Apr 5, 2023 3 min read

Treat mental illness, don’t restrict guns

As I write this, we are just a day removed from a mentally disturbed woman, who thought she was a man, gunning down six people, including three 9 year-olds inside a Christian school in Nashville, Tenn.

Last week, multiple states were hit by “active shooter” hoaxes at various schools that included many here in Western Pennsylvania. A lot of these were Catholic schools. Oddly enough, March 27 was the beginning of “Transgender Week of Visibility,” yet another celebration in the bloated degeneracy liturgical calendar. When I was growing up, we didn’t celebrate mental illness. There was a network of state mental institutions that stretched from the East Coast to the West Coast. Today, if you think you’re in the wrong body, you are celebrated for being “transgendered.”

It’s time to stop the pretending and to realize such people aren’t to be celebrated. They are disturbed, and no different than anybody who thinks they are an inanimate object or an animal. Our educators and medical professionals need to tell their charges that one can butcher and maim their body, change their name/pronouns/hair length, but they cannot change what they are. What you were born as is in every cell of your body. Your DNA will tell the world what you really are, each and every time. There are two sexes, male and female, period. “Nonbinary” is just a made-up term by someone who has mental issues. If you think you are something other than what God made you, you need to be treated by a certified mental-health expert, instead of being thought of as some sort of celebrity.

The shooter in Nashville was being treated for an emotional disorder. Yet, despite this, was permitted to purchase seven firearms in the weeks leading up to her attack. We need to find out why. The form to purchase a firearm has questions for the purchaser about his or her mental clarity and drug usage. It was apparently selectively enforced in this case.

Our job is not to make personal protection unavailable because of the actions of those who shouldn’t have had a weapon in the first place. A firearm is a tool, just like a shovel, an ax, or even a pocket knife. Guns are incapable of firing themselves and they cannot think or reason – like many of the mass shooters who have made headlines also cannot. Guns are no more responsible for deaths than my fork is for making me fat. It’s high time to treat mental illness as the serious problem it is and also to keep weapons of any sort out of the wrong hands.

John A. Quayle

North Franklin