Mass Shootings = Mental Health?

 When a mass shooting happens, police will most likely say the person has a mental illness. The word is being overused. Not all shooters have a mental illness, they probably never saw themselves doing something like this in a million years. In 2018, there has been a total of 1,624 mass shootings in 1,870 days. According to the Guardian, Americans own an estimate of 265 million guns which is more than one gun for every adult. Why do most American's own guns? Are they really using it to "protect themselves" or their family or are they mentally unstable and have bigger and better plans to use these dangerous weapons?

Recently on Tuesday April 3rd, a woman by the name of Nasim Aghdam went to the YouTube HQ and wounded three employees before turning the gun to herself. Why would she do something like this? Because she was mad at YouTube for consistently restricting her videos. An article written by Holly Yan and Faith Karimi from CNN said the alleged shooter visited the shooting range hours before she went into the HQ on Tuesday and shot the employees that she did not know. Aghdam's brother warned the suspicious act to the police due to her sister not answering his phone calls over the weekend. Her family was unaware about the violent acts, they were not expecting her to do something like this.

Next, the Valentine's Day massacre. On Feb 14th, 2018; former Marjory Stoneman Douglas student Nikolas Cruz (19) took the lives of 17 innocent people. It was said that after Cruz lost his mother back in December, he just hasn't been right. But before his mother died, previous classmates noticed his change in middle school when he was hanging out with the wrong group of kids. In high school, a couple of students started to pull themselves away from Cruz due to him talking about violent things, his weapons, and many other things. In an interview with Dan Krauth from NBC Miami interviewed a former friend of Cruz and said that "He made it very clear that he was dangerous". According to Fox news, in early 2014-2015 he was going to therapy at Cross Creek which is a school that specializes in behavioral and emotional disorders and noticed he had violent fantasies. one session he said he had a dream of "killing people and covered in blood". His mother said his obsession with killing and guns developed through video games and another family member said "He thinks he's in f-----g Isis". If a family member thinks that he was in "Isis", Cruz should've been admitted into a mental institution.

After looking at these cases, Nasim did this out of frustration and anger. Instead of going to the YouTube HQ with a weapon and randomly shoot 3 employees who probably wasn't the one's to restrict her videos, she should've called the company or met someone face-to-face and ask why her videos were being restricted. She probably would've gotten the answers she was looking for or YouTube would've been able to stop restricting her videos. Nikolas Cruz was mentally ill. former classmates and friends knew about his violent acts, the teachers knew about it as well and tried reporting it, also people from Cross Creek knew he wasn't mentally stable. 

As stated before, not many people see themselves doing mass shootings, but there's gotta be a way to stop those from happening. If you or family member knows you are not mentally stable to own a gun, then there's no way that person should own one. It's sad to see that the world has to come this way, but everybody needs to add more security to make it harder for a shooter to target and do damage. Because without action there's going to more shootings and some will try to out due the previous shooter.