How many times have you heard people say that monitoring mentally ill patients would help stop mass shootings? This is the elephant in the room, they maintain. We should emphasize that mass shootings are just a tiny fraction of overall gun deaths, as this infographic shows.
Improved mental health monitoring as a solution for gun control is far too restrictive and ineffective, as I hope to show. There are thousands of people who are disturbed. For example, domestic abusers would fly under the radar, as this article in the The Washington Post explains.
The NRA (National Rifle Association) just wants everyone, including mentally unstable persons, to be able to buy mass destruction weapons. They are not the least bit perturbed that a normal weekend can leave 25 people dead as a result of gun violence. Every day 88 Americans are killed with guns.
“Gun ownership is not a privilege, it’s a right. A God-given right.” – Wayne LaPierre, NRA Vice President.
Their talk of encouraging schools to have firearms safety and training as part of the curriculum is sick. They are even offering donations of $30,000 to help school districts implement this crazy policy. LaPierre, who is touring elementary schools in many states, says:
“In this day and age, firearms should be as common in the classroom as textbooks and pencils.”
Why are these people allowed in schools? Now you see why I mention the NRA in a piece about troubled and mentally unstable persons!
Could monitoring mentally ill people really work?
While over 85 percent of Americans support background checks when people are about to purchase firearms, there is little or no talk about suicides. Did you know that 19,000 of the 31,000 gun deaths in the USA in 21010 were suicides? There has also been a 28 percent increase in suicide among middle-aged Americans over the last decade or so. How on earth do you monitor people intent on committing suicide?
There is also the danger of a boomerang effect if we insist that suicide prevention measures should be part of gun control legislation. This risks stigmatizing mental illness even further.
What about psychiatrists and psychologists who might be required to report mentally ill persons who are likely to turn to violent actions? There are questions of patient confidentiality and also a mentally unstable person probably would not tell the truth about whether they owned or wanted to use a firearm or not. In addition, homicidal and suicidal tendencies may not always be so clear cut.
However, good sense dictates that at least if the reporting procedure is carried out, these individuals are going to get priority mental health treatment. That may stop gun violence and prevent them ending up in jail, or in the cemetery. However, there have been improvements in reporting procedures and carrying out background checks.
Figures for the mentally ill show that a very small proportion of them actually carry out murders or mass shootings. Most mentally ill persons are never violent or a danger to others. This is shown by the figures collected in Connecticut. They found that reporting severe mental illness cases only reduced the overall crime rate by 0.5 percent in one year.
Gun violence is caused by many other factors and improved mental health reporting is not the solution. Mental health care must be a standalone issue and not tied to gun control.
The only thing that will stop these crazy deaths is to restrict every American citizen from acquiring these weapons. That is gun control, but sadly, I do not see any realistic legislation on the horizon.
Featured image by Elvert Barnes via Flickr, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.
