President Trump is right. It is about mental health.
And President Trump is wrong. It is about guns.
It is also about domestic violence, race, religion, immigration, campaign finance and the politics of fear and division.
But, mostly, it is about guns.
Asked about the cold-blooded murder of (so far) 26 worshippers Sunday in the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas, the president performed an act of psychological diagnosis that, while it feels true, he was unqualified to give and which, even if true, does little to make our nation safer.
“I think that mental health is your problem here,” Trump said to reporters covering his state visit to Japan. “But this isn’t a guns situation.”
On one level, it seems intuitive to conclude that no sane person would walk into a church and open fire on defenseless people of all ages.
But, unless one wishes to suggest that the United States houses many times its fair share of insane people, the fact that the United States far outstrips the rest of the world in the number of shootings, mass and otherwise, cannot be dismissed as an issue of mental health.
And, if it could, that argument would be much better made by someone who isn’t on record supporting legislation to slash the availability of mental health care.
It also remains distressing that Trump and others who routinely oppose any measures to take military-grade weapons off our streets — and out of our schools, churches, bars and recreation centers — are so quick to isolate the perpetrators of such violence as lone wolfs or lunatics when they are white nominal Christians. And just as quick to call for travel bans, border walls and quick removals to Guantanamo Bay when they are, well, anything else.
It all recalls the experience of Ronald Reagan who, as governor of California, signed bans on assault weapons and the carrying of loaded weapons in public in response to the rise of the heavily armed Black Panthers.
There is no point in getting bogged down in angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin debates over nomenclature — assault weapons, automatic, semi-automatic, bump stocks — when it is clear that the weapon of choice for mass murderers is the AR-15 rifle, along with its many variants, knock-offs and copy cats. Such weapons were used to slaughter defenseless people in Newtown, Aurora, San Bernardino, Orlando and, now Sutherland Springs.
No ban on any item or substance is ever 100 percent effective. But outlawing weapons that have no valid hunting or self-defense purpose, and can be attractive only to those who desire to inflict maximum mayhem, should be much easier than it has proven to be.
Other efforts, of course, are also necessary. Background checks of the sort that might have discovered the domestic assault conviction and bad conduct discharge in the record of the Texas shooter would help. So would improved, meaning much more accessible, mental health care.
But to say, as our president and so many other elected leaders always do, that there is nothing that can be done to reduce the death and destruction that so clearly follow this country’s unique obsession with high-powered firearms is absurdly defeatist.
We can, and we must, do better.