Solving mass shooter issue -don’t regulate guns; regulate bullets

Gun control will do nothing. The horse is out of the barn. Americans own 50% of all civilian owned guns in the world. We need strict bullet control at least as serious as with driver’s licenses. Licenses of several levels like level one for limited # bullets for a 22. To own high capacity clips or clips for guns with more than one bullet at a time must have advanced level bullet certificates for mental health and from police every two years. To own high caliber bullets or clips with more than a few bullets you would have to have training similar to an officer. Licensees would also have to keep records of their bullets like pharmacists do with narcotics. How many they have, who they give or sell them to, how they were used (target practice, etc).

Louisiana has concealed carry everywhere and more guns per capita than almost any state. Where were the armed citizens here? They clearly could not react quick enough. They likely wouldn’t have been fast enough, accurate enough, and trained enough to counter panic in an active shooter situation.

Armed civilians do more harm than good. Studies have shown that practicing with a stationary target under calm conditions does not prepare you to duck, be aware of your surroundings and avoid tunnel vision of fight or flight situation where you fail to recognize innocent and shoot wildly, and without constant intense training, you do not have muscle memory to overcome the shakiness from stress hormones and fight or flight signals from nervous system removing blood from periphery and giving it to large muscles and center mass plus brain, as well as have the quickness and accuracy needed in a rapidly evolving active shooter situation with innocents running everywhere including in front of your gun. Armed civilians everhywhere will cause more death and injury, not less.

With guns, the only thing needed is a permanent ID embedded in some high tech way so that they can be traced more easily.

More bullets = more death.  Less mental health care = more death.  Remember 1/3 of 30,000 gun deaths in U.S. every year are suicides and 11% of population has mental health issues. You should be required to lock up bullets and loaded guns.

Suggested plan to stop gun violence in America

SUGGESTED PLAN TO STOP GUN VIOLENCE IN AMERICA –

TO BE DEBATED AND DISCUSSED BY EXPERTS IN ALL FIELDS

INCLUDING LAW, MILITARY, NRA, HEALTHCARE, MENTAL HEALTH, POLICE, PRISONS  AND JAILS, RELIGIOUS LEADERS, AND PUBLIC INTEREST GROUPS ON ALL SIDES OF THE DEBATE IN A TRANSPARENT MANNER!

1. America has 5% of the world population but its citizens own 50% of the privately owned guns the world. Tax ammunition outrageously like we tax cigarettes. Considering outlawing owning more than a few weapons needed by one person to be a member of a militia unless they have extensive mental health examination and background check.
2. Half of gun deaths are suicides.  Triple mental healthcare spending and  vastly improve access to mental healthcare.
3. Vastly increase opportunities for teens and young adults for jobs and after school activities. Idle minds are the devil’s  playground. Re-instate the Civilian Conservation Corps started in the Roosevelt era.
4. Outlaw high capacity ammunition magazines and give deadline to turn them in – do not grandfather them. An untrained person having      to change clips would slow down mass murders.
5. Find better high tech way to ID guns so that if their numbers are filed off they can still be traced.
6. Research and discuss ways of tracking and controlling the sale of ammunition and the sale of more dangerous types of ammunition, with consideration of putting limits on certain types of ammunition or finding ways of tracing the sale and usage of certain types of ammunition that are more deadly or meant for military mass murder situations, rather than hunting.
7. Tax guns at enormous rate with goal of decreasing ratio of guns to number of Americans to half as many within 5 years. Increase availability of voluntary turn in of weapons without consequences.  Destroy weapons turned in and do not resell them.
8. Outlaw semi-automatic rifles and handguns. Have a panel of experts including military and NRA representatives determine this issue. No grandfather clause.  Maybe allow some stored in gun clubs to mentally certified people, who have  undergone careful background check as to mental health as well as had an  interview by a trained psychologist. Do not allow storage of these weapons in a home where everyone is not certified.
9. Massive education effort to teach not to stigmatize  mentally ill and to recognize need for mental healthcare.  Teach that most mentally ill people are  harmless, most gun deaths are NOT caused by the mentally ill, but that serious mass murders may be caused by a few very disturbed people who need  help BEFORE they murder someone.
10. Research and find ways to identify loners and help them integrate into society, as well as find ways to identify when they are falling into psychotic mental illness and becoming dangerous to society like with the shooters in Oregon & at the Colorado theater.
11. Massively increase training requirements for law enforcement officers and prison guards to include training about mental illness and psychology (at least one year of classes and rotation through  mental health facilities as part of code gray teams and counseling teams).  Three months of post high school      training is not adequate to be employed as a jail or prison guard.  This will take a 5-10 year transition as our police forces are so incredibly undertrained. Parole officers should be required even more training. Study how many peace officers were involved in murder with their own guns or whose guns were used for suicide or accidental shootings.
12. Vastly improve our education system in the U.S. to  include domestic violence and pre-marital counseling, financial  responsibility, and child development, as well as mental health issues.  Require students to volunteer to help the elderly, the disabled, or the mentally challenged so they understand that the disabled and mentally  challenged are not automatically dangerous.
13. Close loopholes so that NO gun may be exchanged or sold without check with a national database.
14. Have intense discussion/analysis as to what diagnoses or mental certification should cause inclusion in database as the vast majority of the mentally ill are not dangerous. Forcing all that  have been treated or hospitalized for mental illness into a database would be grossly unfair.
15. Judicial reform to take corruption out of our court system and vastly reform family courts thus lowering the extreme suicide rate among veterans and the population due to false defamation of character and wrongful termination of child custody rights.
16. Do not put all felons in database as most are not  dangerous concerning guns – analyze this more carefully.
17. Make national effort to put in place system to help wrongfully convicted felons overturn their convictions so that the database is not overtaxed by excessive numbers of people who are mentally  stable but wrongfully accused of being mentally ill or have been defamed and wrongfully convicted felons, or non-violent felons.
18. Make higher penalties for storing weapons without trigger locks and other appropriate safety measures.

Newton, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Columbine – type shootings WILL NOT STOP and WILL ESCALATE until we educate about, make access easy to, and fund mental health care

I am a retired pediatrician in Chicago.  I also have a PhD in pathology and trained for six months in forensic pathology observing and participating in autopsies including many gunshot victims. In addition I was medical director of a mental health care group practice. I know what I am talking about as I have treated babies and children who have been boiled, beaten, shot, and shaken.  I have smelled their burned flesh and held their brain tissue in my hand.  I have attended their autopsies. The destruction of tissue by high-powered weapons is unbelievable.  Tissues explode inside of you as the tissue is vaporized and the bullets wobble and gas from heated vaporized tissue expands the damage. There is absolutely no reason for high-powered, high magazine capacity weapons for civilian use. I fear though that it will take decades to confiscate them all as there are millions out there and millions of high capacity magazines.  Too many people do not secure their weapons and too many can buy them without background checks. The ratio of weapons to people in this country is so astonishing it is beyond belief.  No weapons ban will fully work until we start taking this ratio down.

However we have to start somewhere like limiting the availability of high-capacity magazines and certain types of bullets.  Although limiting guns in UK and Australia has worked well, it won’t work so easily in America where 5% of the world population has 50% of weapons owned  by civilians!  What are we going to do?  Have a massive confiscation campaign?  Eliminate the 2nd Amendment? NO!  We must close the loopholes concerning background checks.  We must start banning semiautomatic weapons to some extent and slow down their  proliferation.  The number in this country already is more than we will ever need. We must link all background registries at the national level. BUT! How are we going to  define mental illness that makes a person dangerous and that deserves to put them on the registry?  How are we going to help wrongfully convicted felons clear their names.  Are all felons deserving of having a ban on owning fire arms?  I think NOT!

I was wrongfully  convicted of aggravated battery of an officer for “bumping” him with my wheelchair and sentenced to two years in prison, a false charge as Sgt. Anthony Salemi actually attacked me in my wheelchair, falsified his records and committed perjury. Now Chief Judge Evans in Cook County is banning all cell phones from courthouses as the eavesdropping law was declared unconstitutional so no citizen can document corruption of Sheriff officers and judges in courthouses even outside of the courtrooms!

We have no choice with this amount of weapons in our country and t he impossibility of banning them due to the numbers already out there, but to make schools as secure as courthouses.  This is the sorry reality and it will cost us dearly – causing fear in our children and enormous government expenditures. Our 2nd Amendment with the technological advances in weapons and astonishing proliferation of weapons in the hands of citizens in America make us a dangerous overly armed population.

We MUST increase the requirements for police officers training and education.  We have a pitifully under trained and corrupt law enforcement legacy in this country. Read my blogs in the following.  We are now even killing a whole lot of people unnecessarily with Tasers!

We also must MASSIVELY increase our funding for mental health care.  We need 30,000 certified child psychiatrists but only have about 5,000 in this country.  We have been forced to choose between drugging people and providing cognitive or talking therapy.  Drugging won as our healthcare system won’t pay to talk to anyone.  I believe however that talking therapies are critical and drugging often does more harm than good!

Those doctors who do procedures (cardiac and ortho surgery for example) get obscenely high payments while psychiatrists, psychologists, and general practitioners, as well as pediatricians and family practitioners are the lowest paid.  We also pay by the pound.  My patients (Vincent triplets) are in the Guinness Book of World Records as the “lightest triplets in the world” (1997 edition), yet I was paid $50 to put in central lines into ultra premees while vascular surgeons were paid $500 to put in central lines into adults! Go figure! Our priorities are goofy.

Our justice system is so corrupt that honest  harmless people like me are wrongfully convicted (in my case in retaliation for whistle blowing against corrupt police and officials – see my other blogs links to the right) and criminals know all the loopholes.  Some of the most dangerous people are very intelligent and also mentally ill yet are not even in the mental healthcare system.

I fear the backlash against most mentally ill people who are harmless.

I fear that people with post-traumatic-stress disorder (PTSD) will be discriminated against and labeled wrongfully as dangerous. I suffer from PTSD and although I am a non-violent pacifist, I cower and swing my arms in front of my head trying to defend myself against flashbacks of being beaten by corrupt  police (I have been beaten several times and falsely accused of attacking these officers – see my blogs: http://cookcountysheriffdeputies.wordpress.com and http://cookcountyjudges.wordpress.com). This massacre in Newtown has caused me to have more flashbacks revisiting seeing wounded and dying children in the emergency rooms where I worked in Chicago 10-20 years ago.

There is NO mental health care in America; no understanding, respect and compassion for the mentally ill; no support for their families; no help available; just disdain, disrespect, hatred, blame, and ignorance. LaPierre’s and others’ descriptions of mentally ill shooters as “lunatics” and other derogatory terms I would rather not repeat makes the defamation against the mentally ill even worse.

Would you blame a person for becoming sick with cancer or being born with a deformity?  Yet we blame the criminally insane and defame them as evil!  We are a very sick society!

I treated a boy who attempted suicide and when I was releasing him from the hospital, the major university children’s hospitals in Chicago and its suburbs said they didn’t take these kids in transfer who didn’t have insurance (Loyola University, Northwestern University Medical Center, Rush Medical Center, Christ Hospital affiliated with the United Church of Christ and part of Advocate Healthcare) they had a year-long waiting list (Mt. Sinai Hospital and Medical Center), they only took transfers to their mental health unit of persons on Medicaid who lived in their zip  code (University of Chicago); or such other lame excuses all due to the country refusing to pay for mental health care.

I tried to testify in juvenile court that an aunt who was trying to help her nephew, whose parents were in prison for murder, had a child who was dangerous due to his mental illness, a liar and that the aunt was not a child abuser. Instead the child needed hospitalization and mental health care for life. He may grow up to be a mass murderer.  His aunt was falsely labeled a child abuser due to the child’s lies without a legitimate fair due process court hearing. The aunt lost custody of the boy and his brothers. The children were placed in foster care or given to their criminal drug dealing and gang member relatives who the aunt had protected them from. He has already become a rapist and was in prison for a year. His brothers have become burglars and teen drug dealers under the wings of their relatives and the lives of the brother who were doing well with the aunt have been ruined by the Cook County judges and court system.   We need extensive judicial reform!  I would love to testify before Congress.

Instead the judge threw me out of the courtroom, declared I was not a reliable witness, instead listened to a child welfare worker who had a few months training after getting a bachelor’s degree in psychology, ended up destroying my career and now corrupt officials arrested me on many false criminal charges and jailed me in retaliation after I began this campaign to get help for these  people.  Read my other blogs: here, here, here, here & here. The corrupt officials who divert Social Security Title IV-D funds from helping families to judicial pensions and fees for incompetent court-appoint hacks who claim to do mental health evaluations and claim to evaluate family situations (child representatives and guardian ad litums in divorce and custody cases), vilify anyone who tries to change the system and get the country to really look at mental health care, custody decisions, divorce courts, and misuse of government funds because we threaten their illegal funding stream. Read about that here.

Until the Affordable Care Act (ACA) known as “Obamacare”, patterned after “Romneycare” in Massachusetts, is in full swing and expanded to deal with mental health care and cover all Americans as a universal single  payer health care system, none of these mothers will have help and the shootings will continue. Victims also need access to mental health care.

See my suggested 15 point plan to address gun violence and gun deaths in America here: https://twitter.com/DrLindaShelton (1/2 of them are suicides and most are not mass murders but are murders by people known to the victims – 11,000 per year in the U.S.  – compared to about 35-50 in either England or Australia who have both banned and confiscated weapons after mass murders in schools).

Please consider joining the group “Newtown United” on Facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/NewtownUnited

The following is a MUST READ that has begun this conversation: http://anarchistsoccermom.blogspot.com/2012/12/thinking-unthinkable.html

The following poem expresses all of our grief and sadness: http://newtown.patch.com/blog_posts/dear-santa-7cbef59a

Statement by former Representative and victim of shooting Gabby Giffords husband Kelly at her shooter’s sentencing excoriating the government and Gov. for not dealing with gun violence and mental illness: http://jezebel.com/5959149/gabby-giffords-husband-stares-down-her-shooter-gabby-and-i-are-done-thinking-about-you