That's not going to change with less spending, smaller-government approach I'm afraid. Mental health does not have a silver-bullet cure, and addressing it requires a lot of different approaches and resources both at the clinical and the community level.
There's two fronts on the problem with gun-violence:
- if you're trying to address gun violence as seen among gangs and inner-city communities, you need to address things like income inequality, American poverty, and a lack of social infrastructure supporting communities in need (along with hopefully addressing racial-dynamics)
- if you're trying to address mass-shootings, you either have to try and ramp up a multi-faceted approach to make sure there isn't an insane person left in America, or just ban items that pose a particular reckless risk to society by their mere presence alone.
-Bring on the spending, everyone is already broke already anyways. Feels like the better approach is just to say to heck with it and just focus on being better people to one another, damn the expense.
-Agree with the no silver-bullet. The community level seems impossible to directly address, but could be helped by dealing with things like inequality, healthcare in general (yes, I think it should be free), and even just improving primary education (simple stuff, teachers deserve more pay).
-From the clinical side I'm not real up on what goes on in the entry level mental health. ('Hey doc, I'm feeling kind of down'... sort of deal). But in the more serious situations the approach seems pretty outdated, and I'm no expert so I don't know the answers, but currently our solution is borderline jail.
-I agree that gang-violence is best addressed by trying to bring those communities up. Poverty/Education inequalities being the big two that I see. Drug decriminalization could also take a lot of power from these gangs.
-I'm not super familiar with the common racial dynamics in america. I grew up in an extremely diverse, but relatively small community (10k, shoutout to LazyD) so I didn't grow up with a lot of culture clash, we all got along because we had to I guess. Area wasn't large enough for each group to separate out. I have now moved on to another community of similar size but that it is completely White, and I can feel their... unease(not quite the right word) in dealing with situations involving minorities. I guess I'm just asking someone to try to summarize what the current issues are on this topic?
-Mass-shootings are an extremely difficult to deal with problem, almost uniquely american. I can't think of any direct approach to dealing with them either, they make me sad
-I like lists, and thanks for the discussion