Ask yourself 3 questions. How many times have GOP candidates said mass shootings are about mental illness? How many times have you heard GOP candidates lie about Benghazi, email, the ACA, anything Obama...? Do you really believe them when they say mass shootings are about mental illness and not guns?
Here's what Ben Carson said:
“Gun control only works for law-abiding citizens, it doesn't work for the crazies."
And here's what
the great pumpkin had to say:
“Well first of all you have strong laws on the books,” Trump said. “But you’re always going to have problems. I mean we have millions and millions of people, we have millions of sick people all over the world. It can happen all over the world — and it does happen all over the world by the way — but this is sort of unique to this country, the school shootings.”
This claim by the GOP that mass shooters are mentally ill and gun control laws won't help, got me thinking about what happened in Aurora CO. A guy studying neuroscience walks into a movie theater dressed as a character from a batman movie and starts shooting for no apparent reason. Sounds pretty damn crazy to me, but when he goes to trial, a jury who probably thought the guy was crazy when they heard about the shooting, decides that's actually a pretty sane thing to do and convicts him of murder, not "guilty but mentally ill".
So the right wing wants you to believe that these mass shooters are mentally ill when they pull the trigger, but when it comes time for the verdict they're perfectly sane, which is a bit crazy in itself, so we should kill them.
Let's explore more below the fold:
So if these shooters are mentally ill like the right wing propaganda machine wants America to believe, I guess the question is, how many that go to trial are found "guilty but mentally ill"? The USA Today dug into that question and here is what they found:
Of the 217 people who have been accused of a mass killing and didn't die at the scene, 132 were sentenced to prison and 15 were sentenced to death, according to USA TODAY data on mass killings since 2006. About 62 suspects are awaiting trial or sentencing, and two were institutionalized or put in a youth rehabilitation program.
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One-third of mass killers never leave the scene alive. About 27% commit suicide and about 6% are killed by police.
Only 2 out of 132 were institutionalized. You can't have it both ways, crazy when they shoot, then sane at the trial!
So how does this, gun laws won't help but treating mental illness will solve the problem, hold up under deeper inspection? Here's an opinion piece from Arthur Chu discussing some of the craziness of the argument.
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But the media insists on trotting out “mental illness” and blaring out that phrase nonstop in the wake of any mass killing. I had to grit my teeth every time I personally debated someone defaulting to the mindless mantra of “The real issue is mental illness” ...
“The real issue is mental illness” is a goddamn cop-out. I almost never hear it from actual mental health professionals, or advocates working in the mental health sphere, or anyone who actually has any kind of informed opinion on mental health or serious policy proposals for how to improve our treatment of the mentally ill in this country.
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We’ve successfully created a world so topsy-turvy that seeking medical help for depression or anxiety is apparently stronger evidence of violent tendencies than going out and purchasing a weapon whose only purpose is committing acts of violence. We’ve got a narrative going where doing the former is something we’re OK with stigmatizing but not the latter. God bless America....
Mass murderers frequently aren’t particularly shy about the motives behind what they do — the nature of the crime they commit is attention-seeking, is an attempt to get news coverage for their cause, to use one local atrocity to create fear within an entire population. (According to the dictionary, by the way, this is called “terrorism,”...
Yeah, most white supremacists aren’t “crazy” enough to go on a shooting spree, most misogynists aren’t “crazy” enough to murder women who turn them down, most anti-government zealots aren’t “crazy” enough to shoot up or blow up government buildings.
But the “crazy” ones always seem to have a respectable counterpart who makes a respectable living pumping out the rhetoric that ends up in the “crazy” one’s manifesto–drawing crosshairs on liberals and calling abortion doctors mass murderers
So when these types of murders happen in other countries the murderers are called terrorists, but when they happen in the U.S. the murderers are called "crazy", until they go to trial.
So what does the community that studies mental illness say? This is from a paper published at the National Center for Biotechnology Information,.
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Torrey, a psychiatrist, claimed that “about half of . . . mass killings are being done by people with severe mental illness, mostly schizophrenia, and if they were being treated they would have been preventable.”23 Similar themes appear in legal dialogues as well. Even the US Supreme Court, which in 2008 strongly affirmed a broad right to bear arms, endorsed prohibitions on gun ownership “by felons and the mentally ill” because of their special potential for violence.24
Yet surprisingly little population-level evidence supports the notion that individuals diagnosed with mental illness are more likely than anyone else to commit gun crimes. According to Appelbaum,25 less than 3% to 5% of US crimes involve people with mental illness, and the percentages of crimes that involve guns are lower than the national average for persons not diagnosed with mental illness. Databases that track gun homicides, such as the National Center for Health Statistics, similarly show that fewer than 5% of the 120 000 gun-related killings in the United States between 2001 and 2010 were perpetrated by people diagnosed with mental illness.
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Swanson argues that mass shootings denote “rare acts of violence” that have little predictive or preventive validity in relation to the bigger picture of the 32 000 fatalities and 74 000 injuries caused on average by gun violence and gun suicide each year in the United States.
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At the aggregate level, the vast majority of people diagnosed with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts—only about 4% of violence in the United States can be attributed to people diagnosed with mental illness.
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However, credible studies suggest that a number of risk factors more strongly correlate with gun violence than mental illness alone. For instance, alcohol and drug use increase the risk of violent crime by as much as 7-fold, even among persons with no history of mental illness—a concerning statistic in the face of recent legislation that allows persons in certain US states to bring loaded handguns into bars and nightclubs.
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A number of studies suggest that laws and policies that enable firearm access during emotionally charged moments also seem to correlate with gun violence more strongly than does mental illness alone. Belying Lott’s argument that “more guns” lead to “less crime,” Miller et al. found that homicide was more common in areas where household firearms ownership was higher. Siegel et al. found that states with high rates of gun ownership had disproportionately high numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides. Webster’s analysis uncovered that the repeal of Missouri’s background check law led to an additional 49 to 68 murders per year, and the rate of interpersonal conflicts resolved by fatal shootings jumped by 200% after Florida passed “stand your ground” in 2005.56 Availability of guns is also considered a more predictive factor than is psychiatric diagnosis in many of the 19 000 US completed gun suicides each year.
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History suggests, however, that psychiatrists are inefficient gatekeepers in this regard. Data supporting the predictive value of psychiatric diagnosis in matters of gun violence is thin at best. Psychiatric diagnosis is largely an observational tool, not an extrapolative one.
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However, in the present day, the actions of lone White male shooters lead to calls to expand gun rights, focus on individual brains, or limit gun rights just for the severely mentally ill. Indeed it would seem political suicide for a legislator or doctor to hint at restricting the gun rights for White Americans, private citizens, or men, even though these groups are frequently linked to high-profile mass shootings. Meanwhile, members of political groups such as the Tea Party who advocate broadening gun rights to guard against government tyranny—indeed the same claims made by Black Panther leaders in the 1960s—take seats in the US Congress rather than being subjected to psychiatric surveillance.
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Finally, forging opinion and legislation so centrally on the psychopathologies of individual assailants makes it harder for the United States to address how mass shootings reflect group psychologies in addition to individual ones. Persons in the United States live in an era that has seen an unprecedented proliferation of gun rights and gun crimes, and the data we cite show that many gun victims are exposed to violence in ways that are accidental, incidental, relational, or environmental.
So when a right winger starts telling you gun violence is all about mental illness, you should make the assumption that 1 they're lying to you, or 2 they don't know what the fuck they're talking about. Now that I think about, that's a pretty good assumption to make about most of what right wingers say. The claim we should concentrate our efforts to stop gun violence by concentrating on keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill has no basis in science. If you really want to put a dent in gun violence, you have to keep guns out of the hands of a whole lot more people than are diagnosed as mentally ill.
And as a gun owner, I don't believe background checks are nearly enough. We need to learn from countries like Australia and Britain and start putting much tighter controls on types of guns and who has access to them.