I actually feel like this was an extremely high quality post on my part.
Are we experiencing a mental health crisis? Is mental health worse now than it was 5, 10, 20, 50 years ago? I certainly don't think it is. I think mental health has been an issue throughout all human history. So if you've got some evidence of a recent crisis, please share.
I have experienced a lot of mental health issues in my family. My father killed himself in December of '05. My mother has made a number of suicide attempts, dating back to the early 90s and as recently as 2006, before she was subject to voluntary electroshock therapy, which was absolutely transformative for her. My sister made three very very serious suicide attempts when she was in her very early 20s, all of which required intervention from people who found her by chance in order to save her life. The last one was my father who found her very near death when he came home to eat lunch, which was not common at all.
If you're under the impression that identifying mental health issues and solving them is the same thing, you're wrong.
I agree that we need to seriously address mental health. But that is not a near or medium or long term solution to gun violence. If we could fix 90% of mental health issues (we can't) we would not reduce gun violence by 90%. So for you to call what I said "flippant" well, you need to get real. It wasn't flippant. What was flippant was your post blaming gun violence on our lack of addressing mental health. Those are two different issues and they have two very different solutions, and in the case of mental health, we have no cure. While improvements can be made, they will be small, incremental improvements. Nothing exists in the realm of mental health treatment that would come close to fixing our problem with gun violence.