Too Soon?

The first thing I heard this morning was how inappropriate it was for the president of the United States to be talking about partisan politics while people at the Navy Ship Yard were still dying. Of course Joe Scarborough laid it on with both barrels saying that the left would have been outraged if George W. Bush would have done that. I can see people checking through the archives looking to see if they can find a similar circumstance.

In my opinion,we will no longer have a time out to reflect on the sadness of a situation because the last incident is still fresh on our minds and we don't have a way to control  the instant response from Twitter and Facebook.   We will just take up where we left off.

 I have to agree with Jeff Greenfield when he said that nothing could have be done to prevent the mass shooting yesterday.    He was talking about the laws and policies that we have in place today. Aaron Alexis did see a VA doctor about his mental problems,he was not charged in the two gun incidents he had, so he could legally buy a gun. He played a lot of violent video games  but we are not going to take steps to keep those games out the hands of adults. Finally,he legally bought a shot gun and apparently acquired the other weapons after he shot the first security office who approached him.All that's left is the lack of security at the base but since Mr. Alexis is dead, we will never know his motive.

Aaron Alexis did see someone at the VA about his mental problem but apparently there is not a way to force him to complete his sessions. His friends in Ft. Worth said he was likable fellow but  one friend said he was addicted to violent video games. He joined the Buddhist religion which is a pacifist group. Try and figure that out. 

I will note once again that the only good guy with a gun happened to be law enforcement. We all saw the chaos in looking for a second and the possibility of a third shooter. It might be just me, but I think an armed civilian might have gotten shot by the police yesterday. We still haven't found a way to control adrenalin in those situations. So much for the theory that shooters don't attack a facility where someone night be armed. 

As I was hearing  about the shooter's past ,I started thinking that there's got to be way to connect all those dots. I thought of a credit bureau type of system  that assigns points to different actions. A domestic violence will get a flag,treatment for PTSD another,violent games and so on and I'm sure NSA could tell us how. Yes,the credit bureau makes a lot of wrong entries,health information should be private and the NRA would be against it but someone -somewhere is collecting all that data right;why not put it to good use. We know the gun shops won't Google the potential buyer,so we've got to give them a tool they can use besides the instant background check. 

I think we can all agree that security needs to be beefed up at our military installations especially one where civilians outnumber the military personnel. 

We can Think Tank this to no end but until we change the culture of America,these shootings will continue.