Choosing Safety: Protecting Our Children in a Crisis of Gun Violence and Mental Health
By Linda Budd, PhD, LP
When I was asked to serve on the board of Humanitas Media, I responded that I was not an expert on human rights. However, I have more than 50 years of experience as a psychologist and relationship therapist working on mental health issues, with an emphasis on parenting and children. The following should be read with this background in mind.
In August 2025, a person opened fire with an automatic weapon on the children and teachers of Annunciation Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, while they were at mass, praying and celebrating the beginning of their school year. After this tragedy, the principal of the school asked everyone to not just to pray, but to also move their feet. This is another way of saying that “thoughts and prayers” are not nearly enough, that we must take concrete action immediately to prevent such a tragedy from happening again.
Sadly, the Minnesota state legislature has been at a standstill. One side states they want to provide mental health support; the other side wants a ban on all assault or rapid-fire weapons in our state. No feet are moving. In marriage and family therapy when resolving relationship disagreements, we are taught to use the “both/and” concept. Both sides are right; but what can we do to address both priorities simultaneously?
As a mental health professional, I don’t believe adding a counselor to a few schools is enough. We need to acknowledge that America is in the middle of a mental health crisis. To presume that one counselor, in brief interactions, can identify the one dangerous individual in a school full of students is far-fetched. To determine if someone is truly dangerous takes hours of assessment over a lengthy timespan. Rather than targeting the entire student body, counselors should initiate an assessment for any individual who attempts to purchase and obtain a gun within 24 hours. Such a short delay leaves inadequate assessment time; a display of such impulsivity should lead to an assessment that takes at least 6 months. That would allow an assessor to do multiple tests, corroborate stability though outside sources and access the student’s social media statements. You cannot say mental health issues are the source of increased gun violence and not provide a structure to determine whether someone purchasing a gun has a mental health issue.
To those who stipulate that all rapid-fire weapons should be banned: I was born at Parris Island, South Carolina. My father was a Marine, a weapons specialist who served in the Pacific during World War II and in the Korean Conflict. He would not allow any guns in our home. Rapid-fire and assault weapons were designed for war. Their purpose is to allow trained service members, such as my father, to kill as many people as possible; they have no place in a civil society. Those of us in the mental health world must deal far too often with the effects that guns, used to shoot innocent students, have on our children. You have only to look at the increase in anxiety and depression in our children. Children’s sense of physical insecurity is a significant source of their mental insecurity.
If we follow the “both/and” model we have ways to move in both directions with our feet simultaneously. This is an issue of human rights – the children’s right to be safe in their own schools, and their right to be protected from the scourge of automatic weapons. We need to see ourselves as protective parents of all the children in our society. As such we need to prioritize what is clearly most important – a child’s right to physical and emotional safety or the “right” of any potential murderer to own whatever mass-casualty weapon his heart desires, as soon as he wants it. The choice is simple.
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Linda Budd is a licensed psychologist, marriage and family therapist, and registered play therapist-supervisor with over 50 years of clinical experience. She specializes in the study of childhood temperament and parent-child relationships. And personality disorders. Dr. Budd is the author of Living with the Active Alert Child, The Journey of Parenting, and I’m OK, You’re Not OK. A former adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota, she has taught and presented nationally on family systems and emotional development.