By Mort Kahn

I am the father of Daniel Kahn, who was shot and killed by the police on July 31 in Springfield.

First, as a baseline, people with mental illnesses were once babies, loving children, energetic and eager-to-grow-up teenagers, and young adults with their whole lives ahead of them. They did not wake up one random morning and make a decision that they wanted to have one or more mental illnesses. With that in mind, we should look to change how we see these tormented souls.

The real story is how we as a nation look upon the mentally ill, the homeless and how we treat them because they don’t act like us and they don’t talk like us and they don’t think like us, so we are fearful of them; however, we do absolutely nothing to help them long term like we do for heart or cancer patient

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