Why not both. To fund the mental health treatment, lets take from the MIC, end all the wars, bring the troops home and use the money to fund mental health care, lets enact single payer.
On the gun control side, there are laws that President Obama can get through the Congress with relative ease right now and he should do so.

No reason why we can't do both.

But some people make it out to be either/or. It's not. We need both.

Also, I would like to see a steep tax on guns and ammunition used to pay for school security.

..

Untreated mental illness can provide the desire to kill, and the guns provide the means for them to do so in large quantities.

They want to pretend we can't solve two problems at once.

The conversation in DC is about austerity and cutting budgets for things like Medicare and Social Security, more money for mental health care isn't in the cards.

I think improved mental health care would be a great idea but it's going to be vastly expensive to get to the point it will do any good and there's brown people on the other side of the world who desperately need bombing.

Priorities, we haz them.

The argument about public mental health care is a diversion.