THE REAL CULPRITS IN MASS SLAYINGS

President Barack Obama blamed the murders of 12 people at the Navy Yard Sep. 16 on "those who fight to make it as easy as possible for dangerous people to get their hands on a gun." 

That’s partly true — but the culprits aren’t the people to whom the president was referring.

The shooter had a long history of erratic and hostile behavior, two prior arrests for gun infractions. 

"Everyone who came into contact with Aaron Alexis noticed something was wrong with him, and his condition was worsening," said Carl Cannon of RealClear Politics. 

Yet Mr. Alexis passed two background checks when he bought his shotgun, and the security clearance which gave him access to the Navy Yard was renewed shortly before his murder spree.

It should be much harder to get a security clearance than a permit to buy a gun.  That Mr. Alexis was able to get one is appalling.  That he kept it after police in Newport, R.I. warned the Navy about him is, said the Washington Post, "scandalous." 

This was not an isolated incident.  The inspector general for the Defense department found that 52 felons had been given unauthorized access to military bases.

Aaron Alexis was able to murder 12 people at the Navy Yard not because there were no laws to stop him, but because those responsible for enforcing those laws didn’t do their jobs.  Heads should roll for this, but Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has shown little interest in holding those responsible accountable.

Liberals would rather talk about how outraged they are by mass shootings than to take the steps necessary to prevent them.

Little about liberals annoys conservatives more than their assertion it is only they who care about the victims of mass shootings. 

I was called "insensitive" (and worse) for noting in a column mass shootings are very rare; an "idiot" (and worse) for noting that nothing in the gun control legislation proposed in Congress would have prevented the Navy Yard shooting.

It didn’t matter that I was right in both instances.  For liberals, moral outrage trumps facts. It’s "insensitive" to note mass killings are rare, because that could diminish concern about them.  Any criticism of gun control — however well founded — indicates you don’t care about the victims.

Their belief that moral outrage trumps all is convenient for liberals, because it excuses them from having to know much about the subject, and from having to make reasoned arguments to defend their position.

But facts matter if we’re to make mass shootings more rare in the future.  If liberals cared as much about the victims as they say they do, they’d pay more attention to facts.

The most important fact is that Aaron Alexis — like virtually every other mass shooter — was mentally ill.  People like him used to be committed to state mental hospitals.  Then the hospitals were emptied out.

A person with a serious mental illness "was ten times more likely to find a psychiatric bed for treatment in 1955 than in 2004," according to a 2010 study by the Treatment Advocacy Center and the National Sheriffs Association.

"De-institutionalization" was supported by liberals, for civil rights reasons, and by fiscal conservatives.  However well intentioned, it’s been a disaster.

Mass shooters are crazy, but they’re not stupid.  They pick venues where they know their victims will be unarmed.  When an armed citizen has been among them, murder sprees have been cut short.

*Jacob Tyler Roberts had shot just two in a shopping mall in Clackamas County, Oregon last December when he noticed a shopper, Nick Melli, was pointing a pistol at him.  Roberts turned his rifle on himself.

*At a shopping mall in San Antonio a few days later, Jesus Manuel Garcia, shot his ex-girlfriend in the China Garden restaurant.  The other patrons fled toward the Palace 14 theater across the mall.  Mr. Garcia chased them, shooting.  Before he could harm anyone else, an off-duty sheriff’s deputy who was working at the theater shot him.

At least seven other times since 1997, an armed citizen has cut a murder spree short.  Yet liberals insist the way to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and crazy people is to take them away from the sane and the law abiding.  It isn’t just the lunatics they let run around loose who should have their heads examined.

Americans understand what needs to be done.  In a Gallup poll last week, they placed most of the blame for mass shootings on failures in the mental health system.  It is liberals — with their gun control demagoguery — who stand in the way of effective solutions.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.