The ‘Selective Service System’ as
Mental Health ‘Filter’?
I lean
towards the ‘control the mentally ill’ side and offer the following suggestion:
Expand the Selective Service registration process to include a mental health
assessment of the 18 year olds who are legally required to register. Currently
it collects only Name, Gender, Date of birth, Social Security number and
current mailing address.
The
Selective Service System is used by the Federal Government to identify the pool
of age-appropriate males for conscription in the event of a national emergency.
Up until the early 70s, Selective Service did conscript hundreds of thousands
of young men who helped fill the ranks of the Army and even the Marines (Navy
and Air Force to a lesser degree) during WWII, Korea and Vietnam. Its continued
use, notwithstanding the lack of an actual ‘Draft’, makes it perfect as a
research process to help with the current ‘national emergency’ of mass
shootings.
If one
Googles ‘Brain Maturity’, or some version of that, one will find many articles
and discussions about the brain’s maturation during a person’s teens and
twenties. Male and female brains both ‘mature’ during this period, with the
females reaching full maturity a few years before males. Most males who’ve
reached, say, their forties can recall making bone-headed, irrational, stupid
and self-destructive decisions and actions that they’d dearly love to reset.
Thankfully, most of these males did not physically injure other people. But in
extremely rare cases, they do.
Obviously,
females are not the ‘shooters’ in these tragedies, and I believe that a
statistically predicable glitch in male brain maturation is producing these
psychotic young men. It just makes no sense that such horrendous acts are
caused solely by a young man’s exposure to family, peers, the natural
environment, social media, etc. If such factors were to blame, we’d see far
more such events. However, a mentally dysfunctional mind creates an isolated
and paranoid man who could, over time, reach a critical mass of anger that
results in an explosion of suicidal violence. Indeed, it’s clear to me that
these acts are in fact suicides whether the final bullet comes from the
shooter’s gun or the police.
In the USA,
all males are required to register for Selective Service (the Draft) between
ages 18 and 25. The law requires even illegal immigrants to file with the
promise that the registrant’s status won’t be shared with ICE. This
registration process could be expanded to include an on-line mental health
questionnaire that could be assessed by healthcare professionals who might
identify clearly troubled and/or dysfunctional young men. At that point they
could be summoned for detailed, in-person interviews. Should they refuse to
register at all, refuse to take the on-line assessment, refuse to show up for
further in-person assessment, or if they are assessed and deemed problematic,
they would go on a national list that restricts their purchase or possession of
firearms. Or, deferring to states-rights stalwarts, the Feds could release the
list to the States who could enforce the purchase/possession restriction. The
individuals could request reassessment on a yearly basis, e.g. an
acknowledgement that brain maturation does progress over time.
As far as I
know, there is no formalized ‘filter’ in place in the country that seeks to
identify young males who may be mentally impaired and in need of treatment, or
some basic monitoring of their welfare. The Selective Service registration process, already in place
as a Federal law, could now be used as that filter. Though those males who will
eventually cause havoc with a gun are a statistically tiny percentage of the
entire population, the possibility to find even one before he ‘goes off’ would
make the effort worthwhile. Thoughts?
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