Stop Telling Mentally Ill People They're Dangerous

According to the above data, in 1959, 60% of people believed that there should be a law that banned the general public from owning handguns. In 2016, less than 25% of people hold that opinion.

Have I talked about gun violence before? I don't think so. Either way, I'm not going to talk about it now.

I'm not going to talk about how Scotland and Australia introduced strict gun laws and firearm buyback schemes and since then, Scotland has had one mass shooting and Australia has had zero. I'm not going to talk about how, in August 2019, the USA has had well over 200 mass shootings. I'm not going to talk about how the number of mass shootings stopped by a good guy with a gun in recorded history is zero.

I'm not going to talk about gun culture and what that looks like in various countries, about interpretations of laws, of history, about politics, or about the scare campaigns and misinformation spread by lobbyist groups. There is zero point to me talking about any of that. You want my opinion, here it is: people should not own guns. But I'm not going to go into that. That's a waste of my time and yours. The USA it seems, has decided, in large, that the right to own a gun is more valuable than the lives of its citizens. There's nothing more to say.

But people with far greater fortitude than I are going to keep having that debate and more power to you guys. Have your say. Maybe one day you'll be heard. But I'm done with that discussion. What I want to discuss is this chart:

What we see here, from a poll taken of adults taken in 2017, is that 89% of Republican and Democrat supporters (not politicians) agree that people with mental illness should not be allowed to buy guns. Only 82% of Republicans and 85% of Democrats believe that people on a no-fly or watch list should be banned from purchasing a firearm. That means more people are concerned about people with mental illness buying a gun than people who are deemed unsafe to have on a plane or are suspected of criminal activity.

Exactly what is it about the anxious and depressed that you're so afraid of?

Oh, but it's not people with depression that you're worried about getting a gun. After all, one in four people have a mental illness, according to the World Health Organisation, so if mental illness made people into killers, surely one in four people would be buying a gun and going on a killing spree. No, those people might shoot themselves, sure, and we shouldn't let that happen, but the ones we really have to watch out for are those people with mania, the sociopaths, the sadists, the delusional paranoid voice hearing schizophrenics. People with "serious" mental illness.

They're the ones doing all the killing, right?

Well, here's some more numbers: only about 5% of gun related killings are committed by people with mental illness. That's not mass shootings, that's all gun killings. The MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study found that, once accounting for substance abuse, only 18% of those studied had committed a violent act in the past year. But when they compared those results to the violence rates in the neighbourhoods and mentally healthy people in a similar environment (such as siblings) it evened out. The violence rates became statistically insignificant.

On the other hand, a study conducted by the Australian government found that 18% of people suffering a psychotic illness such as schizophrenia were a victim of violent and 17% reported self-harm.

The evidence for a causative link between mental illness of any kind and violent crime, particularly firearm related killings, does not exist. Laws that restrict mentally ill people from having firearms is at best going to reduce gun crime by 5%. That's slightly more impact on the homicide rate than a law banning the bogeyman from owning a gun.

The majority of mentally ill people are no more dangerous to you than anybody else. Mental Illness is not the reason for these mass shootings, is not the reason for gun violence. Hate is not a mental illness. Bigotry is not a mental illness. Ethno-nationalism is not a mental illness. But these are the things you should be concerned about.

Okay. So, I actually wrote this blog more than a year ago, but by the time I had finished getting the data, the zeitgeist had tragically moved on. But here we are again, so now is the time to say something. And there's one more thing I would like to say.

I don't talk much about my personal life, but I have been open about suffering from mental illness. I have lived the majority of my life with severe mental illness. And at times, if I had a gun, I would have used it. But the only person I would have shot is myself. Australia's firearms restrictions have saved lives.

But we're not going to talk about that. After all, the decision has been made. Y'all prefer having a gun than not having a gun violence pandemic. So own it. Stop putting the blame on people who are already marginalised.