Are there answers?
In many states, physicians can now request emergency removal of firearms from the home of someone who is both mentally ill and threatening either suicide or homicide. During the era when high-capacity firearms were banned, from 1994 to 2004, mass murders decreased in our country. While most gunmen use legal firearms they have purchased, I would contend that “smart guns” – firearms that allow only the legal owner to operate them based on biometrics – would prevent some mass shootings and many accidents, crimes, and suicides. Universal background checks and tracking gun purchases in the way we monitor controlled medications, or even Sudafed, might allow authorities to predict who might be at risk of committing these heinous acts.
In his newly released book, Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Murders in America, journalist Mark Follman argues for a proactive community approach using threat assessment methods and providing wraparound services to those who are deemed to be at risk for violent acts. Mr. Follman’s voice is one of the few out there saying that these events are not random and are, in fact, preventable.
In psychiatry, we struggle with school shootings such as the one we just saw in Uvalde. Our own hearts ache as we hold our children close and empathize with the loss of strangers who have been through the unthinkable. We help our patients as they process their emotions. And we wonder whether any of our patients might ever do anything so horrific. The feelings get complicated, the sadness and anger intermingle while the frustration builds, and we are left with our fears and the hope that if that very rare person were to walk through our office door, we would know what to do.
Dr. Miller is a coauthor of Committed: The Battle Over Involuntary Psychiatric Care (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). She has a private practice and is assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.