Dear Hobart

I really appreciate you tackling the issue of needing to improve mental and emotional support in our schools in your article “Guns don’t kill students, students kill students.”  It’s been a while since I was in secondary school, but I still remember quite vividly how it felt to be bullied and ostracized.  I’ve always wondered how we as a society have allowed this to continue with our children decade after decade when we wouldn’t tolerate behavior like this from adult colleagues in a workplace or adult strangers on the street.  I couldn’t agree with you more that we need to see reform, and I applaud your ideas about increasing the availability of counseling for students along with your ideas about needing inclusion and emotional support activities. I think all of these could have a tremendously positive impact on the issues we are facing. 

I also wholeheartedly agree with you that these issues and mental health concerns in general are at the core of our nation’s problem with mass shootings, but where I diverge from your ideas is in the belief that tackling these issues will be easier or produce more immediate results than reforming gun laws.  I was in high school over 30 years ago and experienced first-hand the type of bullying and alienation you speak of.  The sting is still there as it is for countless others I went to school with.  What differs so much between my generation and the current one is not that we had so much better mental and emotional support (I guarantee you we didn’t!), it’s that we didn’t have the same kind of gun culture, gun access, or gun types that we do now.  It wasn’t even a consideration.  But since Columbine, it has increasingly become not only a consideration but a go-to. 

I wish we would have solved all the emotional and mental support issues in the 30+ years since I was a high school student, but we haven’t.  I absolutely agree with you that we need to make it a top priority and continue to chip away at it, but I don’t think it will produce the results we are looking for as quickly as we need it to, especially if the last 30 years is any kind of indication.  While legislating reform to gun control laws is no easy task, I actually think it will be an easier and quicker deterrent to mass shootings and will allow us to continue the essential work of trying to reform our society’s school bullying and emotional support issues.