Chico shooting is what can happen as California guts mental health care | Opinion
The small, northern California city of Chico is no stranger to tragedy. Last year, an arsonist burned the community’s historic Bidwell Mansion to the ground. Thousands of refugees from the devastating and deadly Camp Fire flooded into the college town in 2018. A young man died of water poisoning during a frat hazing incident in 2007.
And now, Chico shares another tragic distinction: The latest city in the U.S. to experience a mass shooting.
On Monday night, an 18-year-old man walked into the Butte County Library in downtown Chico, where he allegedly shot and killed two adults, and seriously injured a child who is now in a local hospital.
Chico Police apprehended Bradley Scott Sayer outside the library. Authorities said his motivation was allegedly “a Columbine High School massacre type shooting” — a horrific incentive for anyone who lived through that incident in 1999.
With such a motive, there can little doubt that mental illness played a role in this tragedy. Anyone willing to take another person’s life needs serious and immediate mental health intervention. But it would not be surprising to find that a disturbed young man slipped through the cracks of California’s mental health system. According to Pew Research, in 2024, the most recent year with complete data, 44,447 people died from gun-related injuries.
Ultimately, it is California’s failure to provide a robust system of mental health intervention that led to these deaths in Chico.
It is a harsh reminder at a key time; the governor and Legislature even now seek to further slash the budgets of mental healthcare programs like mobile crisis units or by removing funding for Proposition 1, which county behavioral health service providers rely on to provide services to communities like Chico.
But by doing so, the Legislature and the governor seek to close a $20 billion budget gap on the back of critically necessary social services — a deficit caused in no small part by the cessation of federal funding by the Trump administration, who have instead funneled billions of dollars into an unpopular and unnecessary war.
The sad irony is that, now Sayer is in police custody, he may finally receive the mental healthcare he desperately needs.
Chico, and all of northern California, will now mourn the dead. The Butte County Public Library will never again be a place of safety and learning for the community and its children. And, at the rate of gun violence in the U.S., another city will become the target of a mass shooting by the end of the week.
If America remains unwilling to give up its guns, then we cannot also remain unwilling to fund the social programs that solve the underlying issues that cause mass shootings.
