In the wake of the mass shooting epidemic, the mass media has been teeming with conversations about mental illness. Newspaper headlines have propagated the notion that gun crime is strongly associated with mental illness, and that people who commit gun crimes suffer from mental illness. As it turns out, only 2 to 4 percent of gun crimes are attributable to mental illness.
Holding onto the false belief that mental illness drives gun crime has several adverse effects. This belief continues to stigmatize people with mental illness. It has also led to problematic laws and policies, such as the creation of special statuses for the extended detention of prisoners with mental illness, the imposition of tort liability on psychologists and psychiatrists who do not foresee the violence of their patients, and the creation of a “direct threat” exception to employment protections guaranteed by the Americans with Disabilities Act.
To turn conversations about gun crime into conversations about mental health and mental illness is to avoid the true issues underlying gun crime. Gun crime should be thought of not as a problem of a select group of individuals, but rather as a problem driven by a combination of situational, social, and cultural factors along with individual factors in rare cases. Programs targeting the situational, social, and cultural factors leading to gun crime rather than the individual factors that contribute to only a small fraction of gun crimes would play a much greater role in ending the gun violence epidemic.
The media and entertainment industry, state and federal policy makers and/or Congress, and, most importantly, society need to seriously consider the costs of their inaction that has been going on for way too long. Guns are not necessarily the problem. Helping people with mental health issues should be of high priority. This requires action on the part of everyone in society, and not just a select few individuals. Do we really need more debate as to what needs to happen? How many more innocent lives must we sacrifice before action is taken to help people with mental illness? Are tougher gun laws the answer or just a solution? The time for action is now, not tomorrow, not next year, not sometime in the future.
I close in asking, “What are you going to do to put an end to this madness regarding guns and people with mental health issues?”
Mark Jacobson
Winona
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