I'm all for a better mental health system - would be great if there were the public will in this country to fund it. But a better mental health system and/or background checks ain't gonna do it folks. Gotta get rid of some of the guns available to the general population to truly reduce the risks.

I have a story to tell on this topic, Janie.

My nephew was bipolar all his life - diagnosed as such in early teens - and died in his early 30s. He found no help for his condition from conventional medical treatment and spent much of his later life staying in the house with his mother (my sister), working on his computer (he was brilliant with electronics), and finding medications on the internet which he believed helped him through his problems. He tried to commit suicide with pills on at least two occasions, and he and his mother would regularly go through the kitchen and bathroom cupboard contents together, as a kind of therapy - even joking about it - to get rid of this and that substance.

One day my sister came home to find his room trashed - totally wrecked - water pouring in from burst pipes. My nephew was lying on the bed, dead from a rifle bullet through his head. The rifle had been in the closet. This was in Arizona, by the way - Tucson. "Luckily", he used the rifle just on himself and on no-one else. We'll never know if, without the rifle to hand, he'd have still been alive now - or whether it would still have ended in suicide by some other method. How many more years might he have had... We'll also never know whether, in a depressed state, he might have killed others at a later date.

Who knows? All I know is that the ready availability of that gun was a tragic factor at that point.