Friday, October 24, 2014

Terrorism in Canada; Islamic radicals or nutters with guns?

What is the logical outcome when government policies make it harder to find psychiatric care and easier to get guns?

It is more than obvious when you read the back stories of the perpetrators of the two "terrorist" attacks in Canada this past week, that these individuals fell through the cracks of Canada's health care system. They desperately needed intervention on addiction and mental health issues.

Unfortunately, when the government of the day is totally focussed on a "tough-on-crime" agenda, such help is unlikely to be forthcoming.

The more you look at the past week, the less likely you are to see any link to Islam, radical or otherwise. In both cases you had marginalized men with mental health issues. We're not going to solve the marginalized Canadian men with mental health issues problem by dropping more bombs in the Middle East.

It's not a gun issue either; the guy in Quebec used his car as a weapon to run down that soldier in the parking lot. We could ban cars and guns and mental illness will still be mental illness.

The root problem is that we've become a winner-take-all culture in which the guys who perceive themselves as losers see going out in a blaze of glory as their final chance to regain their dignity, and our media happily obliges them in that quest.

No comments:

Post a Comment