Guns are not the problem....

    I want to preface this with something I hope everyone can agree upon:  Sane, rational, mentally sound and healthy people do not walk into a school and kill children and adults.  They just don't.  For whatever reason some people are broken.  Some by a genetic flaw, some by war, some by a traumatic event that wounds them too much, possibly too early.  For whatever reason some people do things that are unthinkable to the rest of us.  The great divide.  Perhaps they, like my ex-husband, see and hear things so real to them they have no idea that they are lost in a world that doesn't really exist except to them.  Perhaps they are angry and  have used too many drugs to try to deal with it.  Perhaps they just need love.  I have no idea, truly, because I don't have a mental illness so severe that I would ever do such a thing.  Most of us don't.  I've heard a lot about evil.  I know from my experience with mental illness which is limited to schizoaffected disorder as well as my own issues with anxiety (thank goodness for yoga...) that mental illness is never rational.  In the midst of it trying to reason someone out of their illness, when it is so severe they don't know they are sick, is next to impossible.

     I sat down with my kids to tell them what happened in Connecticut, the news has been off in my house since this happened and I knew I needed to tell them.  I didn't want them to hear it from friends at school.  Alorah already knew.  Her teacher told their 5th grade class about it as it was happening.  I have mixed feelings about that but I know enough about her teacher to trust that she did what she genuinely thought was right.  I can't fault her and I can't change it.  I would have liked to have been the one to discuss it with them and explain it in the ways I hope for them to grasp it.  We can't live in fear. Bad things happen every day and the best thing we can all do is love hard, forgive fast, and cherish every day we get with the people we love.  We are all living on borrowed time so we may as well enjoy it.  I used to be absolutely riddled with anxiety over losing one of my children.  It was so bad with Faith that I took a picture of her every single day and never washed the last outfit she wore "just in case" so it would have her smell. I never talked about it when I was going through it.  I knew it wasn't rational but I was convinced something bad would happen.  I watched a program on TLC about SIDS when she was maybe a week old and it really messed with me.  I was also really young, just 21, and the responsibility of keeping this beautiful, perfect, amazing child alive was a lot.  I realized later, after having some really bad PPD with Vance and in counseling years after that, how irrational it all was.  I didn't leave her for 10 months.  I guess what I want to convey is that anyone can be thrown "off."  Through therapy I've let go of most of my anxieties.  After I lost Reese and Levi got sick I realized how much of an illusion control is.  I refuse to live in fear.  It's not worth it.  If someone walks into one of my classes at school and starts shooting at least I died doing something I love.  No one is promised tomorrow.

     Guns are not the problem.  It is the mind behind the trigger that is the problem.  As long as we keep cutting funding and help for people with severe mental illness these tragedies will continue.  We live in a society that puts the full brunt of mental illness on the families.  The families are burned OUT and we need help.  You can't predict what someone with schizophrenia will do, you just can't.  When Levi was first admitted to the hospital he barely fit the criteria despite being severely under weight (he had no food in his apartment except a 20 gallon bin of movie theater popcorn), delusional, and clearly not in his right mind.  He was turned away at one hospital because he wasn't sick "enough."  He was in the hospital for a week, looked really promising after they released him, and he was back in for almost a month a couple weeks later because he got so much worse.  His kidneys almost shut down from lack of water and walking miles upon miles without water.  I'm not giving these details to exploit his mental illness, I am trying to give a picture of what mental illness can look like.  It changes people at the very core of who they are.  It took me years to grasp that the person I married was really gone.  It's still incredibly sad to me.  He is off meds right now, he stopped taking them about a year ago and I knew quite quickly that he was not medicated but I chose to wait and see (because I have no legal binds to make him do anything now that we are divorced) what would happen.  I continued the weekly dinners with the kids so they could see him. By June he was back in full psychosis.  I let him see Vance for his birthday and discontinued visitation after that, per our divorce decree I have full physical and legal custody of them.  It was one of the hardest choices I've had to make.  I just could not have the kids watch him decline, I knew what was coming, I want to protect them.  He showed up at my house earlier this week around 6pm which he knows is not allowed (boundaries are very, very hard for him) and the kids took seeing him really hard.  Alorah especially, it broke her heart.  It's one thing for me to tell them that their daddy's brain is broken and it plays tricks on them...which is how I explain his illness to them...it's a whole other thing to see him in the state he is in.  There should be a way to get people help before they are a danger to themselves or others.  Unfortunately it takes a crime or tragedy to make that happen.  It's a huge societal burden.  I would never advocate all mentally ill people be locked up but they should be monitored, watched, helped.  If someone doesn't know they are sick why are they allowed to hurt people before they get the medications and therapy they so desperately need?  They ARE the victims, too.  They don't ask to be the way they are.  It's all so unfair.  20 children should not have to be killed before America wakes up and starts to talk about mental illness.  It's time for the taboo and hushed silence to be shifted.  There has to be an answer somewhere between lobotomy and allowing these people to snap.  I am a huge supporter of the 2nd amendment.  I have no issues with people arming themselves.  I do have issues with the mentally ill having access to guns.  If someone is so angry, broken, and capable of such madness they shouldn't be able to purchase a gun. It makes no sense.