A white guy with a gun made headlines Wednesday after James T. Hodgkinson opened fire on Republican congressmen at a baseball practice in Virginia. What happened next in the media and online is predictable: reporters started looking for information to prove he was mentally “disturbed” and calls for gun restrictions for people with mental illness surged.
The problem with this pattern is that it simply reinforces stigma against people with mental illness—and it doesn’t do anything to truly address the problem of mass shootings in America. People with mental illness are much more likely to be the victims of violence—not the perpetrators. It’s easy to otherize people with mental health issues and see them as people who are violent and unpredictable. Multiple studies show that the vast majority of violence committed is not done by people with mental illness. A press release from the American Psychological Association about one of those studies states:
In a study of crimes committed by people with serious mental disorders, only 7.5 percent were directly related to symptoms of mental illness, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.
Researchers analyzed 429 crimes committed by 143 offenders with three major types of mental illness and found that 3 percent of their crimes were directly related to symptoms of major depression, 4 percent to symptoms of schizophrenia disorders and 10 percent to symptoms of bipolar disorder.
“When we hear about crimes committed by people with mental illness, they tend to be big headline-making crimes so they get stuck in people’s heads,” said lead researcher Jillian Peterson, PhD. “The vast majority of people with mental illness are not violent, not criminal and not dangerous.”
If we really want to have a productive, well-informed conversation about gun violence and mass shootings, we need to look at its connection to perpetrators of domestic violence. According to an analysis of mass shootings by the organization Everytown for Gun Safety, a majority of mass shootings—54%—between 2009 and 2016 involved a partner or family member as a victim. And 43% of mass shooters have a history of violent acts, many of which committed against a family member and/or partner.
Hodgkinson is among the high percentage of mass shooters with a history of domestic violence, according to the Daily Beast. He’s been the foster parent of at least two girls—one of whom died by suicide after a few months in his home; she lit herself on fire. Years later, he was arrested for abusing a different foster daughter.
In 2006, he was arrested for domestic battery and discharge of a firearm after he stormed into a neighbor’s home where his teenage foster daughter was visiting with a friend. In a skirmish, he punched his foster daughter’s then 19-year-old friend Aimee Moreland “in the face with a closed fist,” according to a police report reviewed by The Daily Beast. When Moreland’s boyfriend walked outside of the residence where Moreland and Hodgkinson’s foster daughter were, he allegedly aimed a shotgun at the boyfriend and later fired one round. The Hodgkinsons later lost custody of that foster daughter.
“[Hodgkinson] fired a couple of warning shots and then hit my boyfriend with the butt of the gun,” Moreland told The Daily Beast on Wednesday.
Hodgkinson was also “observed throwing” his daughter “around the bedroom,” the police report said. After the girl broke free, Hodgkinson followed and “started hitting her arms, pulling her hair, and started grabbing her off the bed.”
The charges were eventually dismissed, but we know that our broken criminal “justice” system is far from perfect—people guilty of crimes escape punishment every day. And the system is particularly bad when it comes to domestic violence: many victims do not report, many police do not investigate or take it seriously (probably because, in part, cops have extremely high DV abuse rates), and a small fraction of abusers are arrested or jailed.
Republicans love to act like they’re the victims when Americans are literally getting hurt because of the problems they created. Despite all the evidence showing the strong ties between domestic violence and gun deaths, both federal and local laws fall short—and the NRA likes it that way, as Fusion notes.
A bipartisan bill to close the loophole was introduced in the House two years ago and it still hasn’t received a hearing or a vote. In a comment to Fusion on the Senate version of the bill, NRA spokesperson Catherine Mortensen said in 2015: “This gun control bill exploits emotionally compelling issues such as domestic violence and stalking in an attempt to keep as many people as possible from exercising their Second Amendment rights.”
There’s no reason—aside from greed—for an organization to resist keeping firearms away from abusers. Unfortunately, we cannot expect to get any sort of productive dialogue or action from the Trump administration and his cronies. They’re using Hodgkinson’s political beliefs as a flimsy excuse to deter attention from any real solutions that will make Americans safer. But when we have a country run by a sexist sexual predator who is surrounded by heartless, power-hungry enablers, it is no surprise that reducing domestic violence is the last thing on their mind.