Question: Guns or Mental Illness

Since the Columbine shooting in 1999, there have been many U.S. massacres that have claimed dozens of victims. Mass shootings have become such a common occurrence, they have transformed American life -- turning places that were once thought safe, like schools, movie theaters, nightclubs, and concert venues, into areas where people now arrive worried about worst-case scenarios.

Yet with each shooting, there is a routine: the list of victims, the "thoughts and prayers" from politicians, the outpouring of grief from families and community members and the feelings of hopelessness that pervade the nation.

ABC NEWS

Mass shootings are defined as an incident in which four or more victims are shot or killed, according to the archive.

Though mass shootings don't make up the majority of gun violence incidents in America, their impact on communities and victims is evident.

Pew Research

About eight-in-ten U.S. murders in 2021 - 20,958 out of 26,031, or 81% - involved a firearm. That marked the highest percentage since at least 1968, the earliest year for which the CDC has online records. More than half of all suicides in 2021 - 26,328 out of 48,183, or 55% - also involved a gun, the highest percentage since 2001.

American Medical Association

Our nation's firearm-related civilian death toll over the past 50 years exceeds the number of soldiers who perished in combat in all our wars combined. More American children and young adults died from firearm injuries in 2020 than from any other cause. In recent years, our rate of gun homicides has been 25 times higher than that of comparable nations. And if we were to inscribe on a granite wall the names of all those lost to firearm violence in the past two decades, we would need a monument 12 times larger than the Vietnam War Memorial.

The answer we often hear is "mental illness", an explanation that fits the common perception that people with serious mental illnesses are dangerous. But most violence, including lethal and near-lethal violence, is not causally linked to mental illness.

Mental illness is quite common in the United States. In 2020, approximately 20% of U.S. adults -- 53 million people -- met criteria for at least one psychiatric diagnosis in the previous year, and nearly 6% -- 14 million individuals -- had a serious, impairing mental illness such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or major depression. Given that so many individuals have a mental health diagnosis and the large majority of those individuals are never violent, psychiatric illness is too blunt an instrument to serve as a useful indicator of violence risk.

Indeed, if serious mental illnesses suddenly disappeared, violence would decrease by only about 4%. More than 90% of violent incidents, including homicides, would still occur.

Even mass shooters, who might seem most likely to be driven by mental illness, don't necessarily suffer from major psychiatric disorders. Arguably one of the best such reports on the topic, conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, found that only 25% of such assailants had a diagnosed mental illness. Although it is difficult to obtain precise data on the gun-prohibited status of every mass shooter, less than 5% of these individuals had a record of a gun-disqualifying mental health adjudication, such as an involuntary commitment to a mental health facility.

Seattle Times

Multiple research studies have found that the vast majority of people with mental health conditions are not violent toward others. It is far more likely that a person with a psychiatric disorder, like depression, will use a gun to hurt themselves than someone else. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2010, suicide accounted for 61% of gun-related deaths -- and most people who died by suicide used a firearm.

National Library of Medicine

The United States is one of only three countries with a Constitutionally protected right to own firearms; of the three, it is the only one with minimal restrictions on that right (Elkins 2013). With over 350 million privately owned firearms (Ingraham 2015), the United States substantially exceeds all other countries in both per capita ownership of guns and absolute number of guns: Approximately 30% of all privately owned firearms in the world are in the hands of U.S. residents (Small Arms Survey 2011).

The common perceptions driven by news media are that gun violence and mass shootings are increasing and are at historically high levels. Firearm homicide rates have actually decreased despite widespread perceptions to the contrary (Cohn et al. 2013). Estimates of increases in mass shootings, meanwhile, are tenuous at best. Although there has been some suggestion that the absolute number and frequency of these events may have seen a recent uptick (Blair & Schweit 2014, Schweit 2016), other studies suggest that mass shootings have maintained a relatively steady share of approximately 1% of U.S. violence over the past century (Duwe 2004, Stone 2015).

A pernicious and false but increasingly common message promoted in the media is that people with mental illness are prone to violence in general and are responsible for mass shootings (McGinty et al. 2014, 2016). Studies consistently indicate that, even among mass murders and shootings, mental illness is a factor in a minority of these events (Duwe 2004, Fox & DeLateur 2014, Stone 2015, Taylor 2016, Vossekuil et al. 2002). Nonetheless, the notion that mental illness drives these events is stoked regularly, and the impact of this trend in U.S. media coverage of violence is so significant that it is now seen to be distorting perceptions even outside of the United States (Jorm & Reavley 2014).

Conclusion - The Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence

Overwhelming evidence shows that firearm ownership and access is associated with increased suicide, homicide, unintentional firearm deaths, and injuries. These injuries and deaths are preventable, and we must advocate for evidence-based solutions to make gun violence in the U.S. rare and abnormal.