Nashville Shooting Highlights Need For Mental Health Reforms

As more alarming details emerge about the transgender woman responsible for Monday's
horrific school shooting in Nashville, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms says the facts support only one conclusion: America has a mental health crisis, not a firearms crisis.

Firearms don't have a brain to hate with, or a finger to pull their own trigger. What happened Monday in Nashville should serve as a reminder that while the gun prohibition lobby and its allies in Congress want to restrict the rights of law-abiding citizens, they are perfectly happy to let people such as the perpetrator of this rampage fall through the cracks. Now it's being reported she was under a doctor's care for some sort of emotional disorder. Our background check system is a mess – bad data in, bad results out – and Joe Biden wants to keep it that way. There are thousands of people in the system who don't belong there, while someone like Audrey Hale probably should have been. Even her parents reportedly believe she couldn't be trusted with a firearm. Hale was killed by police after murdering three children and three adults.

Nashville police involved in stopping the rampage are being hailed as heroes. The country owes these courageous officers a debt of gratitude. They didn't hesitate. From the time they entered the school building to the time they took down the shooter, less than four minutes elapsed. Nashville police did an outstanding job, and we are certain many more lives were saved as a result. But this tragedy also reminds us of the need to make schools a hard target.

Those on the left do not want school resources officers on the job. They argue for reducing police manpower overall while dangerous, violent people wait to prey on our most vulnerable citizens; schoolchildren and older Americans. And then they demand honest people give up their guns. The reason most Americans own firearms is to protect themselves against mentally unstable, violent people and evil, dangerous criminals. It is abundantly clear that they don't care about safety, they just want to abridge our Constitutional rights.

It is a formula for disaster and repeated tragedies like Nashville. We can do better, but we won't do it by trampling on the rights of law-abiding citizens. Millions of American gun owners are also parents and they can be part of the solution, but Biden and the gun ban lobby deliberately never want us at the table.

Alan Gottlieb is the Founder of the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and the Chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA). The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.