Dec 26, 2016 4 min read

Tim Murphy has reason to be proud.

For the last couple of years, the congressman who represents most of Washington and Greene counties labored to get his Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act through Congress. Motivated by the horrific carnage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in December 2013, the measure called for greater coordination among a tangle of federal agencies and departments that deal with mental-health issues, improved access to psychologists and psychiatrists by residents of underserved rural areas, and an assistant secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services who will be charged with overseeing programs and initiatives that could help those dealing with mental illness and substance abuse problems.

Elements of Murphy’s bill were included in the 21st Century Cures Act that was signed by President Obama earlier this month. The law snared the most headlines for its “cancer moonshot” of funding to find a cure for cancer. While it doesn’t include provisions Murphy wanted that would have brought families and other caregivers into the treatment process – patient privacy concerns remain a point of contention – it will, according to Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, “help virtually every American family” and is “a Christmas miracle.”

Murphy and other proponents of the law argue that a less slipshod and more coherent system in delivering mental-health care could stop deranged gunmen from committing atrocities like those that unfolded at Sandy Hook, or at the Pulse nighclub in Orlando, Fla., this summer, or at Virginia Tech in 2007.

While survivors, families of victims and families of the perpetrators can bitterly regret not seeing certain signals or missing opportunities that could have waylaid tragedy, strengthening mental-health care is just one part of the puzzle when it comes to stopping these periodic horror shows.

We simply must work harder to keep lethal weapons that belong on a battlefield out of the hands of those who are convulsed by personal demons, are driven by irrational anger or simply – to put it colloquially – are not quite right in the head.

It’s been frequently pointed out that the United States has not cornered the market in mental illness, but we seem to have a virtual monopoly on periodic mass killings. Granted, 16 children and one teacher were killed in a massacre in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996, and then 35 people were killed and 23 others were wounded in a mass shooting in the Australian state of Tasmania a little more than a month after the terrors of Dunblane. Yet both Great Britain and Australia made changes to their gun laws. In the United States, we have offered candlelight vigils and words of comfort, but not much else. Business has proceeded as usual.

In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed an assault weapons ban that was repealed 10 years later. Realistically, reinstituting an assault weapons ban would probably not take every assault weapon off the market, but it would likely reduce the frequency of their use.

Short of that, how about doing away with high-capacity magazines? The shooter at Sandy Hook fired off 154 rounds in less than five minutes thanks to the fact that he deployed 30-round magazines. Or expanding background checks? In 2013, Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania made a proposal that would have broadened background checks to include sales on the Internet and at gun shows.

It went down in flames. It needs to be revived.

With only hours to go before we reach 2017, we can hope that there will not be another mass shooting in the United States the next 12 months. If that comes to pass, however, it could be more a matter of luck than design.