Wayne LaPierre took to the pages of USA Today today to remind Americans that gun control laws have utterly failed to stop the nation’s rare mass murders committed with firearms, but that fixing the significant problems with the nation’s mental health care system might:

Four miles from the White House. The Washington Navy Yard.

Tragedy that didn’t have to happen. Victims that didn’t have to be victims.

He never should have been at the Navy Yard. Discharged from the military, he had several run-ins with law enforcement — including firearms offenses — and told authorities he was under microwave attack and hearing voices. At that point, he should have been committed.

Instead, he passed the government security background check … and the government’s firearms check … just like the monsters of Aurora and Tucson.

They all passed the same system the political elites want expanded! The same check that will never include violent criminals, the mentally ill and the deranged bent on mayhem.

Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech,  Gabby Gifford’s attacker Jared Loughner in Tucson, AZ, James Holmes in Aurora, CO, Adam Lanza in Newtown, CT, and Aaron Alexis in Washington are just some of the mass murderers that were successful not because of the nation’s gun laws, but because the  nation’s mental health system has failed to lock up the dangerously mentally ill before they can become mass killers.

LaPierre is merely stating the obvious: if you want to stop these instances of “bad guys with guns” from happening, we need better mental health care screening and committal processes to put them away before they get guns.

Put simply, prevention is better than a cure.