Mental health issues have been at the center of the gun control debate since the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in December 2012. Almost immediately after the incident occurred, people scrambled for an explanation as to why Adam Lanza did what he did. Their conclusion: he was mentally ill. From there, the issue exploded onto the foreground of the gun control debate.
But does it belong there?
According to Jennifer Mathis, director of programs for the Bazelon Center of Mental Health Law, it does not. She claims that since the Sandy Hook tragedy, the focus on mental illness “has sparked knee-jerk, myth-based proposals that wrongly target mental health despite the minimal relationship with gun violence.” In fact, Mathis goes on to claim that pushing the attention onto mental health law is just a distraction from the issue at hand: “gun regulation.”
The reaction to Sandy Hook is understandable though still incorrect. When tragedies occur, the media is quick to grab onto the perpetrator’s history of mental illness. But if it is as Mathis said , and the link between mental health and gun violence is tenuous at best, where does that leave the debate?
Gun violence is rarely caused by mental illness. As reported by an article in the Scientific American, severely mentally ill people account for only 3 to 5 percent of violent crimes in the general population, despite the 60 to 80 percent of the public which believes that schizophrenic patients are especially likely to go around committing violent crimes. While there have been instances of schizophrenic patients committing violent acts, such as the 2011 Tucson Massacre shooter Jared Loughner, statistics indicate that these individuals are at a far greater risk of hurting themselves. In fact, according to statistics released in the National Journal, around 15 percent of schizophrenic individuals in the U.S. die by suicide. This is troubling when considering how much emphasis is being placed on the question of the mental illness-violence link in gun regulation which, as reported by the National Journal, researchers have claimed is barely existent. Statistics show that around 96 percent of all violent crimes are actually committed by people with no mental health issues at all.
Despite the way tragedies like Sandy Hook are widely publicized when they occur, the truth is that those events are a departure from the norm. These are the exceptions and should be treated as such. This is evident when compared to the numbers released by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which indicate that in the U.S., an average of 30 people are shot and killed every day, not including suicide. More disturbingly is that most of the data collected points to the fact that the majority of the guns used in these shootings were purchased legally.
Suicides bring a more interesting spin to the issue. The CDC’s data indicates that 53 people kill themselves with a firearm each day, bringing the total number of firearm- related deaths per day to above 80. This is where the mentally ill should be considered: not as murderers, but as a risk to themselves. In an interview with the National Journal, Duke medical professor Jeffrey Swanson refers to suicide as the gun control debate’s “elephant in the room.”
Adam Lanza and the other mentally ill shooters profiled like movie villains by the media are not who those involved in the gun regulation debate should be considering. They should be looking to each other as the main causes of gun-related violence in the U.S. People without mental illnesses who legally purchase their weapons are both the people in control of this debate and the people most likely to kill another person with their guns.
Laura Heiney, Sophomore Spanish Major.
