First of all let me send my condolences to the friends and families of the people killed, injured or otherwise affected by this tragedy - including the friends and family of Robert Hawkins.

Mr Hawkins was clearly a disturbed and very distressed person. He needed psychiatric help. Had a psychiatrist, psychologist or counselor picked up on the danger he represented to himself or others, he would have been confined to a secure hospital. In any case, the hope would be that with appropriate treatment and support this man's emotional turmoil might have been relieved enough to stop him from being a threat.

Last week we say another - in the end much less violent - drama - closer to my home in Massachusetts when a psychologically troubled man took hostages at a Hillary Clinton campaign office in New Hampshire and threatened to detonate a bomb (which turned out to be only road flares). This man claimed his actions were sparked by his wish to draw attention to his inability to afford psychiatric care for longstanding substance abuse and psychological problems.

In no way should what I have written be taken as a plea to excuse these men for the crimes they have committed or for the harm and terror they have caused. But it seems to me that as a country we need to look at the very high percentage of people in our prisons who suffer from mental illness and are not receiving adequate (if any) treatment. To the extent their illness contributed to the crimes they committed, both they and their victims are paying a horrific price for the woeful unavailability of high quality, free (or low cost) mental health care. And this says nothing of the misery mental illness causes to law abiding people who suffer with untreated or under treated mental illness. These conditions cause suffering not only to the people who have them but to their families - especially their children. Sometimes the cost of our failure as a society to even try to look after the wellbeing of each other confronts us in ways to awful to ignore, as it did yesterday in Omahau. Will we try to hear the lesson this time? Or push it away as too difficult, too much like socialism, etc?

Peace

David