What happens when lawful gun owners have mentally ill family members?

Everybody, even in other countries, has been shocked by the mass killings in Sandy Hook. I have some reasonable, and I believe, perfectly respectful questions to ask on this issue.

Somebody suggested that the appropriate response to the Sandy Hook massacre was that everybody should do a random act of kindness to someone everyday. But how will that stop the next Nancy  Lanza, who has two hand guns, and an assault rifle, from having them taken off her by her mentally ill son (or brother or husband or father in law, or cousin who comes to visit) and have them used on her and then on others? [Later note: Nancy Lanza in fact had 6 guns in her house, and her son  killed her with her own gun, then took three of them to do the shooting.]

To keep guns out of the hands of mentally ill people, don’t you you need to check that the buyer hasn’t got a mental illness at the time of purchase, and then regularly review that every year or two? Most countries have annual renewals for car registration.  In New South Wales, Australia, cars over five years old have to have annual roadworthy checks.  Certain medical conditions can get you banned from driving.

People with guns and people with cars can both kill others. Should gun ownership be less stringently monitored and reviewed than car ownership?Should a system of regular re-registration be in place but with documentation from your doctor? (Has this person  developed a mental illness in the last year?) How could this be done?

Or what about other people in your household (Like Mrs Lanza’s son?) Wouldn’t the gun ownership need to be limited where anyone who is a regular visitor to you house has a mental illness? (Does anyone in your house have, or have they developed a mental illness?) This might also apply to people with mental disabilities. The shooter at the Port Arthur massacre here in Australia didn’t have a mental illness, such as paranoid schizophrenia, but did have a serious intellectual disability.

The questions aren’t being disrespectful to gun owners.

They are legitimate questions when the guns are bought legally by a person who is mentally fit at the time, but who may subsequently suffer a mental illness, or whose family members may acquire a mental illness, or where a family member has a significant intellectual disability. Should households in these cases be allowed to own a gun and if “yes” to one should that be “yes” to two or three guns? Is one hand gun enough to protect the average home from intruders? Are two or three? Is an assault rifle needed for that purpose?

Gun owners want to be protected for burglars other violent people. But how do we protect people like Mrs Lanza from the use of her own guns by a family member? After all, although she had the right to own a weapon, she had other rights too – rights not to be killed by her son. How is this right to be enforced?

Who’se looking out for the rights of the thousands of Mrs Lanzas out there?

So – I know many of you have strong feeling about gun ownership – pro and con- but if you accept that guns should stay out of the hands of mentally ill people, how do you deal with the situation of the multiple gun owner whose family member develops a mental illness.

Any thoughts?

What I’m Reading This Week: Karin Slaughter’s ‘Blindsighted’. When I was a few chapters into this book, I started to wonder whether the author’s surname, Slaughter, was a pen name, chosen because she was writing a particularly gruesome series of murders. I won’t go into all the details, but the first murder involved abuses of the victim’s body in a way I had not imaged ever happening. A short Google showed that Slaughter is in fact her real name. “I guessed I lucked out on that,” she said. Some of the material is based on research she did on real serial killers like Ted Bundy.  If she had been writing romances she would have had to change her surname. The book is well written, fast paced, the characters are believable, and it’s well researched. The conflicts that go on in a small town police department and medical examiner’s office, where everybody is friends with, or is related to, or an ex-partner of other characters in the book gives it an extra layer of emotional complexity that might be absent in big-city crime stories. It’s a good read, but only for those with a strong stomach.

 Would you spend two hours making a lunch box for your kids, so that the food looks like a picture of Barack Obama, Michael Jackson or Harrison Ford? No? Well in Japan the way food looks is almost as important as it how it tastes. And keeping up appearances matters. You can’t just send your kids off to school with a few sandwiches in some cling film. Japanese mothers create artistic looking combinations of rice, fish, seaweed and vegetables that look like true works of art.

Some of the lunches look like a piano or the control console for a video game. Some look like Hello Kitty, or Totoro, a Japanese cartoon character. Some look like people. Tomomi Maruo runs classes in her apartment where she teaches other mothers to make lunchboxes. The lunch boxes with faces take two hours.

In this BBC story young mother Yayoi Uemura, one of Tomomi’s students confesses that she feels pressured by Japanese culture to come up with something  novel to match the other moms. “I feel, oh my gosh, it’s sports day, the expectation is getting high, you have to sit next to other moms. I feel pressured.” And most of the kids featured in the BBC story, the ones eating these lunches, are in kindergarten.

Watching this story, I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for the mothers. As well as going to the office, or working in a shop, or doing ordinary housework, the thought of spending two hours on a kid’s lunch box seems, well, pretty demanding.

I’ve been to Japan three times as a tourist, and had Japanese students board at my house. I was learning the language until the writing part got so time-consuming I couldn’t continue. Japan is a country where part of the culture says you have to fit in. One Japanese saying is “Deru kugi wa utareru.” The nail that sticks out gets hammered down. It means you conform or else.

Watching the BBC story made me stop to think: is there anything that I do that serves no real purpose except  to fit in with other people? We’re all social beings. We all try to fit in to some degree with other people, but most of the time we’re not very conscious of it. Sometimes, at family gatherings, we have to hold our tongue for the sake of harmony. But I struggle to come up with anything in Western culture that even remotely resembles what these mothers are doing. Is there anything I’m missing here? Are there things we do just to fit in? What do you think?