The tragedy in Parkland, Florida has once again brought up the conversation about violence and mental illness. It’s not surprising: After all, how could a “sane” person commit such a heinous act as the murder of 17 students and teachers?
The leadership of the National Rifle Association wants to focus the conversation on the idea that Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. When they say that those “people” who commit violence acts such as the one in Parkland are mentally ill, their conclusion is, then, that it really has nothing to do with guns.
The truth is that all sorts of people with guns kill people. And they are not primarily people diagnosed with mental illness.
As North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center’s Executive Director, Andrew Malekoff, wrote in a recent column, “It is incredibly rare for those who are labeled as mentally ill to be violent. In fact, they are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators.”
The idea of making mental health counseling a top priority in this country is certainly a concept that any mental health professional would support, but not because most of those labeled as mentally ill are dangerous. The statistics on mental illness and violence tell a very different story. Here are a few:
- Mass shootings by people with serious mental illness represent less than 1% of all yearly gun-related homicides. In contrast, deaths by suicide using firearms account for the majority of yearly gun-related deaths.
- According to the National Center for Health Statistics, fewer than 5 percent of the 120,000 gun-related killings in the United States between 2001 and 2010 were perpetrated by people diagnosed with a mental illness.
- Only 3 to 5 percent of all violence, including but not limited to firearm violence, is attributable to serious mental illness.
- Evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that suicide, not homicide, is the most significant public health concern in terms of guns and mental illness.
- People with severe mental illnesses, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or psychosis are 2 ½ times more likely to be attacked, raped or mugged than the general population.
As for the issue of whether stricter gun control laws can help prevent such tragedies, perhaps the most poignant and powerful comments came from Emma Gonzales, a student survivor from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School: “Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have ever been done to prevent this, we call BS. They say that tougher gun laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. … They say that no laws could have been able to prevent the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS.”
To Emma’s list, we add: Blaming those who have mental illness for all acts of gun violence and mass shootings. We call B.S.
Sources:
https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/pdf/10.5555/appi.books.9781615371099
https://northshorechildguidance.org/parkland-youth-activism-triumph-helplessness-despair/
https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/17/us/florida-student-emma-gonzalez-speech/index.html
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11585953
http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2014.302242
