From the Heritage Foundation, I'm Michelle Cordero, and this is in the middle of a serious debate about gun violence and mass shootings.

A year has passed since a former student killed 17 people at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

What made the shooting at Stoneman Douglas so different than other mass shootings was how quickly students and parents

turned their pain into action.

Some are pushing for broader restrictions on Second Amendment rights, with new legislation

like the recently voted on HR8 that would impose significant burdens on law-abiding citizens

by mandating universal background checks.

This will be a priority for us in the next Congress.

Common sense background checks to prevent guns going into the wrong hands.

But we've still heard little on a number of other issues that weigh into gun violence and mass shootings,

like mental health, family breakdown, culture, media, and more.

Heritage recently released a series of papers that address these issues.

One of them tries to help us understand

why the United States is suffering from a crisis of untreated serious mental illness.

During the 1960s and 70s, there was a mass removal of the seriously mental ill from inpatient facilities.

It officially began in 1963, when the Kennedy administration implemented the Community Mental

Health Act.

This gave official credence to a movement that had been slowly developing and that kept developing

afterward.

The process has an official name and it's referred to as de-institutionalization.

And between 1955 and 2016, the number of available public psychiatric beds in the United States dropped by 95%.

So what led to this movement?

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