This is the purpose for the post and the reason the mods are allowing a more in depth discussion of the topic, even though it's not strictly about the right to keep and bear arms.
Gun owners are being attacked - strongly - on this issue. Every time someone else shoots someone in public, we find ourselves defending the rationale behind "why do you own guns" - even though we didn't do anything wrong. It's a frustrating position to be in.
I own firearms to preserve life, station of life, and society. I own these tools so that someone bigger, or stronger, or a group of people more numerous than I cannot simply come and take away what I love, have worked hard for, or appreciate in my life. This right is guaranteed and recognized not as a constitutional right but, following as the forefathers indicated - it is a basic human right. The 9th amendment goes on to further this and covers "other {unspecified} rights remain that of the people."
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The bill of rights nearly didn't make it IN to our form of government because at the time people felt they were implicit rights. But the framers also knew that over time things in society change and evolve, and words come in to use and fall in to disuse, even slowly change meaning. The 9th is a catch all, a disclaimer that says "these aren't ALL of your rights" - for to record all of our basic human rights would likely take more paper or time than they had available at the time.
The right to privacy of our mind, the right to have freewill, is of utmost importance to basic human rights. The constitution itself was very clear on this indicating that people should be judged by their actions - not their intent! It goes on to further describe other limitations; that the government has ONE chance at judging a person by their actions, that people are not subject to generalized search and seizure, how all actions are subject to due process, etc.
Mandatory "Mental health testing" to qualify for the "permission" to exercise a constitutionally guaranteed right is an affront to our very way of life, and goes against the core beliefs of our society. It places the assumption of guilt on to a person, who must then prove "hey I'm an OK guy".
Yet gun owners have to prove they are "an OK guy" before owning a gun on an increasing basis; people in some states still have to "prove" they have a need for it before being "permitted" to carry in public, and so on. The assumption of guilt has been presumed, incorrectly, placing the burden of proving innocence on those who want to exercise what is a fundamental human right.
I'm not sorry to say that I, and all others, have a right to privacy of our minds. The fact is, in the increasingly modern surveillance society, our thoughts are one of the few remaining private places available to a person.
Back to the original topic; this means that what I term as "apex predators" (those inflicting force of will on others without their consent, physically or otherwise) may gain access to arms. But time has shown they will do so anyway regardless of what safeguards we take. The only guaranteed way to eliminate the use of guns as tools to mass murder is to eliminate the guns completely from society.
But our society is duplicitous. The same people who think you should submit to mental health screening to exercise a right also generally support state-sponsored killing, or an elite class of knights in shining armor who are supposed to protect everyone else from the depravity of evil.
They've only shifted the burden of predator on to someone else.
Those people have already decided that THEY do not want to participate as a predator and are content with becoming simply prey. They want to rely on other predators to protect them, essentially resigning themselves to the role of herd animals (to continue the analogy).
Our society is still dominated by force of arms, military might, and "the way of the gun". Our society spends more money on guns, bombs, bullets, and inventing new ways of killing people than the next 9 largest "defense" spenders on the planet. Yet the same people who approve of this feel that you, as an individual, should take no role in protecting yourselves, because you might do something wrong.
They don't scream and cry when a drone "accidentally" (negligently) targets a wedding overseas and kills dozens of innocent men, women, and children. There's no massive public outcry demanding the irresponsible government entrusted with our weapons of mass destruction reign them in, destroy them, dismantle them.
Why? Because they NEED that apex predator protecting them. They have submitted and given up the right to do it for themselves.
As Sam pointed out in an earlier post, some people are "just wired wrong." We've all seen this. We've all read about it.
My daughter (in her innocence) believed that there are no evil people on the planet, that everyone was "salvageable", and that every evil person had a spark of good in them that could be used to leverage their humanity and turn them to good. That sounds great and makes for good reading in a "sparkly vampire novel" but the reality is there ARE evil people, and we DO need to protect ourselves from the remote possibility of our early termination by another apex predator. The things predators have been shown to do are horrendous to consider, and far too varied to go in to here, but there's sufficient proof in the concept of "evil" (or if you prefer, bad wiring) to compel me to study on the art of violence to protect myself.
You want to solve the problem of "mass public violence", the fundamental responsibility needs to shift from the public, to the private person, so that apex predator instincts that manifest themselves abruptly, can be dealt with abruptly.
Something that every single public shooting has in common? Force of will.
If the countering force (which is essentially, fear conditioning) is insufficient to keep the person's predator instincts "in check", the equation becomes unbalanced, and it takes violent action to remove them from society.
On the medicine theory subscribers; If you are going to look at SSRI's as a causal effect, study "how does the medicine affect or alter a person's fear / conditioned responses."
One thing I've learned over the years of high-risk activity (motorcycle riding, martial arts combat, etc) is a person can consciously control and utilize their fear response. I've also seen where that response is affected directly by alcohol or other inhibitors.
Keep in mind the basis behind this thought is the simple rationale that "some people are alive today only because it is illegal to kill them."
Think about that statement for a moment; the sole reason people choose not to do certain actions is because they are afraid of the resulting outcome. (Keep in mind there is a forked discussion at this point, about "normal" people whose brains can accept conditioned fear responses and weigh action against result, and those brains which are malformed and develop without the ability to do so; e.g. the nastiest of the evil serial killers/etc).
Now, stop and think about how arrogant our society is, having mastered everything thrown at us over the years as the dominant society on the planet.
If the only thing keeping our apex predator instincts from manifesting is our conditioned responses and fear ... what happens if those checks and balances in our brains are dispelled?
(I have more insight on this later, as have witnessed first hand two people undergo psychological "breaks". While the causal effects were different the end result was a loss of fear of the outcome of their actions, and both individuals went violent.)
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