Yes, governor Jindal, we should talk about mental health

This month's mass shooting event, oh wait, we've had two. I mean the one in Lafayette, Louisiana. Fun fact: over the past twenty years, the average number of days between mass shootings in the US has been cut in half. This one in Louisiana was committed by a guy that had definite mental health issues. Mental health is often a factor in mass shootings (for the record, guns are a factor in 100% of them). Bobby Jindal, Louisiana's governor, in his terrible press conference about the event, noted that we should have better screening for mental health issues before we sell people a gun. Oddly, this makes him a left wing nut relative to the rest of the GOP field. The NRA is ready to run him out of town on a rail for suggesting something that most Americans, and even most gun owners, think is pretty logical: let's not sell guns to crazy people.

Here's the rub - governor Jindal himself just finished cutting mental health benefits state-wide. He did this to compensate for the spectacular revenue shortfall that he himself created by making some big tax cuts. He's not alone in this:

"national and state level Republicans have consistently attempted to slash government spending on mental health care and public employees like police.

The biggest expansion of mental health care in recent years came in the Affordable Care Act, which, of course, Republicans tried to fully repeal. Many House Republicans also voted against a Bush-era move towards requiring insurers to treat mental illness like physical illnesses.

State Republicans have frustrated another major attempt to increase access to mental health services: the Obamacare Medicaid expansion. Medicaid is the single largest payer of mental health care in the country, as treatment remains prohibitively expensive for many poor and middle-class Americans. But only one Republican Governor has agreed to accept federal funding for expanding Medicaid services.

The Congressional GOP’s plan to block grant Medicaid would only exacerbate this problem. Moreover, budget cutting during the Great Recession has slashed state funding for mental health care, a steep decline that Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell (R) proposed to accelerate after the shooting in Connecticut." (full article here).

It's also important to note that those with mental illness are not necessarily violent. While some conditions have a greater pre-disposition to violence, most do not, so we don't want to get in the business of assuming that the mentally ill are all waiting to arm themselves and go postal. It's the hypocrisy that gets me though: let's blame the mentally ill and then cut the funding to treat them. #GOP_Logic.

Since 80% of these mass shooting events are done with guns obtained legally, we need to talk about gun laws and mental illness together. They're not mutually exclusive. The GOP/NRA arguments against better gun control have been proven illogical time and again. In fact, most gun owners support better safeguards specifically designed to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill. It's 1% of gun owners and 1% of gun shops that cause the majority of issues. That, plus the NRA successfully convincing people that "gun control" means Obama is coming to your house to take your guns.