The mass shootings that continue to plague our country call for drastic measures, contends author and psychoanalyst Gerald Schoenewolf, but they don't involve confiscating guns or preventing law-abiding citizens from owning guns.

As of Oct. 26, the U.S. has had at least 565 mass shootings so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive – or about two mass shootings a day.

Those numbers came out a day after a deranged U.S. Army reservist killed at least 18 people at a bowling alley and bar in Lewiston, Maine. According to officials, the suspect, Robert Card, 40, believed that people, even members of his own family, were out to get him and were calling him a pedophile.

Mental illness is at the heart of many of these killing events, Dr. Schoenewolf and other experts contend, and so they say steps aimed at dealing with those issues are what's needed.

On the Lean to the Left podcast, Dr. Schoenewolf, the author of "The Mass Killer: Six Case Histories that Tell Us Why," contends that troubled family issues often are what results in such shootings and he advocates some controversial steps to deal with them, including:

• Requiring all couples who want to have children to first obtain a license from the federal government.
• Requiring all couples to undergo training to help them raise their children.
• Requiring all interest groups that are advocating for specific political actions to register and obtain permission from the government.

The problem in the U.S., he says, is not the proliferation and availability of guns, but rather the fact that many of the perpetrators of such shootings come from troubled families in which they were mistreated during their childhood.

"Most of these mass killers had early traumas, in the first few years of life," he says, adding that the "divided culture" that exists today serves to compound those problems,

"When you have a divided culture in which the liberals and conservatives are always fighting, everyone suffers too, because there's constant restlessness," Dr. Schoenewolf says on the podcast. "In the country and all kinds of other things that are happening and more violence is happening all the time. People get angry because they're driving on the highway and they lose it, and they start killing each other because they're following too close behind the other car. Somebody goes up to a door and knocks at the wrong door, and they get shot through the door. People are restless today and quick to violence."

Dr. Schoenewolf points out that a barber needs a license to cut hair and if you want to go fishing, you need a fishing license. But there are no such requirements for one of the most complicated acts that an individual can undergo -- raising children.

"iI parents had to be licensed, you'd have, you'd be able to weed out, say, schizophrenic parents or borderlines, or bipolars, psychopaths. You'd be able to weed out parents who are not going to be able to have healthy children. And you'd, and you also could have parent training," he says.

So the government would decide who could and could not have children?

"I think the state would have to have special centers for child rearing where children who were taken away from their parents would be raised by experts who would be trained in how to raise children," he explains.

"These are radical solutions, but we have a radical situation in our country. Desperate times call for desperate measures," says Dr. Schoenewolf, who is the author of 30 books, including 14 on psychology and philosophy and nine novels.