Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman spoke Saturday on Up With Chris Hayes about the role played by mental illness in attacks like the mass shooting Friday in Newtown, Connecticut and what society might endeavor to do differently to avoid these types of horrific attacks in the future. Click here to watch.

“After the Arizona shooting with Jared Loughner,” said Goodman, “I interviewed the head of the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Arizona who said the massive cuts to care for the mentally ill in Arizona at that point were so drastic.”

She went on to say, “But also, just to make this point, something like twelve hours before this massacre took place was a man in China who went into an elementary school. Maybe people saw it fleetingly on television, and he had a knife. He didn’t have a gun. And he knifed 23 people, 22 of them children, at least at this point, at the time of broadcast, all survived. It was a knife, it wasn’t a gun. Gun control is the answer right now.”

Click here to read more at Raw Story.

Click here to see Democracy Now!’s coverage of gun control and the Newtown mass shooting.