Boulder

Last week in Boulder, Colorado, a 21-year-old man went on a shooting rampage in a grocery store and killed several people. A couple days before this occurred, the guy’s family caught him fiddling with a gun in his bedroom. They took it away from him but later gave it back. What a terrible mistake, for just a few days later, he went into a grocery store and killed ten people. He was then taken into custody and charged with ten counts of murder; he’ll probably spend the rest of his life in prison. This massacre could have been stopped if only his family had kept the gun and forced him to get help. I wish there was some kind of institute where emotionally and mentally troubled people could go to learn the proper skills they need to handle the world. In fact, there should be a legal system put in place that has the authority to force these people to get help. That might be enough to stop people from committing such horrible crimes. We need classes that teach people how to live better lives because if you don’t know how to handle life effectively, there are really only three options for you: 1) you can accept a lifetime of failure and defeat, 2) you can commit suicide, or 3) you can explode with a gun.

There was almost another tragedy similar to this just a few days later in Atlanta. A guy went into a grocery store armed with six guns and was wearing a bullet proof vest. He went into the bathroom in the back of the store and an Instacart worker saw him loading his guns. The Instacart worker quickly ran to the store manager and told him he had seen a man loading guns in the bathroom. The manager immediately called the police and they arrived just as the guy was walking out of the bathroom with his arsenal of guns. They immediately took him into custody, charged him with multiple counts of criminal attempts to commit a felony, and made him undergo a psychiatric evaluation. I don’t know how much good that evaluation is going to do since our mental health system is far from perfect and needs a lot of improvement. I don’t think most practitioners or psychiatric evaluators really understand people like this and know what their problems are. I know that some of their basic problems are that they don’t know how to emotionally handle the world, they don’t know how to make friends, and they don’t know how to connect with people. So it’s important to have classes to teach these people the skills they need to lead a successful life. If we don’t have this, massacres are going to keep happening. We have to take action to prevent these sorts of tragic events. Just think of the unimaginable devastation something like this causes – it tears our country apart. We can’t deny our problems any longer, we need to face them.