As an Owl, I truly enjoy flights of fancy above our little county. Patchwork fields, meandering county roads, creek beds, and right-angle city streets trace our houses, stores, or great warehouses. Best of all, this “bird’s eye view” makes me realize your closer “people’s eye, ground level views” are so much more meaningful. Last week, I had the chance to talk to a few social workers, who gave a ground-level appreciation of our mental health treatment here. It was not happy.

With names like Not One More, TLC Recovery House, and The Journey, these and many other assistance organizations address our various mental health illnesses, addictions, and treatments. “Oh,” you may say, “not my problem. Not in my family.” Don’t be so sure. Being a disease, you cannot tell when a mental health concern may strike. When it does, it may hit you like lightning. Or it may come to your realization slowly, like a creeping, relentlessly approaching wild fire. Drug and alcohol addiction, for instance, is baffling and indeed appears overwhelming. You wring your hands, knowing not what to do. Then you pick up the phone, and call 211.

That magic number will link you to any number of help services. From drug and alcohol addiction care to clothing, food, transportation, and housing assistance to support groups, counseling, suicide prevention counselors, education, and job training, you can find help. This wonderful idea works best when all support agencies link together so that one call can be directed to the appropriate helper.

Crisis care, at the ground level, is not marred by posturing. At the response level, people know drug abuse kills and alcohol abuse destroys not only the user, but families, friends, and happiness as well. Social work professionals aren’t going to give you high-sounding political treatises on Constitutional law. They are going to get you into treatment, to help save a life. If you are a single parent, they will direct you to a place to get food for your family when you can’t make any more money. If you once thought dropping out of school made you a tough guy, they’ll help you get back into a real job.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a magic number to stop preventable murder? If you call 211, you can access mental health counseling. What you can’t do is take the gun away from an armed shooter. Each and every social worker I’ve asked says danger signs of some future shooters are there, if we only knew enough to recognize them and report. Then, once we reported, they could be cared for and their angers addressed before they opened fire.

Professionals note, for instance, that suicides are often spur of the moment. Keeping potential shooters from access to a weapon — for even a short time — short-circuits that false “permanent solution” to the suicidal person’s short-term problem. How would you feel to save even one life during your time here on earth? Likewise, gunfire attacks are quite often impulsive. Rapid access to weaponry allows the shooter to act upon his hate or rage impulse. Little, innocent children, for example, have paid the price with blown off heads, ripped away limbs, and punctured organs because we won’t require a waiting period for purchase of weapons. We adults won’t require a meaningful background check. Such an inquiry would include not only whether a person has a criminal record, but if they have a history of mental illness. So too, our police and first responders are murdered because mental health issues of their murderers, which could have been reported and dealt with, were not reported. Let’s not forget that many shooters hope for “suicide by cop,” too. We who claim to care for our police subject them to a guessing game as to who has a weapon behind tinted windows, or what kind of additional firepower the shooter has concealed. Often, some jurisdictions have no on-call mental health professionals.

At the ground level, you won’t find politicians preaching their abstract reading of Constitutional law when a child is murdered. What you’ll find at the working level are dedicated, underpaid, understaffed first responders. You’ll find people who have argued for years to fund clinics for mental health concerns, only to have politicians close treatment centers. At the ground-eye level, you see responsible gun owners lock up their weapons, teach their young how to handle a firearm safely, and demand an end to lies about how the Second Amendment allows wanton purchases of combat weaponry outside of national service. At the ground-eye level, professional police officials attest background checks, a cooling-off period before purchase, age limits, an end to homemade ghost weapons, and mental health treatment work. At the dead and dying level, you find people who want to stop the killing. It is only well-protected, wealthy political figures who pretend to shoot weapons on TV election commercials, who won’t act to see this murderous spree ended. Better said, they don’t care. When an enraged 18-year-old boy buys a semi-automatic combat weapon, he’s not part of a “well-regulated militia.” Politicians who say “buy even more guns for teachers” tell all you need to know about where their values are. Just as gun laws are often written by the gun industry, so the dead continue to pile up. When one of the dead is yours, you’ll see the point I’m trying to make here.