(Monday) the news was very telling. One man walked into a grocery store and killed 10 people. For those 10 people and the people that witnessed the shooting, the story they have to share is very different from what the media led us to believe. The story is the trauma and the horror that the innocent shoppers experienced, the lasting impact to those involved and the reigniting of a dormant problem that leaders in Colorado have failed repeatedly to appropriately address. The lack of access to mental health resources and the lack of skilled mental health providers.
The New York Times just published an article on Colorado. Colorado Has Seen Several Mass Shootings in Recent Years. It said "Colorado has a long history of Several Mass Shootings." I am well aware that a number of leaders in Longmont and also in Boulder are going to be defensive about the truth and the truth is the leadership in Colorado has repeatedly failed to deal with the inevitable failures and to protect families from the mentally ill. In fact, my personal experience is the leadership has been distorting the crisis and has allowed a castigated overall system failure to address mental illness, which includes the lack of skill in the mental health providers to recognize pathology and how to treat it. Instead, Colorado takes a reactive approach to leadership just ask Colorado mother Jing Tesoriero whose son, Ty, was murdered by her mentally ill ex-husband and nobody helped her.
(According to) Ranking the States | Mental Health America (mhanational.org), Colorado has one of the worse ratings for access to mental health. Instead of the leaders recognizing the ongoing issues, which are causing people to murder their own children and strangers in a grocery store, they heroically take a stand in the media using the same narrative arc: the assumption that leadership must somehow be connected to heroic things when stories like a mother losing a child to a mentally ill ex and not getting any help are day-to-day real-world indicators that leaders in Colorado are failing to lead and protect.
