There's a petition going around on this site asking President Obama to use his political capital to insist on starting a serious discussion about gun control. I've signed it. I'm glad to see it there. I consider myself a moderate on gun control issues for many reasons, but the current arrangement is the worst of both worlds -- we neither have protection from people obtaining rapid-fire weapons without solid proof of sanity and competent handling, nor the protection which might come from knowing that those people who have legally obtained weapons probably are sane and competent, and therefore can be trusted to use them for society's protection, not its destruction. We need to even out both ends of that spectrum, and a national discussion starting at the top is the place to begin.
But I'm not going there in this diary. I want to talk about the other national discussion we need to have. The one about the health care system and its role in allowing neglected patients to develop into mass killers.