HEALING STARTS AT HOME

This may be controversial. I think the focus shouldn't be on the type of guns or gun control. Though I don't think we need civilians having assault style weapons.

Two thirds of all gun deaths in our country are suicides, over 20,000 a year of them take place by gun. I believe our new level of whats clearly "income apartheid" that robs us of our basic humanity, of our human rights to have our basic survival needs met, of our ability to have time to find personal meaning and purpose in life beyond paying down our crushing personal debt. This unequal, stagnant wages, live and let die economy tells us that our happiness will come some day from more hard work and buying more things, while we know happiness comes from most everything except for what we earn and what we buy and this type of living creates a deep seated unhappiness in people.

We are overall, a mentally ill society because we have been sold into a false idolatry of celebrity, and wealth, at the same time the economy is rigged to hold down wages and extract maximum debt interest payments from us all. Most of us will not become rich or famous. In fact more than half of us live at or over the official poverty line. 

We know that healthy people are parts of healthy communities, and are connected to others in groups with shared interests, groups that work on things bigger than themselves, are connected to something more important than money and individual accomplishments. But more and more in our communities people are isolated not part of any group that meets in person.

If we want to reduce violence including suicides, perhaps we should help members of our communities have healthy lives where they can learn about themselves, and truly honestly love themselves for who they are because if we want "Love thy neighbor as thyself" to have a chance, we must learn to be loving at home first. 

For more on the importance of having a purpose in life please read this book Mans Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel, a Holocaust survivor. I read it in school many years ago and it's always stuck with me.

We need to build a healthy and resilient society if we want to reduce all kinds of violence including mass shootings and suicides.

This great author describes this far better than I have.

https://youtu.be/5eF9Gv1SNWM

These solutions may help:

1. Provide government grants to every city to build and or expand their existing community centers where people can come together to learn healthy living and life coping skills, to teach what they know to others, to share and study the arts, gardening, meditation, Tai Chi, healthy cooking among other things that are known to help people become healthier.  People with positive connections to groups of others are happier and much less likely to harm others.
2. Appropriate money for and legislate a free nation wide mental health care program offering counseling, including therapy, suicide and trauma prevention.
3. Stop the violence of poverty and the "rat race" of working just to pay down personal debt. Pass a "Basic Income" (Negative Income Tax) providing a $1500 a month base stipend to every person in America so every person can have a chance to afford the basic needs to have human dignity including, food to eat, and safe decent housing.
4. Raise the Federal Minimum Wage to $15 an hour now (not in six years!) and have it indexed to the cost of living index in each state.
5. Make public colleges tuition and debt free so people can experience learning and being with people of different ages, nationalities, sexual preferences and backgrounds while learning more about themselves and the world.
6. Set the tone from the top by creating a Cabinet level position in the executive branch for a Department Of Peace responsible for teaching non violent conflict resolution at home and around the world..
7. Create a National "Rebuild America" work creation project to build a National Green Energy Grid connecting all 50 states and employing millions of Americans in living wage jobs that cannot be offshored to other countries.