First, I want to thank all the people who had comments to my last post. This is going to turn into a multi-part post because the issue is too big and to complicated to do in one ore even two posts. I am like a dog with a bone and I do not intend to let this go until Kos or one of his minions blocks me or gives me an "order" to stop, not that I am saying he will. So now as they say, let's go below the fold.
I am for gun control. I am for finding ways to reduce the number of guns that are available for ANYONE to use to kill or injure another human being with a gun. And like a Ven Diagram, there may be some overlap with gun control and mental illness, but blaming the mentally ill doesn't give us the answer on how to reduce mass murders or any murder. Saying that keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill will reduce the number of mass murders is also not the answer. GETTING RID OF GUNS IS THE ANSWER.
To those who in the comments of my last post said that the gun isn't what killed the kids and teachers in Newtown, it was the mentally ill person who was using it, I have one thing to say. You have somehow, directly or indirectly drunk way too much of the NRA's kool aid. This is nothing but a restatement of the NRA's regular crap of "guns don't kill people, people kill people."
To the people who say they are not demonizing the mentally ill, I want to point you to one of the commentators. I will not name him because I do not want to call someone out so publicly. You can look at the comments of my last post and you will find him. He starts out by calling the shooter in Newtown "evil". He then goes on to argue that he is mentally ill, and that that not Aspergers was the reason for the rampage. He throws in that he has a child with bipolar disorder, I guess to give himself some cred. This IS exactly what DEMONIZING the mentally ill looks like. Adam Lanza was not evil. What he did might be called evil. I would rather call it a horrible and tragic thing. If he does have a son with bipolar, I hope he never faces the incrimination, and discrimination that is endured by individuals with this and other mental disorders.
To the people who argue that a person who commits a mass murder are per se mentally ill, I suggest you do some basic research because you do not know what you are talking about, and yes all you are doing is scapegoating someone by using a very flawed logical fallacy as well as having no empirical evidence. In the same vein, one commentator had some criticism about my last post because I had not linked to anything. They politely linked to a Mother Jones article that cited an article from the New York Times from 2000.
Well, I call you, and raise you an article from the same NYT but from December 17, 2012 In Gun Debate, a Misguided Focus on Mental Illness
Generally speaking, it is pretty good. I wish they had used a great deal more stats, but I guess that would have ended this series by making it less needed for me to look them up and put them in a future post. Now lets get to the good stuff:
The gunman, Adam Lanza, 20, has been described as a loner who was intelligent and socially awkward. And while no official diagnosis has been made public, armchair diagnosticians have been quick to assert that keeping guns from getting into the hands of people with mental illness would help solve the problem of gun homicides.
So there has been no "official" diagnosis that Adam Lanza had a mental illness, but the "armchair diagnosticians" connected a few dots, rumor has it that he had a mental illness, or he "must have had a mental illness because anyone who could do such a thing must have a mental illness, right? Wrong.
Lets see what the experts have to say shall we?
Only about 4 percent of violence in the United States can be attributed to people with mental illness.
. I am still learning how to use this system so go to the article and you can follow the link.
Being mentally ill IS a risk factor. What does that mean? It means that with a mental illness you might may present a higher risk of being violent, but that doesn't mean you will commit some sort of violent act.
One of the largest studies, the National Institute of Mental Health’s Epidemiologic Catchment Area study, which followed nearly 18,000 subjects, found that the lifetime prevalence of violence among people with serious mental illness — like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder — was 16 percent, compared with 7 percent among people without any mental disorder. Anxiety disorders, in contrast, do not seem to increase the risk at all.
So who are more likely to be perpetrators of violent act, including "mass murders"? I use quotes because technically more than one at one at a single time, or within a short period is considered a mass murder. The answer is:
Alcohol and drug abuse are far more likely to result in violent behavior than mental illness by itself. In the National Institute of Mental Health’s E.C.A. study, for example, people with no mental disorder who abused alcohol or drugs were nearly seven times as likely as those without substance abuse to commit violent acts.
Yes, the drunk in the bar who doesn't like that he was bumped into a pulls on someone or the spouse who had too much and is pissed at his S.O are much more likely to commit violence against someone else, including killing them, than a person with a mental illness.
Maybe so, kaminpdx, but if we make a rule that people with a mental illness cannot have a gun, then we will still make the world safer, you might say. Well, saying it doesn't make it so.
Jeffrey Swanson, a professor of psychiatry at Duke University and a leading expert in the epidemiology of violence, said in an e-mail, “Can we reliably predict violence? ‘No’ is the short answer. Psychiatrists, using clinical judgment, are not much better than chance at predicting which individual patients will do something violent and which will not.”
It would be even harder to predict a mass shooting, Dr. Swanson said, “You can profile the perpetrators after the fact and you’ll get a description of troubled young men, which also matches the description of thousands of other troubled young men who would never do something like this.”
I will close with one last quote from the NYT, and my apologies to them if I have violated the fair use doctrine.
All the focus on the small number of people with mental illness who are violent serves to make us feel safer by displacing and limiting the threat of violence to a small, well-defined group. But the sad and frightening truth is that the vast majority of homicides are carried out by outwardly normal people in the grip of all too ordinary human aggression to whom we provide nearly unfettered access to deadly force.