ROSEBURG, START NOW TO PREVENT THE NEXT ONE

The ‘Selective Service System’ as Mental Health ‘Filter’?

Tragedies like Roseburg have become all too common in the last few years. Columbine, in 1999, seems to have started a cascade of events that seem to hit the headlines with an almost predictable regularity. The political parties use each occasion to pressure the public to choose between ‘blame the availability of guns’ on one side, versus ‘control the mentally ill’ on the other.

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?