatic. They said … ‘we have a problem with mental health illness in this community.’ And then they elaborated on the magnitude of the mental health challenges that they are facing in the community and the need for more mental health support in this region.”

The implication was clear: The shooter was deranged. And he was a part of a broader psychological well being problem dealing with Texas and the nation. (I’ll notice right here by means of context that Abbott cut $21 million from the division that oversees psychological well being in the state earlier this 12 months.)

And left unsaid, however clearly implied, was this: This slaughter was not likely about weapons.

Except that we all know that’s not true.

Start right here: To settle for Abbott’s rationalization that what occurred in Uvalde was about psychological well being and never weapons, you must imagine that the total remainder of the world doesn’t have psychological well being challenges.

Why? Because research after research has proven that faculty shootings – a lot much less the broader class of mass shootings – are remarkably extra widespread in the United States than in the remainder of the industrialized world. According to a CNN review from 2018, there have been a minimum of 288 college shootings in the US in the earlier 9 years, which was 57 instances (not a typo) greater than different G7 nations mixed. COMBINED.

According to a 2017 study from Adam Lankford, a professor of prison justice at the University of Alabama, the US accounted for 31% of mass shootings globally between 1966 and 2012, regardless of having solely 5% of the world’s inhabitants.

If this had been solely a psychological well being problem and never a gun problem, you would need to conclude that the US is uniquely affected by psychological sickness. It shouldn’t be.

Take melancholy. According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 3.8% of the world inhabitants – 280 million individuals – endure from melancholy. What about youngsters like the one who dedicated the murders in Uvalde? “Globally, it is estimated that 1 in 7 (14%) 10-19 year-olds experience mental health conditions, yet these remain largely unrecognized and untreated,” says WHO.

The easy reality is that psychological well being challenges exist throughout the world, significantly amid the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic that has so basically disrupted the approach we dwell.

Now, think about this: There had been greater than 393 million weapons in the US as of 2017, according to the Small Arms Survey. That’s, roughly, 120 weapons for each 100 individuals in the nation. By approach of comparability, France had a median of 19 weapons per 100 civilians. India had 5.

The numbers are clear: Trying responsible mass shooting solely on the psychological well being disaster now we have on this nation badly misses the level. Which is to not say that we don’t have main points with our collective psychological well being! We do! But, we even have an issue with the proliferation of weapons on this nation. Those two details don’t exist in a vacuum. They are inextricably linked.