At the time of this writing, it has been about two days since a teenage gunman at Reynolds High School in Troutdale, Oregon took his own life not long after taking the life of a 14-year-old student. On top of that, it has been about a day since a couple in Las Vegas disguised themselves as acclaimed Batman villains The Joker and Harley Quinn and killed three innocent people.  It is approximately a month since Elliot Rodger left seven dead and 13 wounded during a drive-by shooting spree near Santa Barbara, California.

As is to be expected from a media which has thrived upon sensationalism since the dawn of televised news, outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News have descended upon these incidents and have reported extensively on them so the public may use them as fuel for a raging conflagration of controversy. Of course, this is precisely what the people have done. The American public has taken advantage of these tragic events for the sake of promoting a variety of agendas, from gun control or the abolition thereof to the possibility of the entertainment industry playing a hand in the perpetration of these terrible crimes, hoping that their debates will be an expedient for some great social change that will make incidents such as these a thing of the past. However, it would appear that they have chosen to challenge singular constructs of American society while ignoring a great underlying flaw which has been the elephant in the room for years: people aren’t getting the help they need.

We Americans are a funny group of people, aren’t we? Everyone in their rightful mind can clearly see that there are problems, but no one can come to a clear consensus as to what they are. That’s when we start playing our little blame game, pointing fingers at things such as guns, comic books and video games and then trying to reprimand the people who possess such things, much like a mother confiscating her misbehaving child’s toys. Ever since the days where the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons was considered Satanic, we have been trying to blame material objects for gruesome crimes such as these, but that is an extremely shallow viewpoint.

As much as I hesitate to rehash clichés such as this, I am afraid there is some validity to what I am about to state: Guns don’t kill people (and neither do comics and games); people kill people. Sure, the anti-gun crowd can argue that guns are a significant source of violence; after all, official FBI statistics show that an average of about 67% of all homicides in America involve the use of firearms. But what makes you think that the people who commit those homicides wouldn’t use knives or other weapons if you were to confiscate their guns? Firearms are only prevalent because they’re more advanced than other weapons; they’re quick and efficient, allowing maniacs to dispose of a larger number of victims in a shorter period of time. If they didn’t have those, however, surely they wouldn’t hesitate to make use of any alternatives. Anti-comic and game advocates may argue similarly that the liberal amounts of violence in modern media serve as an influence to these crimes. If those were taken out of the picture, though, those murderers would still carry out those crimes. Why is that, you may ask?

Because they’re seriously mentally ill.

For an indefinite multitude of deeply-rooted psychological reasons, the perpetrators of these murders lacked the judgment to distinguish right from wrong and therefore made the conscious decision to take the lives of innocent people without remorse. They didn’t just see their friends playing Call of Duty and think “Hey! That whole ‘blowing people’s heads off’ thing looks fun!”; that is a gross oversimplification of a much more deep-seated issue. Elliot Rodger claimed that his greatest problem was his inability to attain a female companion, but actual research will uncover that he had been taking medication and undergoing psychiatric treatment. Needless to say, it wasn’t very effective. That is precisely the point I am trying to make; people like Rodger are in dire need of help, but we are doing little to nothing to address that. The mentally-ill are ostracized and cast out by our society, and that is enough to render any psychotherapy meaningless. Once we address the rampant issue of poor aid for the mentally ill, I believe that gun violence will be a considerably less significant problem. Until then, I suppose we’ll have to sit back and watch more innocent people suffer because of disturbed individuals that we failed to care for properly. One would think that Columbine was enough to make that point, but that is unfortunately not the case.