Seventeen people were killed last week in the latest mass school shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkview, Florida. It is one of the incidents with most fatalities in history.
US president Donald Trump has since commented that the reasons behind the shooting could be narrowed down to the perpetrator suffering from mental illness – drawing away from the issue at the heart of the problem of civilian shootings: the ineffective gun control policies in the US.
Trump took to Twitter to say: “So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic behaviour. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again!”
Mental health activists have spoken out against the president’s comments saying that the only thing they will achieve is a greater stigma surrounding people suffering mental health issues, who are more likely to be victims of violence than to perpetrate such horrors themselves.
Many people have come out in protest of the gun policies in the US, demanding reform to ensure that people who could be capable of carrying out such atrocities have no access to any sort of weapon and that civilians have a greater sense of safety. Civilians opening fire on the public in the US is not an unheard of event.
> Naomi Round
