Of knives, guns and a Pennsylvania school.

[J Marston]

cbelt3 wrote:
If all the money spent on arguing about guns went into mental health services, many if these tragedies would not have happened.

Possibly. But any gun rights advocate will tell you that you can't restrict access to a firearm on the suspicion that someone is mentally unstable. You would need a medical certificate of some kind which, to preserve patient confidentiality, would in turn require background checks to carry (and not just purchase) a weapon, and you can imagine how the NRA is going to react to that. In addition, the vast majority of people who are mentally "fragile" never have recourse to violence, still less a shooting spree.

In other words: I agree that mental health is an issue in many of these cases, but there is virtually no way that regulations currently available would have kept guns out of the hands of most such killers.