To Jiverly Wong et. al

It's getting to be so that there are safe havens anymore. No church, no nursing home, no community adult center offers the complete and utter sanctuary we once thought they did. And it's mostly because someone can get a gun and snuff someone else out with all the nonchalance of a kid buying a pack of gum at a drug store

Yet in spite of all the recent mayhem and shootings, I still am not in favor of gun control because I know where it will lead. All the law-abiding citizens will be the ones following the rules while all the loose cannons will be out there shooting at anything that moves.

Still, there are some solutions. One is that schools and communities need to expand their mental health services. Anger and mental illness do not come out of nowhere and for every Jiverly Wong, the Vietnamese immigrant who pulled the trigger on 13 people before killing himself in the Binghamton, NY rampage, or Marie Moore, the 44 year-old Florida woman with a history of mental illness who shot and killed her 20 year-old son at a shooting range before turning the gun on herself, there are those who knew these people and what they were capable of.

This means that the universities need to start turning out more competent counselors and social workers, meaning those who exhibit a relative degree of sanity and want to help others. And I know of what I speak. One counselor I worked with spends much of her time holed up in her office while her inbox floweth over with requests and referrals. Another always has repeat customers because she is unable to set clear expectations the first five times around, and a third has no idea about his counselees' home life because he seldom asks. Clearly they are graduates of one of our roll them out like cream puffs counseling degree programs.