Stopping the Next Shooter: Guns and Mental Illness

The school shooting in Newton, Conn. over the weekend that left 27 dead sparked an intense debate about how we care for the mentally ill in the United States. All over the web, grief-stricken posters called upon our lawmakers and institutions to do something not just about gun control but about improving treatment for the mentally ill—and keeping guns out of their possession. Adam Lanza’s death spree in Connecticut recalls a number of similar shootings in recent years, all of them carried out by mentally ill individuals, including Jared Lee Loughner’s shooting spree in Arizona in 2011, the Aurora, Colorado shooting this summer by James Eagan Holmes and the Virginia Tech shooting by Seung-Hui Cho in 2007.

For an interactive story on this topic over at Storify, check out this link.

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